Myths of moderation

John Hawkins addresses the false arguments for a more "moderate" Republican Party:

After a GOP beating, there is always a debate between the people who want the party to become more principled and those who want to turn the GOP into a poll-driven pile of mush that they believe will be more appealing to centrists. . . .
One of the most surreal aspects of the post-2008 campaign is listening to moderates pretend that the last eight years never happened.
You say that the GOP can't win as a small government party. Well, we've already tried being a big government party for the last 8 years and it failed. You think running a moderate, pro-amnesty candidate who eschews social issues is the key to winning elections? Well, that's who we ran in 2008 and he received even less votes than George Bush did in 2004.

The big-government approach -- whether you call it "national greatness" or "compassionate conservatism" -- is not a fighting creed, because it does not offer a meaningful alternative to Democratic Party liberalism. Republicans were able to win elections in 2002 and 2004 on national-security issues, but ultimately it was failure to pursue a politically effective domestic agenda that undid Karl Rove's "permanent Republican majority."

More to the point, as I've previously noted, independent voters are not "centrist" or "moderate" in an ideological sense. Independents are actually "low-information" voters whose political ideas are an ill-informed hodge-podge that conforms to no ideological template. There is no coherent middle-of-the-road agenda to which they subscribe.The moderate argument that Republicans lose independents because of specific conservative policy stances -- on immigration, abortion, gay rights, etc. -- simply does not fit the reality of who these voters are. (And there is plenty of evidence that independents tend to be conservative on social issues.)

Low-information voters often can't name their representatives or senators, but they usually know who the president is and which party he belongs to, and if they don't like the president (Bush is at 26% approval), his party will pay the price. The Republican Party's electoral problems, then, are more simple than some would have us believe. The simplicity of the problem doesn't mean the solution will be easy, but "moderation" -- chasing a centrist will-o'-th'-wisp -- is unlikely to be part of the solution.

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

Two Americans killed in Mumbai

A father and his daughter:

The U.S. State Department said on Friday two Americans were among those killed in the attacks by militants in the Indian financial capital Mumbai.
Spokesman Gordon Duguid said the department had notified the families of the victims. He did not give details or identify the dead Americans.
Earlier, a group called the Synchronicity Foundation said two Americans who were in India as part of a meditation program had died in the attacks.
The Synchronicity Foundation said in a statement on its website that Alan Scherr and his 13-year-old daughter Naomi were killed.
It gave no details about how they were killed but said Scherr and his family had been involved in the Synchronicity community in Faber, Virginia for more than a decade.

Allahpundit has a fresh thread.

UPDATE: Five Jewish hostages killed at Chabad House.

Death toll estimated at 145.

Death by shopping

A victim of capitalism:

A worker died after being trampled and a woman miscarried when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart Friday morning, witnesses said.
The unidentified worker, employed as an overnight stock clerk, tried to hold back the unruly crowds just after the Valley Stream store opened at 5 a.m.
Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him.
"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Jimmy Overby, 43, a co-worker. "They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too...I literally had to fight people off my back."

Should have shopped the Holiday Book Sale.

Holiday Books: Black Friday Special

Only 27 shopping days until Christmas, and for today's installment of the 2008 Holiday Book Sale, we round up the previous seven days of featured books. Let your wife go fight the crowds standing in line for those 4 a.m. Black Friday "door-buster specials" while you save time and money by shopping at Amazon.com. Great books delivered nationwide -- ORDER NOW!

11/27: THE CIVIL WAR

11/26: IMMIGRATION

11/25: THOMAS SOWELL

11/24: THE GREAT DEPRESSION

11/23: BLACKLISTED BY HISTORY

11/22: MISES & HAYEK

11/21: WHITE GUILT BY SHELBY STEELE

Celebrity News Update

OK, it's been a while, and politics slows to a crawl during the holidays, therefore I'll read the sleazy tabloid trash, so you don't have to:

• Michael Phelps dates Vegas cocktail waitress. Going for the gold(digger).
• Britney Spears abusing . . . laxatives?
• A-Rod and Madonna? Dude, don't go there!
• Hollywood star whizzes on the sidewalk.
• Britney's mom says Britney is a great mother. Hey, she should know, right?
• Ruined by David Copperfield.
• Natalie Portman, because she's hot.
• Kate Winslet, because she's hot.

