Michelle Obama VS. Michelle Malkin.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/MichelleMalkin/2008/02/20/michelle_obamas_america_--_and_mine
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Monday, April 14, 2008
BARACK: THE SILVER-FOOTED ORATOR
“He can’t he’p it; he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” These words, ungraciously spoken by former Texas Governor Ann Richards about George H. W. Bush at the 1988 Democrat convention, may now be transferred to The Great Barackster--the primary difference being that the latter’s rhetorical lapses have a distinctly Marxist twist.
The Obamameister wants “typical white person(s)” to know that he, the bi-racial Harvard lawyer and Chicago pol, feels their pain—that he’s more than a silver-tongued demigod eager to pass out bottled ambrosia to swooning groupies. Unfortunately, The Exalted One, unlike The Arkansas Empathizer, hasn’t mastered the dramatic trick of biting his lower-lip and projecting that teary-eyed, beaten-dog look that works so well on voters seeking sympathy (and on women craving a man-boy to mother).
Absent these affective illusions, The Dalai Obama can’t simply say that he’s moved by people’s distress. And highfalutin’ language doesn’t play well in Painsville. Consequently, His Holiness must explain to Bay Area devotees why blue-collar Pennsylvanians aren’t swarming like good disciples to his side. The reason for this reluctance, The B. H. Oracle explains, is that these lunch-bucketeers are embittered and have poured their anger into pointless political and spiritual preoccupations.
Here are The Audacious One’s ipsissima verba: “It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Put more directly, Herr Obama might have spoken as follows: “You Yahoos don’t really care about illegal immigration or gay marriage. What you hate is a government that hasn’t improved your economic status in decades. All that time and effort you put into protesting against abortion and for gun rights is just an expression of your frustration over the forces of globalization. And since no intelligent person takes seriously the things a preacher says in the pulpit, what you naively believe is commitment to a higher spiritual power is actually a misdirected protest against the capitalist devils who’ve reduced you to pawns in a hellish game of outsourcing and downsizing.”
Perceptive auditors will hear the words “opiate” and “delusion” echoing in the vast cranial spaces between those prominent Obamanian ears—intellectual tidbits derived from Marx and Freud during The Great One’s formative years in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Or perhaps The Eminent Explainer got his economic reductionism second hand from Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas?—a condescending treatise that berates heartland hayseeds who can’t see the leftist truth in front of their eyes and who forfeit their economic birthright for a mess of values-voter pottage. Indeed, Frank might have subtitled his snooty work “False Consciousness on the Plains.”
Personal experience, of course, also informs The Blessed One’s view of religion, since for him and his spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, “faith” is clearly more about “street-cred” and black identity than it is about the tenets of a religion whose name is deceptively appended to a political organization in clerical drag.
Unwilling to admit an error, His Infallibleness doubled down on stupid by putting out a revised edition of his “religion as emotional compensation” dictum—a creed The Opportunistic One doubtless embraces with pure faith.
"So I said, well you know, when you're bitter you turn to what you can count on. So people, they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country."
This “clarification” was accompanied with the now-omnipresent non-apology, apology: “…if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that.”
This formulation stealthily puts the onus for offense on the linguistic sensitivities of the offended. The Intractable One then strengthened this penitential reversal by insisting that “the underlying truth of what I said remains.”
Though His Barackness may not be aware of it, Fyoder Dostoevsky also knew a thing or two about psychology, faith, and despair. In The Brothers Karamazov the Russian author employs a dramatic courtroom scene to show that psychology is “a knife that cuts both ways." Thus, what I would like Comrade Sigmund Obama to analyze is the pathology of bitterness and victimization that motivates the likes of Jeremiah Wright and Jesse Jackson—a bitterness that transforms racial grievance into personal power but systematically undermines the reasonable hopes their followers cherish. Or does bitterness only explain the actions and beliefs of folks who don’t share the Democrat Senator’s political agenda?
Great Obama Buddha, open thy mouth and insert again thy silver foot!
The Obamameister wants “typical white person(s)” to know that he, the bi-racial Harvard lawyer and Chicago pol, feels their pain—that he’s more than a silver-tongued demigod eager to pass out bottled ambrosia to swooning groupies. Unfortunately, The Exalted One, unlike The Arkansas Empathizer, hasn’t mastered the dramatic trick of biting his lower-lip and projecting that teary-eyed, beaten-dog look that works so well on voters seeking sympathy (and on women craving a man-boy to mother).
Absent these affective illusions, The Dalai Obama can’t simply say that he’s moved by people’s distress. And highfalutin’ language doesn’t play well in Painsville. Consequently, His Holiness must explain to Bay Area devotees why blue-collar Pennsylvanians aren’t swarming like good disciples to his side. The reason for this reluctance, The B. H. Oracle explains, is that these lunch-bucketeers are embittered and have poured their anger into pointless political and spiritual preoccupations.
Here are The Audacious One’s ipsissima verba: “It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Put more directly, Herr Obama might have spoken as follows: “You Yahoos don’t really care about illegal immigration or gay marriage. What you hate is a government that hasn’t improved your economic status in decades. All that time and effort you put into protesting against abortion and for gun rights is just an expression of your frustration over the forces of globalization. And since no intelligent person takes seriously the things a preacher says in the pulpit, what you naively believe is commitment to a higher spiritual power is actually a misdirected protest against the capitalist devils who’ve reduced you to pawns in a hellish game of outsourcing and downsizing.”
Perceptive auditors will hear the words “opiate” and “delusion” echoing in the vast cranial spaces between those prominent Obamanian ears—intellectual tidbits derived from Marx and Freud during The Great One’s formative years in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Or perhaps The Eminent Explainer got his economic reductionism second hand from Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas?—a condescending treatise that berates heartland hayseeds who can’t see the leftist truth in front of their eyes and who forfeit their economic birthright for a mess of values-voter pottage. Indeed, Frank might have subtitled his snooty work “False Consciousness on the Plains.”
Personal experience, of course, also informs The Blessed One’s view of religion, since for him and his spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, “faith” is clearly more about “street-cred” and black identity than it is about the tenets of a religion whose name is deceptively appended to a political organization in clerical drag.
Unwilling to admit an error, His Infallibleness doubled down on stupid by putting out a revised edition of his “religion as emotional compensation” dictum—a creed The Opportunistic One doubtless embraces with pure faith.
"So I said, well you know, when you're bitter you turn to what you can count on. So people, they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country."
This “clarification” was accompanied with the now-omnipresent non-apology, apology: “…if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that.”
This formulation stealthily puts the onus for offense on the linguistic sensitivities of the offended. The Intractable One then strengthened this penitential reversal by insisting that “the underlying truth of what I said remains.”
Though His Barackness may not be aware of it, Fyoder Dostoevsky also knew a thing or two about psychology, faith, and despair. In The Brothers Karamazov the Russian author employs a dramatic courtroom scene to show that psychology is “a knife that cuts both ways." Thus, what I would like Comrade Sigmund Obama to analyze is the pathology of bitterness and victimization that motivates the likes of Jeremiah Wright and Jesse Jackson—a bitterness that transforms racial grievance into personal power but systematically undermines the reasonable hopes their followers cherish. Or does bitterness only explain the actions and beliefs of folks who don’t share the Democrat Senator’s political agenda?
Great Obama Buddha, open thy mouth and insert again thy silver foot!
Saturday, April 05, 2008
KING AND OBAMA
Here's an honest assessment of Barak Obama by Juan Williams on the 40th anniversary of the murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120726732176388295.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120726732176388295.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
WHEN YOU WISH UPON A RAIL
It took $478,000,000 to get the Sprinter up and running—just a tad over the projected cost of 60 million in 1990. What did we get for the money? Clearly not a significant dent in Highway 78 congestion. But one can always look on the bright side.
My ride on the rail wasn’t during commuting hours and was basically a function of curiosity. With those caveats, I’m glad to say it was a pleasant journey—an experience reminiscent of Disneyland’s monorail. A slow-motion “Chicago L” sensation did accompany our traversing the 78 Speedway during the San Marcos jog, and I had a Bay Area flashback as we slid under I-5. But mostly it was Disney.
The trains I caught were all on time and boarding (even at the crowded Oceanside Transit venue) was swift. My four-dollar pass entitled me to ride the Sprinter and Breeze buses the rest of the day. Unfortunately, the machines that dispense tickets aren’t as user-friendly as one might hope. Specific credit card directions (like those displayed at most gas stations) were absent.
Fortunately, a security officer filled in the blanks and encouraged a second, and then a third (successful) transaction. Indeed, nattily uniformed Transit District officers were posted at all stops along the Sprinter’s route.
The seating in the train was comfortable, but I was never forced to sit directly opposite another passenger in the four-person groupings that comprise most of the vehicle’s 136 seats. By my calculations less than 24 inches separated my seat from the seat of the imaginary traveler facing me. This “ample legroom” would demand prim and proper posture of both parties and could make for extended games of kneecap pat-a-cake.
Outside of the east-west terminals, only two stops, in Vista and at College Boulevard, are near large shopping centers. Moreover, one has to walk a few blocks and cross Center City Parkway to get from Escondido’s transit station to the theater complex and arts center. By contrast, Oceanside’s downtown and pier are fairly accessible. Similarly, Palomar College is located right by its station, whereas the main Cal State campus is almost a mile from its stop—a gap spanned by the school’s weekday shuttle service.
Scenery was best going from I-5 to Vista’s Melrose Drive. During this stretch passengers can also sample the graffiti that graces a few large surfaces near the railway—most of it artistically restrained and non-obscene. After passing the Vista Transit Center, I gawked at the “Blues Brothers” apartments that couldn’t stand more than 100 feet from the tracks.
Except for a few minor glitches and a plastic Sprite bottle that a young man chunked at his companion on the other side of the aisle, my rides were incident free.
Here’s a final note. When I arrived at Escondido’s aging transit center, the clock was striking 11 a.m., and the carillon greeted me with its rendition of “When You Wish Upon a Star”—a song indicative of the triumph of wishful thinking over cold, hard facts. I’ll let readers make their own connections.
My ride on the rail wasn’t during commuting hours and was basically a function of curiosity. With those caveats, I’m glad to say it was a pleasant journey—an experience reminiscent of Disneyland’s monorail. A slow-motion “Chicago L” sensation did accompany our traversing the 78 Speedway during the San Marcos jog, and I had a Bay Area flashback as we slid under I-5. But mostly it was Disney.
The trains I caught were all on time and boarding (even at the crowded Oceanside Transit venue) was swift. My four-dollar pass entitled me to ride the Sprinter and Breeze buses the rest of the day. Unfortunately, the machines that dispense tickets aren’t as user-friendly as one might hope. Specific credit card directions (like those displayed at most gas stations) were absent.
Fortunately, a security officer filled in the blanks and encouraged a second, and then a third (successful) transaction. Indeed, nattily uniformed Transit District officers were posted at all stops along the Sprinter’s route.
The seating in the train was comfortable, but I was never forced to sit directly opposite another passenger in the four-person groupings that comprise most of the vehicle’s 136 seats. By my calculations less than 24 inches separated my seat from the seat of the imaginary traveler facing me. This “ample legroom” would demand prim and proper posture of both parties and could make for extended games of kneecap pat-a-cake.
Outside of the east-west terminals, only two stops, in Vista and at College Boulevard, are near large shopping centers. Moreover, one has to walk a few blocks and cross Center City Parkway to get from Escondido’s transit station to the theater complex and arts center. By contrast, Oceanside’s downtown and pier are fairly accessible. Similarly, Palomar College is located right by its station, whereas the main Cal State campus is almost a mile from its stop—a gap spanned by the school’s weekday shuttle service.
Scenery was best going from I-5 to Vista’s Melrose Drive. During this stretch passengers can also sample the graffiti that graces a few large surfaces near the railway—most of it artistically restrained and non-obscene. After passing the Vista Transit Center, I gawked at the “Blues Brothers” apartments that couldn’t stand more than 100 feet from the tracks.
Except for a few minor glitches and a plastic Sprite bottle that a young man chunked at his companion on the other side of the aisle, my rides were incident free.
Here’s a final note. When I arrived at Escondido’s aging transit center, the clock was striking 11 a.m., and the carillon greeted me with its rendition of “When You Wish Upon a Star”—a song indicative of the triumph of wishful thinking over cold, hard facts. I’ll let readers make their own connections.
Al Gore in Panic Mode
Below is an interesting bit of information contained in the article featuring an observation by British environmental analyst Christopher Monckton that Al Gore (the world's largest "global-warming profiteer") is "panicking" because the world has been getting cooler for the last ten years, not warmer.
"But Monckton points out that in the U.K., Gore is not allowed to speak in public about his 'green investment company' because to do so would violate racketeering laws by 'peddling a false prospectus.' He says that fact came about after a British high court found Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, riddled with errors."
See the entire article via the link below.
http://www.onenewsnow.com:80/Culture/Default.aspx?id=74121
"But Monckton points out that in the U.K., Gore is not allowed to speak in public about his 'green investment company' because to do so would violate racketeering laws by 'peddling a false prospectus.' He says that fact came about after a British high court found Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, riddled with errors."
See the entire article via the link below.
http://www.onenewsnow.com:80/Culture/Default.aspx?id=74121
Thursday, March 20, 2008
HOME SCHOOLING THREATENED: THE "RUSE" OF CERTIFICATION
Yes, Woodrow Wilson did say that the purpose of education is to make children “as unlike their fathers as we can.” That statist goal seems to have motivated a recent California Appeals Court ruling on home schooling.
Justice H. Walter Croskey and two other black-robed despots issued an opinion on February 28 (In re Rachel L.) that overturned the decision of Superior Court Judge Stephen Marpet. Marpet had ruled that “parents have a constitutional right to school their children in their own home.” Croskey and company, however, discounted U. S. Supreme Court cases (like Wisconsin v. Yoder) that informed the lower court decision and issued a precedent-shattering opinion that appears to prohibit non-credentialed parents from home schooling their own children.
The fact that the home schooling in question was done under the supervision of an accredited private school didn’t impress this judicial Troika. Nor did the quality of the school’s curriculum seem to matter—or the fact that Sunland Christian School had been operating as a home schooling program in compliance with state laws for more than twenty years. Instead, the tribunal regarded the parents’ relationship with Sunland as a “ruse” and focused on a 1953 ruling that supported their state-certified conclusion.
Whatever the nebulous child welfare issues involved in this case, there was no good reason for the court to deliver such a sweeping decision instead of one narrowly tailored to the specific situation. Brad Dacus, President of the Pacific Justice Institute, said if the court’s ruling isn’t reversed, “more than 166,000 students currently receiving an education at home will be subject to criminal sanctions.”
That comment echoes Justice Croskey’s own words, which warned parents that they “may be subject to a criminal complaint against them…[or] to imposition of fines or an order to complete a parent education and counseling program."
Any bright individual who’s spent time in education knows that teacher certification is itself one of the biggest “ruses” in the professional world. Indeed, at the prep-school where I taught for two decades, education degrees were regarded less highly than discipline-specific degrees—while certification was viewed as a scrap of paper when weighed against a candidate’s academic competence and his or her ability to perform in class.
As scholars like Thomas Sowell have pointed out ad nauseam, education majors consistently rank toward the bottom of the barrel when it comes to test scores—a fact that explains the relative simplicity of California’s C-BEST test and, even more, why teachers unions and their judicial shills despise competition. What they want is a monopoly that creates as many union jobs and PC socialist students as possible.
The good news is that even Education Superintendent Jack O’Connell, knows better than to support this absurd ruling. Moreover, North County’s Assembly Representatives, following El Cajon’s Joel Anderson, are backing a resolution (A.C.R. 115) that calls on the California Supreme Court to reverse the Appeals Court’s folly. If it doesn’t, the U.S. Supreme Court probably will—and certainly should.
Justice H. Walter Croskey and two other black-robed despots issued an opinion on February 28 (In re Rachel L.) that overturned the decision of Superior Court Judge Stephen Marpet. Marpet had ruled that “parents have a constitutional right to school their children in their own home.” Croskey and company, however, discounted U. S. Supreme Court cases (like Wisconsin v. Yoder) that informed the lower court decision and issued a precedent-shattering opinion that appears to prohibit non-credentialed parents from home schooling their own children.
The fact that the home schooling in question was done under the supervision of an accredited private school didn’t impress this judicial Troika. Nor did the quality of the school’s curriculum seem to matter—or the fact that Sunland Christian School had been operating as a home schooling program in compliance with state laws for more than twenty years. Instead, the tribunal regarded the parents’ relationship with Sunland as a “ruse” and focused on a 1953 ruling that supported their state-certified conclusion.
Whatever the nebulous child welfare issues involved in this case, there was no good reason for the court to deliver such a sweeping decision instead of one narrowly tailored to the specific situation. Brad Dacus, President of the Pacific Justice Institute, said if the court’s ruling isn’t reversed, “more than 166,000 students currently receiving an education at home will be subject to criminal sanctions.”
That comment echoes Justice Croskey’s own words, which warned parents that they “may be subject to a criminal complaint against them…[or] to imposition of fines or an order to complete a parent education and counseling program."
Any bright individual who’s spent time in education knows that teacher certification is itself one of the biggest “ruses” in the professional world. Indeed, at the prep-school where I taught for two decades, education degrees were regarded less highly than discipline-specific degrees—while certification was viewed as a scrap of paper when weighed against a candidate’s academic competence and his or her ability to perform in class.
As scholars like Thomas Sowell have pointed out ad nauseam, education majors consistently rank toward the bottom of the barrel when it comes to test scores—a fact that explains the relative simplicity of California’s C-BEST test and, even more, why teachers unions and their judicial shills despise competition. What they want is a monopoly that creates as many union jobs and PC socialist students as possible.
The good news is that even Education Superintendent Jack O’Connell, knows better than to support this absurd ruling. Moreover, North County’s Assembly Representatives, following El Cajon’s Joel Anderson, are backing a resolution (A.C.R. 115) that calls on the California Supreme Court to reverse the Appeals Court’s folly. If it doesn’t, the U.S. Supreme Court probably will—and certainly should.
ON THE REVEREND JEREMIAH WRIGHT
Here is a rather compelling essay by Don Feder on Rev. Wright and the implications of his long pastoral association with Sen. Barack Obama.
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Perspectives/Default.aspx?id=72425
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Perspectives/Default.aspx?id=72425
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
THE "HORROR" OF BORDER ENFORCEMENT
Two weeks ago the Escondido Police Department began a program that targeted illegal immigrants who not only had committed crimes in the U.S. but also had been deported and returned. According to the North County Times piece on the subject (Feb. 23, “Escondido launches criminal illegal immigrant sweep’) the first three-day sweep netted 15 criminals from a list of 70 of the department’s “most frequent customers.”
The story observed that this was “the first time a local police force in the region has specifically targeted the criminal illegal immigrant population,” and noted that six officers were involved in the project.
Also included in the article was this criticism of the program by El Grupo spokesman, Bill Flores: “Escondido seems to be deliberately earning a reputation as being a racist community because of these kinds of policies.” No doubt the “policies” Flores had in mind also included the City Council’s unsuccessful 2006 attempt to prevent landlords from renting to illegal immigrants and the license-check traffic stops that have become common in the city.
In defense of the new policy Escondido Police Chief Jim Maher assured critics that the department isn’t looking for illegal immigrants who have violated “only” federal law and noted that traffic stops are inherently race-neutral. These critics might also be happy to know that (according to the article) only six illegal immigrants were turned over to the Border Patrol in 2007 due to the traffic checks. But presumably that’s six too many.
This front-page article about a new law enforcement response to foreign criminals who clearly scoff at laws well beyond the immigration variety generated a ton of web page comments—most of which were quite supportive of the police department. It also provoked a few comments that reflected Flores’ point of view.
For myself, I fail to see how a program of such limited magnitude and specific scope could generate such profound expressions of support or opposition. Targeting a few criminals who have been deported and returned is hardly a draconian policy. And unless some unspecified new penalties are involved, it isn’t clear why newly deported criminals won’t be back again—though perhaps in a locale where their mugs aren’t so well known.
I suspect the real point at issue here is the limited cooperation this new program exhibits between local police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement—a policy the City Council approved last spring that allows police officers to confirm the immigration status of persons detained even for minor offenses. Indeed, a Customs agent now has a desk at the department so officers can check a suspect’s “criminal deport status.”
For open-border advocates even this small degree of cooperation between ICE and local law enforcement violates a federal-local division of labor that they insist upon as fervently as ACLU lawyers insist on the recently invented separation of religion and state. Such individuals can only imagine the legal horrors that might arise if local police, ICE, and Border Patrol agents actually cooperated in earnest.
Another name for these horrors would be “border enforcement.”
The story observed that this was “the first time a local police force in the region has specifically targeted the criminal illegal immigrant population,” and noted that six officers were involved in the project.
Also included in the article was this criticism of the program by El Grupo spokesman, Bill Flores: “Escondido seems to be deliberately earning a reputation as being a racist community because of these kinds of policies.” No doubt the “policies” Flores had in mind also included the City Council’s unsuccessful 2006 attempt to prevent landlords from renting to illegal immigrants and the license-check traffic stops that have become common in the city.