So that's all the really important sleaze you would have otherwise missed, and I know you feel better now.

BTW, I hereby officially pronounce today International Natalie Portman Cleavage Day in the blogosphere. Don't worry, your wife's at the mall all day with your credit card . . .

So good, Ace blogged it twice

Well, Drew M. blogged it once, then Ace.

You've been Rickrolled, baby!

News flash: Nobody likes Rosie O'Donnell

But you knew this, right?

The network's attempt to revive the primetime variety show failed to draw an audience Wednesday night, tying for the evening's lowest-rated program.
A mere 5 million viewers tuned in for the 8 p.m. premiere of "Rosie Live," with the program earning a 1.2 preliminary adults 18-49 rating. The telecast matched ABC's recently canceled "Pushing Daisies" as the night's lowest-rated program on a major broadcast network.
NBC had high hopes for the special and planned to expand the program into a series should viewers re-embrace the decades-old variety format.

Gee, let's give a show to an obnoxious, unattractive lesbian, and then when it flops, we'll blame the format. These Hollywood people are geniuses, I tell you!

Next up: "The Nathan Lane Variety Hour."

Allahpundit has more reaction.

Krugmanese

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw:

Of course, if one defines "grownup" as a person who agrees with Paul Krugman, and "hack" as a person who does not, then one might come to a different conclusion.

The important thing is not Krugman or his opinion, but the fact that nothing proposed by Team Obama will fix the economy. It's all warmed-over Keynesianism, and it won't work. But when it comes to simple arithmetic, Mankiw smokes Krugman.

Holiday Books: Civil War

Only 28 shopping days until Christmas!

The 2008 Holiday Book Sale continues with a bonanza of excellent titles about The War. (When a Southerner says "The War," there's never any need to wonder which war he's talking about.)

Shelby Foote's epic trilogy, The Civil War: A Narrative, should be in every American home. Foote sought to write a history worthy of Homer, and that high ambition makes his account a genuine classic. Foote's work is especially important because of the attention he gives to the Western theater of the war, which is sometimes slighted by historians more fascinated with the war in Virginia. Douglas Southall Freeman was arguably the greatest historian of the war, and his magnificent 4-volume biography of R.E. Lee -- now available in a 650-page abridged version -- and his Lee's Lieutenants: A Study in Command are must-have titles for any serious student of the war.

Bruce Catton was not only an excellent historian, but a great prose stylist, and I heartily recommend his account of U.S. Grant's wartime leadership, Grant Moves South: 1861-1863 and Grant Takes Command: 1863-1865. Perhaps no campaign of the war was more fateful than W.T. Sherman's advance through Georgia to capture Atlanta in 1864, and Albert Castel's Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 is the best chronicle of that dramatic chapter of the war.

Finally, every student of the war should try to get past the interpretations of historians and see the conflict as it was seen by the men who fought it:

• Richard Taylor's wonderful Destruction and Reconstruction is a book that every student of the war should read. The son of President Zachary Taylor, Gen. Richard Taylor commanded a brigade under Stonewall Jackson in the Valley Campaign of 1862, later defeated Gen. Banks in the Red River Campaign, and in 1865, surrendered the last Confederate army east of the Mississippi. A Yale graduate with a sarcastic wit, Taylor filled his memoir with clever literary and historical allusions that will bring a smile to the face of the erudite reader.
• Henry Kyd Douglas was a Marylander who served under Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart, and his memoir, I Rode with Stonewall, is one of the best of its kind. Of particular interest are Douglas's memories of famed artillerist John Pelham and his account of the Battle of Sharpsburg, which was fought in his own backyard, so to speak.
• Robert E. Lee called James Longstreet his "war horse," and Longstreet's From Manassas to Appomattox is the only account of the war written by one of Lee's corps commanders. While many dispute Longstreet's version of events at Gettysburg -- the most controversial episode of his career -- it is nevertheless an invaluable first-person account by one of the most important soldiers of the war.