In defense of the new policy Escondido Police Chief Jim Maher assured critics that the department isn’t looking for illegal immigrants who have violated “only” federal law and noted that traffic stops are inherently race-neutral. These critics might also be happy to know that (according to the article) only six illegal immigrants were turned over to the Border Patrol in 2007 due to the traffic checks. But presumably that’s six too many.
This front-page article about a new law enforcement response to foreign criminals who clearly scoff at laws well beyond the immigration variety generated a ton of web page comments—most of which were quite supportive of the police department. It also provoked a few comments that reflected Flores’ point of view.
For myself, I fail to see how a program of such limited magnitude and specific scope could generate such profound expressions of support or opposition. Targeting a few criminals who have been deported and returned is hardly a draconian policy. And unless some unspecified new penalties are involved, it isn’t clear why newly deported criminals won’t be back again—though perhaps in a locale where their mugs aren’t so well known.
I suspect the real point at issue here is the limited cooperation this new program exhibits between local police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement—a policy the City Council approved last spring that allows police officers to confirm the immigration status of persons detained even for minor offenses. Indeed, a Customs agent now has a desk at the department so officers can check a suspect’s “criminal deport status.”
For open-border advocates even this small degree of cooperation between ICE and local law enforcement violates a federal-local division of labor that they insist upon as fervently as ACLU lawyers insist on the recently invented separation of religion and state. Such individuals can only imagine the legal horrors that might arise if local police, ICE, and Border Patrol agents actually cooperated in earnest.
Another name for these horrors would be “border enforcement.”
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
LIBERAL FASCISM by Jonah Goldberg
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg. Doubleday, 2007. (487 pages, $27.95, Hardcover)
“History is written by the winners.” So goes the discipline-denigrating cliché. A more accurate observation, as Jonah Goldberg’s new book, Liberal Fascism, suggests, is that history is written by historians—and especially, in recent decades, by academics whose biases predispose them to serve as useful idiots for Joseph Stalin’s defunct propaganda ministry. Though Goldberg’s well-researched book doesn’t focus minute attention on the culpability of leftist historians, it does provide convenient targets (Richard Hofstadter and William Shirer) who might be blamed for abetting the greatest intellectual ruse of the twentieth century—the absurd designation of fascism as an ideology of the political right.
Anyone looking for Coulteresque theater in Goldberg’s work (the product of four years’ labor) will be disappointed. The book isn’t meant to toss “f-bombs” at liberals the way liberals regularly toss that seven-letter epithet at conservatives. Indeed, Goldberg reiterates again and again that he doesn’t employ the word “fascism” as a synonym for Nazism, racism, or “evil.” Rather, he uses the term to label a method of governing that expressed itself differently in different countries. Given that caveat, anyone who chooses to read this engrossing analysis of the origins of fascism will likely be rewarded with a paradigm-shifting experience that puts the history of the twentieth century in a new light—a history that places Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt in the same political neighborhood as Benito Mussolini.
The story of fascism, Goldberg notes, begins with the “holistic” philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau and his revolutionary progeny—men whose boundless conception of national communion (via a general will) led to the odd idea that dissidents would be “forced to be free”—a fate more benign than the guillotine that “freed” enemies of the state from error during the French Reign of Terror. Hegel’s philosophy, where the state incarnates God’s work in history, provides another piece of the ancestral puzzle, while Nietzsche’s romantic and relativistic “will to power” adds a third leg to fascism’s Continental heritage. A fourth progenitor was Otto von Bismarck, whose comprehensive welfare package for the new German Empire provided Western intellectuals with a top-down model of social policy that they yearned to replicate.
These historical connections aren’t exceptionally novel, but the American branches of fascism’s genealogical tree are unexpected—limbs that include the pragmatic philosophers William James and John Dewey as well as political writers like Henry George (Progress and Poverty), Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward), and Herbert Croly (The Promise of American Life). Drawing on these and other sources, Goldberg not only shows that European fascism is a product of the political left, he also argues persuasively that America’s version of that system is rooted in the Progressive movement and was first given national expression in the war socialism of Woodrow Wilson.
Not surprisingly, Goldberg’s first two chapters are devoted to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. But contrary to the impression given by pop-history, Mussolini isn’t relegated to the status of an absurd fifth wheel. Instead, Il Duce’s role as the “Father of Fascism” is clearly laid out. The portrait of his rise to power in 1922--more than a decade before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany--is the story of an intellectual whose communist sympathies were developed from infancy. (Even his given names, Benito Amilcare Andrea, conjured up leftist heroes from the past.) Those socialist sentiments remained with Mussolini to the day of his death—alongside his obsession with sexual conquest and his contempt for Christianity.
As Goldberg notes, Mussolini’s state-centered, anti-capitalist rhetoric could only be declared “right-wing” by ideologues who were fighting over the same political bone. In other words, it was the internecine struggle between fascists and communists that gave birth to the longstanding practice of separating the terms “fascist” and “socialist.” This linguistic divorce was mandated by Stalin to stigmatize the socialist heresy Mussolini promoted in light of his comrades’ nationalistic response to World War I.
Goldberg also emphasizes that fascism itself varied from nation to nation. Most significantly, the Jew-hatred that characterized Hitler’s regime wasn’t integral to Italian Fascism—a movement that included a disproportionate number of Jews. Indeed, Mussolini scoffed at the Aryan myth that animated German Nazism, preferring for his part to play the role of a latter-day Caesar who was destined to resurrect Rome’s ancient greatness.
The most unexpected part of Goldberg’s Mussolini portrait is the way the Italian leader was hailed in American Progressive circles (e.g. in issues of Herbert Croly’s New Republic) and in American pop-culture. Even as late as 1934, Cole Porter’s song, You’re the Top, exhibited this adulatory attitude toward the Italian idol. Only after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935 did this admiration begin to wane. Significantly, the American President that Mussolini praised effusively in 1919, three years before his march on Rome, was Woodrow Wilson.
As far as Hitler’s left-wing credentials are concerned, Goldberg’s discussion of the Nazi Party Platform does a good job of demonstrating that the word “socialist” in National Socialist wasn’t mere window dressing. After summarizing that ambitious document, Goldberg offers this sarcastic conclusion:
“Ah, yes. Those anti-elitist, stock-market-abolishing, child-labor-ending, public-health-promoting, wealth-confiscating, draft-ending, secularist right-wingers!”
Analysis of the groups from which Nazism drew its support also shows that corporations weren’t (as Moscow insisted) pulling strings behind the scene. Rather, Nazism emerged as a populist movement that was so cash-strapped Hitler frequently rode to rallies “in the back of an old pickup.” As the historian Henry Ashby Turner concludes, corporate funding of the Nazi party was “at best” of “marginal significance.” Were it not for decades of leftist disinformation, that conclusion would have been a foregone conclusion, given the virulently anti-capitalist language of Mein Kampf—language Hitler still employed in 1941. In short, Goldberg provides extensive evidence that Hitler’s political program was just as “right-wing” as the politics of Leon Trotsky—whom Stalin also labeled a “fascist.”
It is one thing to assert that fascism is a product of the political left—one of the “heresies of socialism” according to Harvard Professor Richard Pipes. It is something else to argue that fascism has its own American expression that grew out of the Progressive political tradition and that “Woodrow Wilson was the twentieth century’s first fascist dictator.” That, however, is precisely the proposition put forward in Goldberg’s third chapter: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of Liberal Fascism.
To bolster this hypothesis, Goldberg highlights connections between the intellectual milieu that fostered fascism in Europe and the milieu that begat American Progressivism. Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, for example, was received enthusiastically in Europe where it helped to shape populist and socialist economic theory. Similarly, Edward Bellamy’s utopian vision in Looking Backward (where a single municipal umbrella would one day shield all Bostonians from the rain) drew inspiration from Bismarck’s top-down political example in Germany. These and other “holistic” visions of society fed into an American Progressive movement whose moral energy was derived largely from legions of Social Gospelers. As Goldberg notes, the party’s 1912 presidential convention was described in the New York Times as a “convention of fanatics” and “religious enthusiasts.” This fusion of social reform and religious fervor is central to what Goldberg calls “liberal fascism.”
On the philosophical side of the ledger, American Progressivism looked to William James, John Dewey, and Charles Darwin. The former duo provided a relativistic and pragmatic outlook that coincided nicely with bold social experimentation. Dewey, in particular, advocated an “organic” Darwinian approach to society that consigned American individualism to the dustbin of evolutionary history. Darwinism also brought to the Progressive project a focus on racist genetics that (alongside the movement’s militant imperialism) subsequent historians have been eager to forget. Furthermore, the polite moral relativism of James and Dewey echoed the unequivocal relativism expressed by Nietzsche (whose philosophy, according to H. L. Mencken, Theodore Roosevelt had swallowed whole). Finally, the attachment of elite progressives to Hegel’s political philosophy (Goldberg notes that Woodrow Wilson “even invoked Hegel in a love letter to his wife.”) reinforced the idea that society is an organic whole and that reformers are, quite literally, God’s instruments on earth.
Woodrow Wilson is the unexpected villain of Liberal Fascism. Based on a review of his academic writings, Goldberg demonstrates that Wilson was a devotee of power—power utilized according to the pragmatic lights of John Dewey. Consequently, the twenty-eighth president denigrated, with the confidence of a divinely anointed leader, those constitutional provisions that limited his ability to mold the nation into a healthy organism that worked for the good of all. This “evolutionary” vision of history provided the intellectual justification for that modern legal theory that dissolves all governmental boundaries—the living Constitution. It also paved the way for an approach to education that transferred the locus of pedagogical authority from parents to the state. In Professor Wilson’s words: “Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life…[but] to make them as unlike their fathers as we can.”
World War I gave President Wilson the crisis he needed to implement the top-down vision of social coordination he had written about for decades. Government instruments employed in this massive effort (whose only near precedent was Lincoln’s response to the Civil War) included the War Industries Board, a vigorous and widespread propaganda ministry, and a justice department that, Goldberg notes, presided over the arrest and jailing of more dissidents than Mussolini incarcerated during the entire 1920s. From censorship, to price-fixing, to Palmer raids, to patriotic nursery rhymes designed for toddlers, mobilization gave Wilson’s government unprecedented access to and control over people’s lives. This whipping of individualistic Americans into collective shape was cheered by progressives like Walter Lippmann who saw in the war an opportunity to bring about a Nietzschean “transvaluation of values as radical as anything in the history of intellect.” No wonder Warren Harding won the presidency in 1920 with a campaign that promised a return to “normalcy.”