There is no need to launch a frontal assault on the shopping mall, battle for a parking space and then wage hand-to-hand combat with the crowds. Peace is at hand with Amazon.com! Just one click and you can have your gifts delivered nationwide. Why wait? ORDER NOW!

PREVIOUSLY:

• 11/26: Immigration
• 11/25: Thomas Sowell
• 11/24: The Great Depression
• 11/23: Blacklisted by History
• 11/22: Mises & Hayek
• 11/21: White Guilt by Shelby Steele

Hope, faith and Thanksgiving

Michelle Malkin has a nice column today:

In The Year of Bottomless Bailouts, I am most grateful this Thanksgiving for Americans who refuse to abandon thrift, personal responsibility, and self-reliance. When the moochers and entitlement-mongers drive you mad, remember that our nation still serves as home to millions of citizens who do for themselves. Like our Founding Fathers, they are God-fearing people -- the ones elitist pundits deride as "oogedy-boogedy" -- who will never put their faith in The Cult of You Owe Me.

She tells a nice story. Read the whole thing. Meanwhile, Jules Crittenden writes:

The tide of history remains opposed to tyranny. One of the worst of the modern era, Saddam's Baathist regime, is out of business. In Gaza, in Burma, in Zimbabwe, in Sudan, in China, in Georgia, in North Korea and Iran, while tyranny still exists, it is widely condemned. For all the rhetoric we sometimes hear, people know where the tyrants live. The values and freedoms nurtured in America and exported, gratis, at the expense of our own nation’s blood and treasure, are the values and freedoms most widely admired, and desired where they are not already emulated in the world.

People seeking grievances to grumble about and evidence to justify discouragement will always find it. Gloom and self-pity are always easier than gratitude and hope. We complain of what we don't have and neglect to be thankful for the blessings all around us.

It is helpful at times to reflect back on all that God has done for us. There is an old hymn that includes the lyric, "Hither by Thy grace I've come." And those words inspre me as I think back to that moment in August 1987 when I sat in my '84 Chevette in the parking lot of the Calhoun (Ga.) Times, praying that I would get the $275-a-week sports editor's job for which I was about to interview.

The day before, I'd been driving a forklift in a warehouse on Fulton Industrial Boulevard in Atlanta when the call came informing me of this opportunity. "Great," I said. "Just one question. . . . Where in the hell is Calhoun, Georgia?"

Well, it was there that I met and married my wife. Sometimes I recall the prayer I said in that parking lot and think, "Wow. I ought to pray more often." Surely, I can't complain of all God's blessings toward me in the intervening years. Being human, however, I still complain when the hardships come. It is difficult to be thankful for the hardships, to recognize that our disappointments and trials are equally part of God's plan.

The pilgrims whose 1621 feast we commemorate at Thanksgiving recognized their dependence on God. As William Bradford said of the 102 settlers who arrived off the New England coast in 1620: "What could now sustain them but the spirit of God and his grace?" They had a mystic faith in God's will, as described in the eighth chapter of Romans:

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. . . .
What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?

We cannot deserve God's grace and mercy. We are "sinners in the hands of an angry God," as Jonathan Edwards said: "There is nothing that keeps wicked men, at any moment, out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God." Deserving nothing but destruction, then, it behooves us to reflect in all humility upon whatever design God means to accomplish by our preservation, to be grateful to play some part in His purpose, and to understand that it is through no merit of our own that we are called.

If God wishes to destroy us, nothing can save us. Yet if God wishes to save us, nothing can destroy us. This faith requires that we be thankful even for God's chastisements. Remember that the Israelites were God's own chosen people, yet they were enslaved by the Egyptians, conquered by the Assyrians, Babylonians and Romans. This was not because God had any particular favor for Israel's conquerers; rather, those heathen nations were instruments by which He chastised His people, part of a larger design of which the heathen knew nothing.

In everything, God has some purpose, and in nothing do we have cause to complain. Suppose that you lost everything. Suppose disaster came, and you lost your home, your career, every material possession and hope for advancement. Suppose that this disaster not only involved you, but that it also took the lives of many of your closest friends, and even destroyed your community. What would you say in the midst of such an all-encompassing disaster?

The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.

My six children are all healthy, and my beautiful wife is even now preparing a lavish Thanksgiving feast. Alabama is undefeated. With so much to be thankful for, I cannot complain. And history still teaches us to hope.

P.S.: Don't forget to shop the 2008 Holiday Book Sale!

UPDATE: I see from the comment field that we have been honored with a visit from Jennifer at Double Nickel Farm, who inspired Michelle Malkin's column. God bless you, ma'am.

UPDATE II: I have to note the bizarreness of the accusation of universalism from an anonymous commenter, who responded to my remark, "In everything, God has some purpose, and in nothing do we have cause to complain," with this:

if you believed that then you would also believe tyrants are the will of god, and if so, you will find them in heaven, since the will of god cannot be denied, they are not only commanded and obligated but tools of the all mighty
in other words, if you believe these words then Hitler and every single person is in heaven and you must also believe there is no good and there is no evil.

Eh? I very definitely believe in good and evil, and don't understand why someone would say that an attitude of humility -- God's absolute sovereignty, a divine will beyond our comprehension -- should result in the belief that Hitler is in heaven. God is sovereign; evil men cannot escape or defy the will of God. Our puny mortal minds cannot fully comprehend this, but it is so. God's will appears to us mysterious, and it is our arrogant faithlessness that causes us to question and doubt.

Who are we to judge God? I would ask you to study the Book of Job and contemplate the faithfulness of Job, who refused to complain of the evils that had befallen him, even when his neighbors told him to "Curse God and die."

God's existence is objective, and thus independent of our belief. There are many people who seem to think that there is some eternal merit to their particular theological preconceptions, and so they will sit around arguing furiously over these things, as if they could argue their way into heaven. But it seems to me that Ecclesiastes ends with a very important point: Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.

It is that "Fear God" part that we are today too guilty of ignoring. Faith may be a difficult thing, but it is a very simple thing.

Mumbai terror attacks

UPDATED & BUMPED: Hostage standoffs continue:

Fresh gunfire and explosions were heard late Thursday in Mumbai as police battled terrorists at three sites almost 24 hours after the first wave of violence hit the city.
Fresh explosions have been heard at the Taj Mahal hotel, where police are trying to free hostages.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh suggested the group behind the terrorist attacks, which killed 125 people, was based outside the country.
CNN reporters said regular gun fire and blasts could be heard Thursday at the Oberoi and Taj Mahal hotels and a Jewish center in the city. . . .
"It is evident that the group which carried out these attacks, based outside the country, had come with single-minded determination to create havoc in the financial capital of the country," [Singh] said. . . .
Authorities found 8 kilograms (17 pounds) of RDX, one of the most powerful kinds of military explosives, at a restaurant near the Taj, indicating that the attackers may have been planning more violence.
Gunmen also remained holed up in a building called Chabad House, where several Jewish families live. Rabbi Gabriel Holtzberg, the city's envoy for the community, was being held inside with his wife, a member of the Hasidic Jewish movement said. The couple's 18-month-old baby was released unharmed.

Possibility of an al-Qaeda link is unclear:

Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims and not linked to Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba, another violent South Asian terrorist group.
“There’s absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it,” she said of the attack. “Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints of Lashkar. They don’t do hostage-taking and they don’t do grenades.” By contrast, [security expert Sajjan] Gohel in London said “the fingerprints point to an Islamic Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group."

Allahpundit has a fresh thread today.