With the advent of the Great Depression, Progressives were given an opportunity to reprise the coordination achieved under Wilson’s war socialism. The British journalist Alistair Cooke doubtless turned many heads when, in the 1970s, he announced on his popular PBS history series that America under FDR “flirted with National Socialism.” Goldberg argues that the amorous relationship was a good deal more intimate—a relationship fanned by the populist hot air that emanated from Father Coughlin and Senator Huey Long and consummated by many of the individuals that ran Wilson’s war agencies. A prime example of these fascist retreads was Hugh “Iron Pants” Johnson, whose “sock in the nose” style at the National Recovery Administration doubtless drew positive reviews from one of FDR’s early admirers, Benito Mussolini. Even Germany’s new Fuhrer had words of praise for the government-business partnerships that typified Roosevelt’s New Deal.
The expansion of government under Franklin Roosevelt is well known. What isn’t acknowledged in polite historical circles, as Goldberg notes, is how “the fascist flavor of the New Deal was not only regularly discussed” but even “cited in Roosevelt’s favor.” Why this inconvenient fact was dropped down the historical memory hole is clear. Leftist historians had no desire to link the paragon of modern “liberalism” with “right-wing” fascism. Stated more honestly, they didn’t want to acknowledge that fascism was a left-wing philosophy and expose the ongoing historical ruse that kept conservatives (i.e. classical liberals) off balance.
The remainder of Goldberg’s book (more than half) discusses progressivism’s third wave of influence on American life in the 1960s and explains how its fascist traits have been incorporated into modern “liberalism.” While not as narrowly focused as his first four chapters, these materials do give further definition to the concept of “liberal fascism”—a phrase coined in 1932 by H. G. Wells to promote an ambitious “liberal” variant of Europe’s burgeoning political system.
Among the concepts that Goldberg identifies as integral to sixties radicalism are these: the romantic embrace of youthful impulsiveness and sexuality, the denigration of reason and tradition, the extension of politics into all areas of life, the exaltation of identity politics (initially in terms of race and gender), and the justification of violence committed by revolutionaries intent on creating a mythical heaven on earth (e.g. the Black Panthers). All these themes, Goldberg notes, have significant corollaries in the fascist regimes of Italy and Germany.
What separates these 60s street radicals from Great Society and contemporary progressives, however, is the smothering maternalism that characterizes the latter groups. Today’s “liberal fascists,” unlike their European and turn-of-the-century American forebears, promote a religion of the state that is non-militaristic. As such, it resembles Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, not George Orwell’s 1984. No better example of this smothering maternalism exists than Hillary Clinton’s magnum opus, It Takes A Village—a mythical world where helpful government programs cover the social landscape and where repetitive video messages inculcate useful parenting tips “any place where people gather and have to wait.”
Another Goldberg chapter, Liberal Racism: The Eugenic Ghost in the Fascist Machine, shows how “eugenics lay at the heart of the progressive enterprise”—an assertion backed by historian Edwin Black, who noted that the eugenic crusade was “created in the publications and academic research rooms of the Carnegie Institution, verified by the research grants of the Rockefeller Foundation, validated by leading scholars from the best Ivy League universities, and financed by the special efforts of the Harriman railroad fortune.” This embarrassing skeleton in the Progressive closet is compared with the implicit pro-abortion subtext in the best-selling book, Freakonomics—namely, “fewer blacks, less crime.”
Regrettably, Goldberg’s final chapter, The New Age: We’re All Fascists Now, begins to treat fascist traits so eclectically that the precision and focus of earlier chapters is lost. Looking for fascist themes in Dirty Harry and Whole Foods Market is a bit like searching for grandmother’s features in little Ricky’s newborn mug. One is bound to find something, but isolated traits don’t amount to a close likeness. A similar critique applies to Goldberg’s afterword, The Tempting of Conservatism, where playing (perhaps badly) at the only governmental game in town seems to be confused with religious devotion to the political Weltanschauung exhibited in It Takes A Village.
Despite these end-of-book drawbacks, Goldberg has produced a popular book of rare historical depth and quality—a book that promises to scrap those ridiculous history-class charts that put democracy midway between “socialism” on the left and “fascism” on the right, then justify their totalitarian extremes by bending the linear ends into a globe where left and right magically “meet.”
An old Soviet joke asserted that loyal comrades know the future; it’s only the past that keeps changing. With Goldberg’s assistance, Americans can begin to rewrite their own political history, this time putting the “fascist” label where it belongs. That single alteration would be a momentous accomplishment—one that would make the architects of democracy’s future more sure-handed.
“History is written by the winners.” So goes the discipline-denigrating cliché. A more accurate observation, as Jonah Goldberg’s new book, Liberal Fascism, suggests, is that history is written by historians—and especially, in recent decades, by academics whose biases predispose them to serve as useful idiots for Joseph Stalin’s defunct propaganda ministry. Though Goldberg’s well-researched book doesn’t focus minute attention on the culpability of leftist historians, it does provide convenient targets (Richard Hofstadter and William Shirer) who might be blamed for abetting the greatest intellectual ruse of the twentieth century—the absurd designation of fascism as an ideology of the political right.
Anyone looking for Coulteresque theater in Goldberg’s work (the product of four years’ labor) will be disappointed. The book isn’t meant to toss “f-bombs” at liberals the way liberals regularly toss that seven-letter epithet at conservatives. Indeed, Goldberg reiterates again and again that he doesn’t employ the word “fascism” as a synonym for Nazism, racism, or “evil.” Rather, he uses the term to label a method of governing that expressed itself differently in different countries. Given that caveat, anyone who chooses to read this engrossing analysis of the origins of fascism will likely be rewarded with a paradigm-shifting experience that puts the history of the twentieth century in a new light—a history that places Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt in the same political neighborhood as Benito Mussolini.
The story of fascism, Goldberg notes, begins with the “holistic” philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau and his revolutionary progeny—men whose boundless conception of national communion (via a general will) led to the odd idea that dissidents would be “forced to be free”—a fate more benign than the guillotine that “freed” enemies of the state from error during the French Reign of Terror. Hegel’s philosophy, where the state incarnates God’s work in history, provides another piece of the ancestral puzzle, while Nietzsche’s romantic and relativistic “will to power” adds a third leg to fascism’s Continental heritage. A fourth progenitor was Otto von Bismarck, whose comprehensive welfare package for the new German Empire provided Western intellectuals with a top-down model of social policy that they yearned to replicate.
These historical connections aren’t exceptionally novel, but the American branches of fascism’s genealogical tree are unexpected—limbs that include the pragmatic philosophers William James and John Dewey as well as political writers like Henry George (Progress and Poverty), Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward), and Herbert Croly (The Promise of American Life). Drawing on these and other sources, Goldberg not only shows that European fascism is a product of the political left, he also argues persuasively that America’s version of that system is rooted in the Progressive movement and was first given national expression in the war socialism of Woodrow Wilson.
Not surprisingly, Goldberg’s first two chapters are devoted to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. But contrary to the impression given by pop-history, Mussolini isn’t relegated to the status of an absurd fifth wheel. Instead, Il Duce’s role as the “Father of Fascism” is clearly laid out. The portrait of his rise to power in 1922--more than a decade before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany--is the story of an intellectual whose communist sympathies were developed from infancy. (Even his given names, Benito Amilcare Andrea, conjured up leftist heroes from the past.) Those socialist sentiments remained with Mussolini to the day of his death—alongside his obsession with sexual conquest and his contempt for Christianity.
As Goldberg notes, Mussolini’s state-centered, anti-capitalist rhetoric could only be declared “right-wing” by ideologues who were fighting over the same political bone. In other words, it was the internecine struggle between fascists and communists that gave birth to the longstanding practice of separating the terms “fascist” and “socialist.” This linguistic divorce was mandated by Stalin to stigmatize the socialist heresy Mussolini promoted in light of his comrades’ nationalistic response to World War I.
Goldberg also emphasizes that fascism itself varied from nation to nation. Most significantly, the Jew-hatred that characterized Hitler’s regime wasn’t integral to Italian Fascism—a movement that included a disproportionate number of Jews. Indeed, Mussolini scoffed at the Aryan myth that animated German Nazism, preferring for his part to play the role of a latter-day Caesar who was destined to resurrect Rome’s ancient greatness.
The most unexpected part of Goldberg’s Mussolini portrait is the way the Italian leader was hailed in American Progressive circles (e.g. in issues of Herbert Croly’s New Republic) and in American pop-culture. Even as late as 1934, Cole Porter’s song, You’re the Top, exhibited this adulatory attitude toward the Italian idol. Only after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935 did this admiration begin to wane. Significantly, the American President that Mussolini praised effusively in 1919, three years before his march on Rome, was Woodrow Wilson.
As far as Hitler’s left-wing credentials are concerned, Goldberg’s discussion of the Nazi Party Platform does a good job of demonstrating that the word “socialist” in National Socialist wasn’t mere window dressing. After summarizing that ambitious document, Goldberg offers this sarcastic conclusion:
“Ah, yes. Those anti-elitist, stock-market-abolishing, child-labor-ending, public-health-promoting, wealth-confiscating, draft-ending, secularist right-wingers!”
Analysis of the groups from which Nazism drew its support also shows that corporations weren’t (as Moscow insisted) pulling strings behind the scene. Rather, Nazism emerged as a populist movement that was so cash-strapped Hitler frequently rode to rallies “in the back of an old pickup.” As the historian Henry Ashby Turner concludes, corporate funding of the Nazi party was “at best” of “marginal significance.” Were it not for decades of leftist disinformation, that conclusion would have been a foregone conclusion, given the virulently anti-capitalist language of Mein Kampf—language Hitler still employed in 1941. In short, Goldberg provides extensive evidence that Hitler’s political program was just as “right-wing” as the politics of Leon Trotsky—whom Stalin also labeled a “fascist.”
It is one thing to assert that fascism is a product of the political left—one of the “heresies of socialism” according to Harvard Professor Richard Pipes. It is something else to argue that fascism has its own American expression that grew out of the Progressive political tradition and that “Woodrow Wilson was the twentieth century’s first fascist dictator.” That, however, is precisely the proposition put forward in Goldberg’s third chapter: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of Liberal Fascism.
To bolster this hypothesis, Goldberg highlights connections between the intellectual milieu that fostered fascism in Europe and the milieu that begat American Progressivism. Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, for example, was received enthusiastically in Europe where it helped to shape populist and socialist economic theory. Similarly, Edward Bellamy’s utopian vision in Looking Backward (where a single municipal umbrella would one day shield all Bostonians from the rain) drew inspiration from Bismarck’s top-down political example in Germany. These and other “holistic” visions of society fed into an American Progressive movement whose moral energy was derived largely from legions of Social Gospelers. As Goldberg notes, the party’s 1912 presidential convention was described in the New York Times as a “convention of fanatics” and “religious enthusiasts.” This fusion of social reform and religious fervor is central to what Goldberg calls “liberal fascism.”