PREVIOUSLY: India is hit with the kind of large-scale coordinated attacks that are an al-Qaeda trademark:

At least 101 people have been killed in attacks by gunmen in Mumbai , police said on Thursday. At least six foreigners have been killed and the death figure has gone up to 101 now," Ramesh Tayde, a senior police officer told from Mumbai's control room.
In one of the most violent terror attacks on Indian soil, Mumbai came under an unprecedented night attack as terrorists used heavy machine guns, including AK-47s, and grenades to strike at the city's most high-profile targets -- the hyper-busy CST (formerly VT) rail terminus; the landmark Taj Hotel at the Gateway and the luxury Oberoi Trident at Nariman Point; the domestic airport at Santa Cruz; the Cama and GT hospitals near CST; the Metro Adlabs multiplex and Mazgaon Dockyard -- killing at least 80 and sending more than 900 to hospital, according to latest reports.
The attacks have taken a tragic toll on the city's top police brass: The high-profile chief of the anti-terror squad Hemant Karkare was killed; Mumbai's additional commissioner of police (east) Ashok Kamte was gunned down outside the Metro; and celebrated encounter specialist Vijay Salaskar was also killed.

The Indian Mujahideen group that has taken credit for the attack has clear ties to Pakistan, the Weekly Standard reports:

Indian intelligence believes the Indian Mujahideen is a front group created by Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Harkat ul Jihad al Islami to confuse investigators and cover the tracks of the Students' Islamic Movement of India, or SIMI, a radical Islamist movement. The groups receive support from Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence and are al Qaeda affiliates.

Hot Air has an extensive roundup, including this CNN video:

The Counter-Terrorism Blog names the group Lashkar-e-Toiba as a likely sponsor of this attack. The terrorists were seeking American and British hostages at the luxury hotels in Mumbai:

Two terrorists carrying guns tonight took 15 people, half of them foreigners, hostage on the roof of the luxury Taj Hotel, one of the hostages who managed to escape said.
...Replying to a question, Patel said the terrorists wanted to know if any one of the hostages was carrying American and British passports.
They clearly wanted foreigners, he added.

Via Ace of Spades, where the flaming skull alert is in effect.

Republican irrelevancy

Matthew Yglesias makes a point I've made before -- Republicans will be essentially irrelevant in Washington after Jan. 20. Yglesias makes this point in refutation of Elizabeth Drew's wondering how Obama can get GOP cooperation, and the obvious answer is, "Why bother?" There is very little likelihood that the Senate Republicans, with only 41 or 42 seats, could mount an effective filibuster of anything, and House Republicans are now utterly irrelevant to the governing process.

This goes to show how the mentality of some people has been influenced by recent history. Since Newt Gingrich and the GOP took Congress in 1994, the big question among liberals has been, "What will Republicans do?" Everything has been conditioned on that question, and they can't seem to shake the habit. (Fact: 41% of CNN viewers didn't even realize Democrats had taken control of Congress.)

Republicans never consolidated power. After six years of divided government, with congressional GOP fighting Clinton tooth and nail, when Bush took office he had a House with a very narrow Republican majority and a 1-seat majority in the Senate. At the very zenith of his power (2003-06) Bush never had more than 55 Republicans in the Senate, whereas Obama will have 58 Democrats, perhaps 59.

The GOP poses no impediment to Democrats enacting whatever policies Democrats want. This is (or should be) frightening, but the great disadvantage to Democrats is this: They can't blame Republicans.

Sure, for a while, they can say that they're dealing with the toxic result of the Bush years, but that song will get old pretty quick. By Election Day 2012, will expect Obama to have accomplished something -- not merely in terms of passing legislation, but actually making things better -- and it's hard to imagine him being able to do that.

Obama's progressive base doesn't understand that he can't enact the kind of left-wing economic program they expect, because it would cause capital flight from U.S. markets at a time when we're very much in need of capital. But I guarantee his economic advisers are cautioning him about this danger. Lawrence Summers is not a stupid man.

One of the keys to organizing a GOP resistance will be denying Obama and the Democrats the mantle of "bipartisanship" for any of their key measures. That is to say, House and Senate Republicans need to make sure that they whip the maximum number of "no" votes on Obama's agenda items, so that in 2010, they are in position to hang that agenda around the Democrats' necks in the midterms.