On the philosophical side of the ledger, American Progressivism looked to William James, John Dewey, and Charles Darwin. The former duo provided a relativistic and pragmatic outlook that coincided nicely with bold social experimentation. Dewey, in particular, advocated an “organic” Darwinian approach to society that consigned American individualism to the dustbin of evolutionary history. Darwinism also brought to the Progressive project a focus on racist genetics that (alongside the movement’s militant imperialism) subsequent historians have been eager to forget. Furthermore, the polite moral relativism of James and Dewey echoed the unequivocal relativism expressed by Nietzsche (whose philosophy, according to H. L. Mencken, Theodore Roosevelt had swallowed whole). Finally, the attachment of elite progressives to Hegel’s political philosophy (Goldberg notes that Woodrow Wilson “even invoked Hegel in a love letter to his wife.”) reinforced the idea that society is an organic whole and that reformers are, quite literally, God’s instruments on earth.
Woodrow Wilson is the unexpected villain of Liberal Fascism. Based on a review of his academic writings, Goldberg demonstrates that Wilson was a devotee of power—power utilized according to the pragmatic lights of John Dewey. Consequently, the twenty-eighth president denigrated, with the confidence of a divinely anointed leader, those constitutional provisions that limited his ability to mold the nation into a healthy organism that worked for the good of all. This “evolutionary” vision of history provided the intellectual justification for that modern legal theory that dissolves all governmental boundaries—the living Constitution. It also paved the way for an approach to education that transferred the locus of pedagogical authority from parents to the state. In Professor Wilson’s words: “Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life…[but] to make them as unlike their fathers as we can.”
World War I gave President Wilson the crisis he needed to implement the top-down vision of social coordination he had written about for decades. Government instruments employed in this massive effort (whose only near precedent was Lincoln’s response to the Civil War) included the War Industries Board, a vigorous and widespread propaganda ministry, and a justice department that, Goldberg notes, presided over the arrest and jailing of more dissidents than Mussolini incarcerated during the entire 1920s. From censorship, to price-fixing, to Palmer raids, to patriotic nursery rhymes designed for toddlers, mobilization gave Wilson’s government unprecedented access to and control over people’s lives. This whipping of individualistic Americans into collective shape was cheered by progressives like Walter Lippmann who saw in the war an opportunity to bring about a Nietzschean “transvaluation of values as radical as anything in the history of intellect.” No wonder Warren Harding won the presidency in 1920 with a campaign that promised a return to “normalcy.”
With the advent of the Great Depression, Progressives were given an opportunity to reprise the coordination achieved under Wilson’s war socialism. The British journalist Alistair Cooke doubtless turned many heads when, in the 1970s, he announced on his popular PBS history series that America under FDR “flirted with National Socialism.” Goldberg argues that the amorous relationship was a good deal more intimate—a relationship fanned by the populist hot air that emanated from Father Coughlin and Senator Huey Long and consummated by many of the individuals that ran Wilson’s war agencies. A prime example of these fascist retreads was Hugh “Iron Pants” Johnson, whose “sock in the nose” style at the National Recovery Administration doubtless drew positive reviews from one of FDR’s early admirers, Benito Mussolini. Even Germany’s new Fuhrer had words of praise for the government-business partnerships that typified Roosevelt’s New Deal.
The expansion of government under Franklin Roosevelt is well known. What isn’t acknowledged in polite historical circles, as Goldberg notes, is how “the fascist flavor of the New Deal was not only regularly discussed” but even “cited in Roosevelt’s favor.” Why this inconvenient fact was dropped down the historical memory hole is clear. Leftist historians had no desire to link the paragon of modern “liberalism” with “right-wing” fascism. Stated more honestly, they didn’t want to acknowledge that fascism was a left-wing philosophy and expose the ongoing historical ruse that kept conservatives (i.e. classical liberals) off balance.
The remainder of Goldberg’s book (more than half) discusses progressivism’s third wave of influence on American life in the 1960s and explains how its fascist traits have been incorporated into modern “liberalism.” While not as narrowly focused as his first four chapters, these materials do give further definition to the concept of “liberal fascism”—a phrase coined in 1932 by H. G. Wells to promote an ambitious “liberal” variant of Europe’s burgeoning political system.
Among the concepts that Goldberg identifies as integral to sixties radicalism are these: the romantic embrace of youthful impulsiveness and sexuality, the denigration of reason and tradition, the extension of politics into all areas of life, the exaltation of identity politics (initially in terms of race and gender), and the justification of violence committed by revolutionaries intent on creating a mythical heaven on earth (e.g. the Black Panthers). All these themes, Goldberg notes, have significant corollaries in the fascist regimes of Italy and Germany.
What separates these 60s street radicals from Great Society and contemporary progressives, however, is the smothering maternalism that characterizes the latter groups. Today’s “liberal fascists,” unlike their European and turn-of-the-century American forebears, promote a religion of the state that is non-militaristic. As such, it resembles Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, not George Orwell’s 1984. No better example of this smothering maternalism exists than Hillary Clinton’s magnum opus, It Takes A Village—a mythical world where helpful government programs cover the social landscape and where repetitive video messages inculcate useful parenting tips “any place where people gather and have to wait.”
Another Goldberg chapter, Liberal Racism: The Eugenic Ghost in the Fascist Machine, shows how “eugenics lay at the heart of the progressive enterprise”—an assertion backed by historian Edwin Black, who noted that the eugenic crusade was “created in the publications and academic research rooms of the Carnegie Institution, verified by the research grants of the Rockefeller Foundation, validated by leading scholars from the best Ivy League universities, and financed by the special efforts of the Harriman railroad fortune.” This embarrassing skeleton in the Progressive closet is compared with the implicit pro-abortion subtext in the best-selling book, Freakonomics—namely, “fewer blacks, less crime.”
Regrettably, Goldberg’s final chapter, The New Age: We’re All Fascists Now, begins to treat fascist traits so eclectically that the precision and focus of earlier chapters is lost. Looking for fascist themes in Dirty Harry and Whole Foods Market is a bit like searching for grandmother’s features in little Ricky’s newborn mug. One is bound to find something, but isolated traits don’t amount to a close likeness. A similar critique applies to Goldberg’s afterword, The Tempting of Conservatism, where playing (perhaps badly) at the only governmental game in town seems to be confused with religious devotion to the political Weltanschauung exhibited in It Takes A Village.
Despite these end-of-book drawbacks, Goldberg has produced a popular book of rare historical depth and quality—a book that promises to scrap those ridiculous history-class charts that put democracy midway between “socialism” on the left and “fascism” on the right, then justify their totalitarian extremes by bending the linear ends into a globe where left and right magically “meet.”
An old Soviet joke asserted that loyal comrades know the future; it’s only the past that keeps changing. With Goldberg’s assistance, Americans can begin to rewrite their own political history, this time putting the “fascist” label where it belongs. That single alteration would be a momentous accomplishment—one that would make the architects of democracy’s future more sure-handed.
Monday, February 18, 2008
GOOD REGULATOR INTENTIONS FOSTER BAD LOANS
A picture is worth a thousand words. So is the jump-page graph that accompanied a recent front-page North County Times story. Though the graph was of the gee-whiz variety, the near vertical rise of median home prices in San Diego County from 2001 to 2004 was still impressive.
Having sold a house in North County during that boom period, the graph didn’t inform me of anything I didn’t experience firsthand. It did, however, provide a vivid visual representation of the financial vertigo that sellers and buyers should have been experiencing at the time.
If the graph had been passed around to lenders and folks buying houses and condos during those years, it might have occurred to them that this “irrational exuberance” couldn’t last forever. And this thought might have made their decisions more prudent.
Another news story about the rash of foreclosures in Oceanside’s 92057 zip code made clear that a majority of these purchases were financed with no or little down payment—a practice that’s difficult to understand given the balance sheets of many of those borrowers and given the possibility that mortgage rates would be adjusted upward in a couple of years.
One of the little-known reasons that financial institutions were willing to make such dubious loans is that they were encouraged to do so in the name of ending discrimination. As economist Stan Liebowitz observed, “From the current hand-wringing, you’d think that the banks came up with the idea of looser underwriting standards on their own, with regulators just asleep on the job. In fact, it was the regulators who relaxed these standards—at the behest of community groups and ‘progressive’ political forces.”
Liebowitz notes that activist groups like ACORN had been making charges of discriminatory “redlining” for years. Moreover, despite a detailed study debunking those charges, government regulators insisted that discrimination, not economics, was keeping minorities from realizing the dream of home ownership.
Accordingly, the Boston Federal Reserve produced a manual for lenders that condemned underwriting policies that “contain arbitrary or outdated criteria that effectively disqualify many urban or lower-income minority applicants.” Examples of “arbitrary or outdated criteria” included the ratio of income to mortgage payments, an individual’s credit and savings history, and income verification.
Moreover, “the Boston Fed ruled that participation in a credit-counseling program should be taken as evidence of an applicant’s ability to manage debt.” Not surprisingly, the lender that took these ACORN-friendly standards most to heart was Countrywide. Rising home prices masked the rising number of foreclosures.
An odd beneficiary of these lending standards is described in the 92057 story mentioned above. A homebuyer in that troubled zip code is walking away from his obligations after netting $50,000 from refinance loans, paying off $8,000 in personal debts, and taking his family on a vacation to Hawaii. He’s now looking forward to renting a bigger house. Perhaps regulators might consider this dude’s credit history a relevant lending factor in the future—no matter his race or ethnicity
Having sold a house in North County during that boom period, the graph didn’t inform me of anything I didn’t experience firsthand. It did, however, provide a vivid visual representation of the financial vertigo that sellers and buyers should have been experiencing at the time.
If the graph had been passed around to lenders and folks buying houses and condos during those years, it might have occurred to them that this “irrational exuberance” couldn’t last forever. And this thought might have made their decisions more prudent.
Another news story about the rash of foreclosures in Oceanside’s 92057 zip code made clear that a majority of these purchases were financed with no or little down payment—a practice that’s difficult to understand given the balance sheets of many of those borrowers and given the possibility that mortgage rates would be adjusted upward in a couple of years.
One of the little-known reasons that financial institutions were willing to make such dubious loans is that they were encouraged to do so in the name of ending discrimination. As economist Stan Liebowitz observed, “From the current hand-wringing, you’d think that the banks came up with the idea of looser underwriting standards on their own, with regulators just asleep on the job. In fact, it was the regulators who relaxed these standards—at the behest of community groups and ‘progressive’ political forces.”