'Hawaii Five-0' is only #8?

This list of the 40 Greatest TV Theme Songs (via AOSHQ) commits an injustice against a tune rivaled only by the "Peter Gunn" theme. Listen to how the French horns start doing counterpoint at the 53-second mark -- that's quality, baby:

I would also argue for the inclusion of the magnificent theme from "The Virginian":

Ed Driscoll TV

Attaboy, Ed! Remind me to ask sometime about your green-screen virtual-studio setup. Is that a canned package? Also, how do you convert YouTube clips to QuickTime (or whatever)? I've been working with Final Cut Pro for about a month, and need to learn this stuff.

21st-century indoctrination

Mark Steyn:

A few months back, my little boy came home from Second Grade and said to me, "Guess what we learned today?" I said: "Rosa Parks." He said: "How did you know that?" I said: "Because it's always Rosa Parks."

I'd laugh, except it's no joke. The Historic Victimhood Narrative is virtually the only history or civics taught in American public schools today. "America The Beautiful" has been replaced by "America The Oppressive." Parents who send their offspring to these government-run indoctrination camps should be prosecuted for child abuse.

UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias offers the excuse that the "greater attention given in recent decades to the contributions of women and ethnic minority groups is about trying to expand the circle of people who feel invested in the national narrative."

This is what Marxists call "social history" or "people's history," and is the sort of thing that leftist academic activists like Howard Zinn have made popular in America. Scouring history for relatively obscure figures who can be made into political heroes -- role models for The Movement, as it were -- is the sort of propaganda tactic that anyone familiar with the Soviet Union will recognize: "Comrade Pavlik -- be like him!"

Children are taught to reverence a pantheon of symbolic personalities whose biographies are didactically rendered in such a way as to ignore whatever fundamental reality might contradict their function as symbols. The student/subject of these thought-control projects develops a conditioned response to the invocation of the holy names. Obversely, social didacticism requires certain demon characters who symbolize oppression and injustice, who are subjected to the same kind of one-dimensional treatment.

The student subjected to such politicized "history" cannot be said to think about history. Rather, he has an autonomic reflex, and reacts instinctively as he has been trained to react.

One of the reasons that women and minority conservatives are so vilified is that they contradict the Left's narrative of women and minorities as "change agents" on the side of Progress. Our Marxist indoctrinators teach children to reverence a catalog of non-white-male symbolic heroes whose martyrdom and/or courageous protests are exalted as archetypes of progressive activism. This is why college leftists always react so furiously when they encounter a Michelle Malkin or a or Shelby Steele or a Star Parker contradicting today's latest leftist dogma.

Somali terror network in Minnesota?

They're out to get Ed Morrissey, no doubt. Wonder how these terrorists got into the country?

Holiday Books: Immigration

Only 29 shopping days until Christmas!

The 2008 Holiday Book Sale continues with three excellent books on the immigration issue:

• Michelle Malkin's Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores shows how the issues of immigration and national security are intimately connected. Her riveting account of how Mohamed Atta and his fellow terrorists took advantage of lax immigration enforcement is particularly informative.
• Peter Brimelow's 1996 classic, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster is a lively debunking of the economic, political and cultural fallacies underlying the open-borders arguments. Brimelow's account of the history of America's immigration laws is especially important, given that conservatives are accused of heartless bigotry for wanting to enforce an immigration law drafted and supported by that mean-spirited right-winger . . . Ted Kennedy.
• Pat Buchanan's State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America spent 10 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list in 2006, even though such "conservative" journals as National Review refused even to acknowledge its publication, while it was (predictably) slammed by liberals. If it's that politically incorrect, you know it's got to be great!

Let's face it, if Thanksgiving reminds us of nothing else, it reminds us that the Indians paid the price for having a weak immigration policy. Now the country's so overcrowded, you can't even find a parking space at the mall. Fortunately, with Amazon.com, you don't have to go to the mall. Just one click and you can have your gifts delivered nationwide. Why wait? ORDER NOW!