Liebowitz notes that activist groups like ACORN had been making charges of discriminatory “redlining” for years. Moreover, despite a detailed study debunking those charges, government regulators insisted that discrimination, not economics, was keeping minorities from realizing the dream of home ownership.
Accordingly, the Boston Federal Reserve produced a manual for lenders that condemned underwriting policies that “contain arbitrary or outdated criteria that effectively disqualify many urban or lower-income minority applicants.” Examples of “arbitrary or outdated criteria” included the ratio of income to mortgage payments, an individual’s credit and savings history, and income verification.
Moreover, “the Boston Fed ruled that participation in a credit-counseling program should be taken as evidence of an applicant’s ability to manage debt.” Not surprisingly, the lender that took these ACORN-friendly standards most to heart was Countrywide. Rising home prices masked the rising number of foreclosures.
An odd beneficiary of these lending standards is described in the 92057 story mentioned above. A homebuyer in that troubled zip code is walking away from his obligations after netting $50,000 from refinance loans, paying off $8,000 in personal debts, and taking his family on a vacation to Hawaii. He’s now looking forward to renting a bigger house. Perhaps regulators might consider this dude’s credit history a relevant lending factor in the future—no matter his race or ethnicity
Friday, February 08, 2008
GLOBAL COOLING: BLAME THE SUN
Danish scientists promote the wacky idea that the primary force in determining climate change is...THE SUN! They also think things will be getting cooler, not warmer!
http://ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=287279412587175
http://ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=287279412587175
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
REBUTTING THE NANNY STATE VIA GOLDBERG'S "LIBERAL FASCISM"
Recently I saw an elderly gentleman smoking a cigarette and walking a Chihuahua through Oceanside’s Buddy Todd Park. It was midmorning and no one else was about in the facility under construction—only this lone lawbreaker. I mention this incident because my column three weeks ago, “Nanny State on a Roll” (Jan. 15), generated a lot of dissent on the page opposite.
Pointing to a recent beach booze ban and anti-smoking ordinances that extend from Solana Beach to Oceanside to Poway, I noted that government regulation of personal behavior is permeating more and more areas of life. In the case of Belmont, California’s anti-smoking ordinance, the ban even reaches into some private apartments.
I also included two other examples of top-down governmental regulation—one environmental and another a proposal (now put on hold) to let the state set home thermostats during “emergencies.” Had I world enough and time, I could have discussed the jaw-dropping subversion of parental authority via the public school system—an institution whose purpose seems to be, in the words of Woodrow Wilson (John Dewey’s presidential disciple), “to make [children] as unlike their fathers as we can.”
Whether a toll road is built connecting I-5 to Highway 91 via the San Onofre State Park wasn’t my concern—only the employment of an unfettered critter-based logic that allows a few bureaucrats to veto decisions arrived at by democratic means.
Some responders to the column focused attention on the term “liberal fascism”—the popular title of Jonah Goldberg’s new book. Those critics would do well to peruse Goldberg’s well-researched tome—a work that illustrates the extensive ideological and personal links between fascism, America’s Progressive movement, Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, and FDR’s New Deal. Goldberg not only demonstrates the unmistakable leftist origins of fascism, he also observes that the term “liberal fascism” was consciously employed by H. G. Wells when he promoted an ambitious Progressive variant of Europe’s burgeoning political system.
The dust jacket of Goldberg’s book displays a yellow “happy face” that sports the distinctive mustache worn by the anti-smoking, vegetarian, organic foods Chancellor of the German Reich. That oxymoronic icon perfectly expresses the blending of fascism’s fixation on the health of the state with a boundless do-gooderism that imposes its will with a benevolent smile. As Goldberg observes, “Brave New World” exhibits this obsessively “nurturing” approach to politics—not the “masculine” totalitarianism of Orwell’s “1984.”
Goldberg repeatedly notes that there’s nothing wrong with focusing attention on the common good. He even supplies a chapter on conservative programs that move in this direction. What he decries is the perverse stigmatizing of small-government, free market policies as fascistic while so-called liberals make extensive “It Takes A Village” plans to push an omni-capable state into kindergartens, nurseries, and beyond.
Personally, I wouldn’t have a huge problem with ticketing that elderly Chihuahua-walker in the park if there weren’t a phalanx of power-hungry do-gooders eager to make every part of our collective lives “better”—according to the lights of their constitutionally unrestricted secular faith.
Pointing to a recent beach booze ban and anti-smoking ordinances that extend from Solana Beach to Oceanside to Poway, I noted that government regulation of personal behavior is permeating more and more areas of life. In the case of Belmont, California’s anti-smoking ordinance, the ban even reaches into some private apartments.
I also included two other examples of top-down governmental regulation—one environmental and another a proposal (now put on hold) to let the state set home thermostats during “emergencies.” Had I world enough and time, I could have discussed the jaw-dropping subversion of parental authority via the public school system—an institution whose purpose seems to be, in the words of Woodrow Wilson (John Dewey’s presidential disciple), “to make [children] as unlike their fathers as we can.”
Whether a toll road is built connecting I-5 to Highway 91 via the San Onofre State Park wasn’t my concern—only the employment of an unfettered critter-based logic that allows a few bureaucrats to veto decisions arrived at by democratic means.
Some responders to the column focused attention on the term “liberal fascism”—the popular title of Jonah Goldberg’s new book. Those critics would do well to peruse Goldberg’s well-researched tome—a work that illustrates the extensive ideological and personal links between fascism, America’s Progressive movement, Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, and FDR’s New Deal. Goldberg not only demonstrates the unmistakable leftist origins of fascism, he also observes that the term “liberal fascism” was consciously employed by H. G. Wells when he promoted an ambitious Progressive variant of Europe’s burgeoning political system.
The dust jacket of Goldberg’s book displays a yellow “happy face” that sports the distinctive mustache worn by the anti-smoking, vegetarian, organic foods Chancellor of the German Reich. That oxymoronic icon perfectly expresses the blending of fascism’s fixation on the health of the state with a boundless do-gooderism that imposes its will with a benevolent smile. As Goldberg observes, “Brave New World” exhibits this obsessively “nurturing” approach to politics—not the “masculine” totalitarianism of Orwell’s “1984.”
Goldberg repeatedly notes that there’s nothing wrong with focusing attention on the common good. He even supplies a chapter on conservative programs that move in this direction. What he decries is the perverse stigmatizing of small-government, free market policies as fascistic while so-called liberals make extensive “It Takes A Village” plans to push an omni-capable state into kindergartens, nurseries, and beyond.
Personally, I wouldn’t have a huge problem with ticketing that elderly Chihuahua-walker in the park if there weren’t a phalanx of power-hungry do-gooders eager to make every part of our collective lives “better”—according to the lights of their constitutionally unrestricted secular faith.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
PAYING FOR CONVERSION TO LIBERAL FASCISM
Two weeks ago San Diego’s City Council followed the lead of City Attorney Mike Aguirre and agreed to pay $760,000 to James McElroy, the lawyer for deceased atheist Philip Paulson—the litigant in the Mount Soledad cross case.
Apparently Aguirre (a long-time opponent of the cross) and federal Judge Gordon Thompson Jr. think McElroy deserves remuneration despite the fact that Mr. Paulson is no longer with us and that the veterans memorial cross still stands atop Mount Soledad. Indeed, Aguirre facilitated this taxpayer-funded windfall by blithely acquiescing to a plaintiff swap for this death-defying lawsuit.
Four years ago the city of San Diego agreed to pay $950,000 to the ACLU because of a suit over the Boy Scouts’ dollar-a-year Balboa Park lease. In both these cases plaintiffs utilized a “fee shifting” rule first instituted by Congress to aid poor victims of racial discrimination. This same rule keeps school districts and municipalities supine before the ACLU’s well-funded legal threats.
All this anti-religious legal activity is made possible because of an opinion written in 1947 by Justice Hugo Black in Everson v. Board of Education, the critical case upon which the role of religion in American public life now turns.
It was in Everson that Black, citing a letter written by President Thomas Jefferson to Connecticut’s Danbury Baptists, asserted that the Constitution erects a “high and impregnable” wall between church and state that doesn’t admit “the slightest breach.” Inexplicably, Black ruled that New Jersey’s funding of transportation to religious schools did not violate his unprecedented judicial standard—a standard that would have rendered unconstitutional the God-sated language on the recently constructed Jefferson Memorial.
Our current legal intolerance toward religious expression arose because subsequent justices took seriously the standard that Black himself didn’t take to heart. Nor did Thomas Jefferson place Black’s interpretation on the words he penned to his Connecticut admirers, since two days latter the president attended (as he regularly did) the church services that were held in the capitol building from 1795 to 1866. (These and other little-known facts are discussed in Stephen Mansfield’s instructive book, “Ten Tortured Words.”)
Nowadays the ACLU and other secularist organizations wield these recently crafted legal cudgels to see that public monies and institutions are only employed to disseminate ideas they embrace—either via the SB 777 legislation that recently passed in Sacramento or via gay pride parades manned by reluctant city firefighters.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the naïve notion of state neutrality in matters of religion is only a ruse employed to censor traditional perspectives. Meanwhile, a host of anti-religious ideas fill the ethical vacuum.
Anyone who thinks that public schools and colleges aren’t indoctrinating young people with the whole “progressive” playbook--from support for gay marriage to reverence for an elite-led socialist society--simply hasn’t been paying attention. Indeed, as Jonah Goldberg’s new book explains, dissenting parents are now paying, through taxes and legal awards, to have their children converted to the religion of liberal fascism.
Apparently Aguirre (a long-time opponent of the cross) and federal Judge Gordon Thompson Jr. think McElroy deserves remuneration despite the fact that Mr. Paulson is no longer with us and that the veterans memorial cross still stands atop Mount Soledad. Indeed, Aguirre facilitated this taxpayer-funded windfall by blithely acquiescing to a plaintiff swap for this death-defying lawsuit.
Four years ago the city of San Diego agreed to pay $950,000 to the ACLU because of a suit over the Boy Scouts’ dollar-a-year Balboa Park lease. In both these cases plaintiffs utilized a “fee shifting” rule first instituted by Congress to aid poor victims of racial discrimination. This same rule keeps school districts and municipalities supine before the ACLU’s well-funded legal threats.
All this anti-religious legal activity is made possible because of an opinion written in 1947 by Justice Hugo Black in Everson v. Board of Education, the critical case upon which the role of religion in American public life now turns.
It was in Everson that Black, citing a letter written by President Thomas Jefferson to Connecticut’s Danbury Baptists, asserted that the Constitution erects a “high and impregnable” wall between church and state that doesn’t admit “the slightest breach.” Inexplicably, Black ruled that New Jersey’s funding of transportation to religious schools did not violate his unprecedented judicial standard—a standard that would have rendered unconstitutional the God-sated language on the recently constructed Jefferson Memorial.
Our current legal intolerance toward religious expression arose because subsequent justices took seriously the standard that Black himself didn’t take to heart. Nor did Thomas Jefferson place Black’s interpretation on the words he penned to his Connecticut admirers, since two days latter the president attended (as he regularly did) the church services that were held in the capitol building from 1795 to 1866. (These and other little-known facts are discussed in Stephen Mansfield’s instructive book, “Ten Tortured Words.”)
Nowadays the ACLU and other secularist organizations wield these recently crafted legal cudgels to see that public monies and institutions are only employed to disseminate ideas they embrace—either via the SB 777 legislation that recently passed in Sacramento or via gay pride parades manned by reluctant city firefighters.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the naïve notion of state neutrality in matters of religion is only a ruse employed to censor traditional perspectives. Meanwhile, a host of anti-religious ideas fill the ethical vacuum.
Anyone who thinks that public schools and colleges aren’t indoctrinating young people with the whole “progressive” playbook--from support for gay marriage to reverence for an elite-led socialist society--simply hasn’t been paying attention. Indeed, as Jonah Goldberg’s new book explains, dissenting parents are now paying, through taxes and legal awards, to have their children converted to the religion of liberal fascism.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
NANNY STATE ON A ROLL
In 2003 Solana Beach outlawed smoking on the beach. In the following years communities from Del Mar to Oceanside followed suite. Beachless Poway, along with other North County municipalities, outlawed smoking in city parks.
Last year the northern California city of Belmont approved an ordinance that would restrict smoking not only in the workplace but also in all multilevel, multi-unit housing—a restriction so comprehensive that a total ban on smoking seems the next logical step.
Recently the San Diego City Council, responding to a booze-fueled melee in Pacific Beach, passed a one-year trial ban on alcohol consumption on city beaches—a ban that has been met with an apparently successful petition calling for a public vote on the measure.
On another restrictive front, the California Coastal Commission recently published a 236-page staff report that warned against completing a toll road (Highway 241) on the San Diego-Orange County line because the project might threaten the Pacific pocket mouse and arroyo toad populations.
Topping those news items, the California Energy Commission was recently pushing revisions in its Building Energy Efficiency Standards that would mandate “programmable communicating thermostats” in all new residential buildings. These thermostats would have contained a non-removable Radio Data System that allowed state officials to set temperatures during “emergency events.” Fortunately, protests have caused the Commission to rethink this non-overridable feature.
What all these developments have in common is government control—a “helping hand” that reaches from the beach to your living room and that covers concerns as varied as cigarette-butt litter to the number of arroyo toads living near the ocean.
Last week the North County Times published columnist Rich Lowry’s review of Jonah Goldberg’s new book, “Liberal Fascism” (Jan. 10, “Who you calling ‘fascist’?”). Goldberg, Lowry notes, points to the historical and ideological links between fascism and the state-centered policies of the left—policies that suppress individual freedom and private group rights for the sake of the whole.
According to Lowry’s Goldberg, “liberal fascism” is “pacifist rather than militaristic and feminine rather than masculine in its orientation, but it also seeks to increase the power of the state and overcome tradition in sweeping crusades pursued with the moral fervor of war.”
While I don’t fancy encounters with streams of smoke at the beach or at city parks, I’m more concerned about the way powerful groups are transforming almost every aspect of life into a matter requiring state intervention. Already a drumbeat for regulating fast food is building—a drumbeat that will grow frenetic as healthcare is socialized.
As for arroyo toads, I’d wager a Franklin that Coastal Commission staff doesn’t give a kangaroo rat’s behind about endangered species—that their real agenda involves a “holistic” vision of a non-capitalist society with them at the controls.
In 1981 Professor Daniel Callahan composed an article (“Minimalist Ethics”) that warned of a morally neutered society where all matters of conduct become, by default, legal issues. Goldberg might note that “liberal fascism” flourishes in a culture where self-control has become passé.
Last year the northern California city of Belmont approved an ordinance that would restrict smoking not only in the workplace but also in all multilevel, multi-unit housing—a restriction so comprehensive that a total ban on smoking seems the next logical step.
Recently the San Diego City Council, responding to a booze-fueled melee in Pacific Beach, passed a one-year trial ban on alcohol consumption on city beaches—a ban that has been met with an apparently successful petition calling for a public vote on the measure.
On another restrictive front, the California Coastal Commission recently published a 236-page staff report that warned against completing a toll road (Highway 241) on the San Diego-Orange County line because the project might threaten the Pacific pocket mouse and arroyo toad populations.
Topping those news items, the California Energy Commission was recently pushing revisions in its Building Energy Efficiency Standards that would mandate “programmable communicating thermostats” in all new residential buildings. These thermostats would have contained a non-removable Radio Data System that allowed state officials to set temperatures during “emergency events.” Fortunately, protests have caused the Commission to rethink this non-overridable feature.
What all these developments have in common is government control—a “helping hand” that reaches from the beach to your living room and that covers concerns as varied as cigarette-butt litter to the number of arroyo toads living near the ocean.
Last week the North County Times published columnist Rich Lowry’s review of Jonah Goldberg’s new book, “Liberal Fascism” (Jan. 10, “Who you calling ‘fascist’?”). Goldberg, Lowry notes, points to the historical and ideological links between fascism and the state-centered policies of the left—policies that suppress individual freedom and private group rights for the sake of the whole.
According to Lowry’s Goldberg, “liberal fascism” is “pacifist rather than militaristic and feminine rather than masculine in its orientation, but it also seeks to increase the power of the state and overcome tradition in sweeping crusades pursued with the moral fervor of war.”
While I don’t fancy encounters with streams of smoke at the beach or at city parks, I’m more concerned about the way powerful groups are transforming almost every aspect of life into a matter requiring state intervention. Already a drumbeat for regulating fast food is building—a drumbeat that will grow frenetic as healthcare is socialized.
As for arroyo toads, I’d wager a Franklin that Coastal Commission staff doesn’t give a kangaroo rat’s behind about endangered species—that their real agenda involves a “holistic” vision of a non-capitalist society with them at the controls.
In 1981 Professor Daniel Callahan composed an article (“Minimalist Ethics”) that warned of a morally neutered society where all matters of conduct become, by default, legal issues. Goldberg might note that “liberal fascism” flourishes in a culture where self-control has become passé.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
BUSH v. GORE: CARBON FOOTPRINT
Here's the Snopes truth about how Algore's personal carbon footprint compares with that of W.
Monday, January 07, 2008
THE COURAGE TO DO NOTHING ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING
Comments about the non-event of global warming--and a batch of links!
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=c9554887-802a-23ad-4303-68f67ebd151c
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=c9554887-802a-23ad-4303-68f67ebd151c
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
DIVERSITY IS CONFORMITY
In George Orwell's world, "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength." Those definitions are from the same ideological dictionary that today touts the virtue of "diversity." Put succinctly, "Diversity is conformity." The longer rendering concerns persons of every race, ethnicity, sex or perceived sexual identity who believe exactly the same thing.
In an attempt to further politicize a public school system saturated with ideological indoctrination, the Democrat-dominated California Legislature recently teamed with the Governator to pass another law, Senate Bill 777, to strengthen protections for gay and transgender kids in our public schools.
SB 777, sponsored by state Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, guarantees that districts will get the message that no dissent on the gender agenda will be tolerated. Indeed, that landmark piece of pedagogical propaganda paves the way into the brave new world of perceived gender identity.
Having preempted parents with respect to sex education and abortion facilitation, California's spectacularly mediocre public schools are now undertaking the task of reprogramming little tikes from "show me yours" curiosity to the liberating frontier of "imaginative plumbing."
According to Kuehl's new civil rights lexicon, gender discrimination now includes a person's gender identity and gender-related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person's assigned sex at birth. This preposterous definition literally drips with diversity dogma, implying that administrators who are wary of gussied up guys are guilty of stereotyping because of an arbitrary label that was affixed to those students in the maternity ward.
Kuehl and the gender police in Sacramento insist, of course, that SB 777 is only a cosmetic alteration of pre-existing policy, but the gay lobby that pushed this new legal formulation is already planning to introduce curriculum that helps implement the idiotic idea that genitals have nothing to do with one's "assigned sex at birth."
The Gay-Straight Alliance Network, for example, is pushing a curricular guide called "Sharing Our Dreams" that purportedly "sets the record straight" about the historical contributions of LGBT individuals. No doubt in the next few years pervasive PC inserts will clutter the already dumbed-down history texts so that students without a clue about Alexander Hamilton will become as familiar with the civil rights contributions of Latina transwoman Sylvia Rivera as they now are of the Revolutionary heroism of Crispus Attucks.
Currently a petition is being circulated that would put SB 777 on a referendum ballot. North County petition centers in Escondido, Vista, and Carlsbad are listed on the SaveOurKids Web site. Most of our avant-garde educational system, however, seems not to need legislative sticks to compel them to push social agendas that a great number of parents find repulsive and that put words like "mom" and "dad" into the same category as ethnic slurs. With or without SB 777, educators' enthusiasm for "diversity" will silence their voices.
In an attempt to further politicize a public school system saturated with ideological indoctrination, the Democrat-dominated California Legislature recently teamed with the Governator to pass another law, Senate Bill 777, to strengthen protections for gay and transgender kids in our public schools.
SB 777, sponsored by state Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, guarantees that districts will get the message that no dissent on the gender agenda will be tolerated. Indeed, that landmark piece of pedagogical propaganda paves the way into the brave new world of perceived gender identity.
Having preempted parents with respect to sex education and abortion facilitation, California's spectacularly mediocre public schools are now undertaking the task of reprogramming little tikes from "show me yours" curiosity to the liberating frontier of "imaginative plumbing."
According to Kuehl's new civil rights lexicon, gender discrimination now includes a person's gender identity and gender-related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person's assigned sex at birth. This preposterous definition literally drips with diversity dogma, implying that administrators who are wary of gussied up guys are guilty of stereotyping because of an arbitrary label that was affixed to those students in the maternity ward.
Kuehl and the gender police in Sacramento insist, of course, that SB 777 is only a cosmetic alteration of pre-existing policy, but the gay lobby that pushed this new legal formulation is already planning to introduce curriculum that helps implement the idiotic idea that genitals have nothing to do with one's "assigned sex at birth."
The Gay-Straight Alliance Network, for example, is pushing a curricular guide called "Sharing Our Dreams" that purportedly "sets the record straight" about the historical contributions of LGBT individuals. No doubt in the next few years pervasive PC inserts will clutter the already dumbed-down history texts so that students without a clue about Alexander Hamilton will become as familiar with the civil rights contributions of Latina transwoman Sylvia Rivera as they now are of the Revolutionary heroism of Crispus Attucks.