PREVIOUSLY:

• 11/25: Thomas Sowell
• 11/24: The Great Depression
• 11/23: Blacklisted by History
• 11/22: Mises & Hayek
• 11/21: White Guilt by Shelby Steele

Yeah, right

Note the "clever" tactic:

For author Richard Rodriguez, no one is talking about the real issues behind Proposition 8.
While conservative churches are busy trying to whip up another round of culture wars over same-sex marriage, Rodriguez says the real reason for their panic lies elsewhere: the breakdown of the traditional heterosexual family and the shifting role of women in society and the church itself. As the American family fractures and the majority of women choose to live without men, churches are losing their grip on power and scapegoating gays and lesbians for their failures.

The "real issues," my foot. This argument is a transparent coalition-building gesture: "We're all gay now!" Rodriguez utterly ignores that gay militants are the aggressors in this battle of the "culture wars," that this is a fight of their choosing, and that -- far from seeking to "scapegoat" anyone -- opponents of same-sex marriage are strictly playing defense.

There are no protest marches by hetero "swingers," no boycotts by divorced moms, no petition drives by single guys. If homosexuality is an issue in 2008, it's only because gay-rights activists insist on making it an issue. Having spent the past three decades calling attention to themselves, they now complain they're getting too much attention. It's like Britney griping because the paparazzi won't leave her alone.

And don't overlook how horribly Rodriguez has suffered: He's published three memoirs celebrating his gay/Lation identity-politics narrative. Oh, what a pathetic victim . . .

Palin's Georgia itinerary

Following up on yesterday's news that Sarah Palin will go to Georgia to campaign for Sen. Saxby Chambliss before Tuesday's runoff election, here is the governor's two-day itinerary:

• Sunday, 6:30 p.m. -- Fundraiser at the W Hotel Midtown in Atlanta. Tickets are $1,000 per couple, or $5,000 for "hosts." The invitation notes that "The Run-off is a separate election cycle and contribution limits start over."
• Monday, 8:30 a.m. -- James Brown Arena in Augusta
• Monday, 11 a.m. -- MLK Jr. Arena in Savannah
• Monday, 1:30 p.m. -- Georgia Fairgrounds in Perry
• Monday 4 p.m. -- Gwinnett Arena in Duluth

Admission to Monday's events is first-come, first-serve, but attendees are urged to RSVP with the Chambliss campaign.

Today, meanwhile, the Chambliss campaign is hosting a "BBQ Lunch Victory Rally" with Gov. Sonny Perdue and former Gov. Zell Miller in Gainesville.

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

Her Unconstitutionality?

Many bloggers are intrigued by the possibility that Hillary Clinton is forbidden, under Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution, from taking the job as Secretary of State. Marc Ambinder sums it up:

Essentially, you cannot take a job if the salary was increased during your current congressional term. And the salary for cabinet officials has gone up in the past year.

Not that the Clintons have ever let the Constitution stand in their way before, but Ed Morrissey points out:

Still, the intent of the founders is clear, and not something to shrug off so lightly. They wanted to keep Congress from creating cushy sinecures for them to occupy when a friendly President took office. The attraction of power, cash, and cronyism would lead to corruption and a permanent political class that would cease answering to the electorate.

We are well past the point where constitutional restraints have any real meaning. On the one hand, the Supreme Court looks at the Constitution and sees things -- "penumbras and emanations" and the "sweet mystery of life" -- that aren't there. On the other hand, the limits of the enumerated powers are ignored and the 10th Amendment eviscerated by the very existence of the massive establishment in Washington. If the Constitution had any real power, the Department of Education would not exist.

The Constitution now means whatever the fashionable professors say it means. Perjury and obstruction of justice cannot be "high crimes and misdemeanors," the professors assured us during the Lewinsky scandal. I'm sure the Clinton Foundation can make a few research grants and buy off enough law professors to legitimize whatever it is that Hillary wants. The dictatorship of the professoriate!