Currently a petition is being circulated that would put SB 777 on a referendum ballot. North County petition centers in Escondido, Vista, and Carlsbad are listed on the SaveOurKids Web site. Most of our avant-garde educational system, however, seems not to need legislative sticks to compel them to push social agendas that a great number of parents find repulsive and that put words like "mom" and "dad" into the same category as ethnic slurs. With or without SB 777, educators' enthusiasm for "diversity" will silence their voices.
John Tierney's Take on Global Warming Hysteria
It's in the New York Times no less! Another inconvenient opinion for Algore.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
EDUCATION AND OBFUSCATION
Wading through the verbiage of educrats is like taking a bath in an ink-filled sandbox. That’s my take on the articles the North County Times recently published in its Sunday Perspective section (Dec. 2) about the achievement gap that separates white and minority students in California.
Most prominent were the pieces by state superintendent Jack O’Connell and Vista Unified superintendent Joyce Bales. Here’s a sample of edu-speak from Dr. Bales:
“Our challenge is that VUSD has the most schools on ‘Priority Improvement,’ the lowest NCLB [No Child Left Behind] ranking. Of the 31 schools in North County with that label, 11 are in VUSD . . . The expectation for the past five years has been for 25 percent of the students to achieve proficiency. Beginning in 2007, the goal was for 35% of the students to meet the NCLB goals.”
The superintendent moves from edu-jargon to nearly plain English with her next sentence: “Vista Unified’s goal is that 100 percent of its students achieve grade level requirements every year.” Yes, one would think so. But extrapolating from the rate of improvement previously noted, that common sense goal would be formalized around 2040.
Superintendent O’Connell’s proficiency in oblique-speak is illustrated by this sentence: “While arguments have been made that the range of poverty within the classification ‘socioeconomically disadvantaged’ is broad and that white students tend to be at the higher end of that range, myriad data—from SAT scores to distribution of qualified teachers to dropout rates—lead to the unavoidable conclusion that the race of a student is likely to affect how that student is served by our educational system.”
Put succinctly, even minority students from more affluent and stable households don’t do as well, academically, as their white counterparts. I suspect the superintendent’s linguistic opaqueness stems from a reluctance to clearly articulate the observation made some time ago by John McWhorter, an African-American linguist and social commentator, that many black groups disparage academic achievement as “acting white.”
The clearest article was the one by state Board of Education president Ken Noonan, who advocated putting funds and responsibility squarely in the hands of principals and teachers in local schools. The former Oceanside superintendent also noted, however, that the state still lacks “a statewide database system for tracking the performance of every public school student.”
Such a database, I would think, might help determine exactly how many students have dropped out of the system altogether—a number that, incredibly, education bureaucrats can’t specify with confidence. But then again, based on the Byzantine Academic Performance Index that was constructed to bury true performance indicators (like the National Assessment of Educational Progress) under a blizzard of improvement indices, a clear presentation of the status quo doesn’t seem to be a high priority.
Other education critics have clearly noted that a major problem, as indicated by SAT and GRE scores, is the quality of the education work force—a problem exacerbated by tenure rules that make firing teachers almost impossible. I observe, more bluntly, that systems designed primarily for job security abhor competition and require obfuscation.
Most prominent were the pieces by state superintendent Jack O’Connell and Vista Unified superintendent Joyce Bales. Here’s a sample of edu-speak from Dr. Bales:
“Our challenge is that VUSD has the most schools on ‘Priority Improvement,’ the lowest NCLB [No Child Left Behind] ranking. Of the 31 schools in North County with that label, 11 are in VUSD . . . The expectation for the past five years has been for 25 percent of the students to achieve proficiency. Beginning in 2007, the goal was for 35% of the students to meet the NCLB goals.”
The superintendent moves from edu-jargon to nearly plain English with her next sentence: “Vista Unified’s goal is that 100 percent of its students achieve grade level requirements every year.” Yes, one would think so. But extrapolating from the rate of improvement previously noted, that common sense goal would be formalized around 2040.
Superintendent O’Connell’s proficiency in oblique-speak is illustrated by this sentence: “While arguments have been made that the range of poverty within the classification ‘socioeconomically disadvantaged’ is broad and that white students tend to be at the higher end of that range, myriad data—from SAT scores to distribution of qualified teachers to dropout rates—lead to the unavoidable conclusion that the race of a student is likely to affect how that student is served by our educational system.”
Put succinctly, even minority students from more affluent and stable households don’t do as well, academically, as their white counterparts. I suspect the superintendent’s linguistic opaqueness stems from a reluctance to clearly articulate the observation made some time ago by John McWhorter, an African-American linguist and social commentator, that many black groups disparage academic achievement as “acting white.”
The clearest article was the one by state Board of Education president Ken Noonan, who advocated putting funds and responsibility squarely in the hands of principals and teachers in local schools. The former Oceanside superintendent also noted, however, that the state still lacks “a statewide database system for tracking the performance of every public school student.”
Such a database, I would think, might help determine exactly how many students have dropped out of the system altogether—a number that, incredibly, education bureaucrats can’t specify with confidence. But then again, based on the Byzantine Academic Performance Index that was constructed to bury true performance indicators (like the National Assessment of Educational Progress) under a blizzard of improvement indices, a clear presentation of the status quo doesn’t seem to be a high priority.
Other education critics have clearly noted that a major problem, as indicated by SAT and GRE scores, is the quality of the education work force—a problem exacerbated by tenure rules that make firing teachers almost impossible. I observe, more bluntly, that systems designed primarily for job security abhor competition and require obfuscation.
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
SUING ENGLISH-ONLY EMPLOYERS
It seems that traditional service organizations now have perpetual bulls-eyes pasted on them. If it’s not the Boy Scouts being evicted from Balboa Park for defying the creed of political correctness, it’s the Salvation Army facing an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit for requiring employees to speak English on the job.
The suit against the bell-ringing charity was filed in March of this year and concerns a thrift store in Framingham, Massachusetts that fired two employees for violating an English-only policy. The EEOC sued the organization even though the employees had been given a year’s notice and despite a ruling four years earlier by a federal judge in Boston that upheld the group’s English-only policy—a rule the court found promoted “workplace harmony.”
(North County business owners might like to know that the EEOC filed over 200 anti-English-only suits last year and that exemptions are granted based on the agency’s standard for “compelling business necessity.” Apparently, the ability to understand what employees are saying about their employer or other employees isn’t “compelling” in the eyes of EEOC mandarins.)
In order to save businesses from this innovative bureaucratic interpretation of “civil rights” law, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) introduced legislation that protects employers with English-only policies from EEOC lawsuits. The provision passed both the Senate (75-19) and the House (218-186) but was killed when the House Hispanic Caucus threatened to derail critical tax legislation if Speaker Pelosi allowed the Alexander amendment (which was attached to a huge appropriations bill) to survive in committee.
So as things now stand, thanks to Caucus Chair Joe Baca (D-Calif.), the EEOC can bring employers to court for their English-only policies, and those businesses will either have to kowtow to bureaucrat lawyers or face litigation costs.
Meanwhile, as a recent Rasmussen poll indicates, Americans overwhelming support (77% to 14%) an employer’s right to set English-only standards in the workplace. (Seventy-seven, by the way, is also the percentage of Americans that oppose giving drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants—an electoral consensus that recently turned the political heads of Sen. Hillary Clinton and New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and that, in 2003, helped depose Gov. Gray Davis.)
Another Rasmussen poll found 87% of Americans agreeing that it is “very important” to speak English in the United States. Indeed, that sentiment is so widespread among Latinos that TV Azteca, Mexico’s second largest network, has scheduled a 60-hour series of English classes for its U.S. affiliates. Apparently the network doesn’t see English proficiency as a racist stalking horse but rather, as anchor Jose Samano asserts, a tool by which immigrants can increase their incomes by 50% or more.
Nevertheless, the EEOC, some Hispanic groups, and a persistent bi-lingual education lobby in California seem determined to undermine those cultural forces that have helped to integrate newcomers into American society. After all, for interest groups that profit from keeping Latinos in manageable barrios, Gov. Schwarzenegger’s advice to immigrants to immerse themselves in English amounts to political poison.
The suit against the bell-ringing charity was filed in March of this year and concerns a thrift store in Framingham, Massachusetts that fired two employees for violating an English-only policy. The EEOC sued the organization even though the employees had been given a year’s notice and despite a ruling four years earlier by a federal judge in Boston that upheld the group’s English-only policy—a rule the court found promoted “workplace harmony.”
(North County business owners might like to know that the EEOC filed over 200 anti-English-only suits last year and that exemptions are granted based on the agency’s standard for “compelling business necessity.” Apparently, the ability to understand what employees are saying about their employer or other employees isn’t “compelling” in the eyes of EEOC mandarins.)
In order to save businesses from this innovative bureaucratic interpretation of “civil rights” law, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) introduced legislation that protects employers with English-only policies from EEOC lawsuits. The provision passed both the Senate (75-19) and the House (218-186) but was killed when the House Hispanic Caucus threatened to derail critical tax legislation if Speaker Pelosi allowed the Alexander amendment (which was attached to a huge appropriations bill) to survive in committee.
So as things now stand, thanks to Caucus Chair Joe Baca (D-Calif.), the EEOC can bring employers to court for their English-only policies, and those businesses will either have to kowtow to bureaucrat lawyers or face litigation costs.
Meanwhile, as a recent Rasmussen poll indicates, Americans overwhelming support (77% to 14%) an employer’s right to set English-only standards in the workplace. (Seventy-seven, by the way, is also the percentage of Americans that oppose giving drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants—an electoral consensus that recently turned the political heads of Sen. Hillary Clinton and New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and that, in 2003, helped depose Gov. Gray Davis.)
Another Rasmussen poll found 87% of Americans agreeing that it is “very important” to speak English in the United States. Indeed, that sentiment is so widespread among Latinos that TV Azteca, Mexico’s second largest network, has scheduled a 60-hour series of English classes for its U.S. affiliates. Apparently the network doesn’t see English proficiency as a racist stalking horse but rather, as anchor Jose Samano asserts, a tool by which immigrants can increase their incomes by 50% or more.
Nevertheless, the EEOC, some Hispanic groups, and a persistent bi-lingual education lobby in California seem determined to undermine those cultural forces that have helped to integrate newcomers into American society. After all, for interest groups that profit from keeping Latinos in manageable barrios, Gov. Schwarzenegger’s advice to immigrants to immerse themselves in English amounts to political poison.
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