sisu

"The media treat it like a case of non-denominational shoplifting"

As temperatures hovered in the low thirties early morning, Tiny kept warm atop the kitchen counter register while Cat Whisperer Tuck murmured sweet nothings.

"Twitter makes it almost impossible to surprise people with breaking news because they all already know about it," twitters Patrick Ruffini. That's how events unfolded in the Fort Hood shooting yesterday as early error-laced reports and theories gave way, in waves, to the facts ma'am, just the facts. It was duly noted by Mark Steyn that the usual suspects on the left quickly lockstepped into politically-correct, see-no-evil mode:

Andy, you're right that there's something deeply weird about the media's instinctive avoidance of the M-word or the T-word and the careless abandon with which they speculate about "post-traumatic stress disorder."

Better to blame "man-caused disasters" on a US-foreign-policy-induced psychological affliction beyond the victim's perpetrator's control than call a spade a spade. In the light of day today, Michelle Malkin and Ralph Peters win top honors for best/most concise analyses of what's really going on behind the curtain. Malkin:

Political correctness is the handmaiden of terror.

Peters:

On Thursday afternoon, a radicalized Muslim US Army officer shouting "Allahu Akbar!" committed the worst act of terror on American soil since 9/11. And no one wants to call it an act of terror or associate it with Islam.

What cowards we are. Political correctness killed those patriotic Americans at Ft. Hood as surely as the Islamist gunman did. And the media treat it like a case of non-denominational shoplifting.

The Gramscian march through the institutions has well prepared susceptible self-loathing citizens of the once Shining City Upon a Hill to bow down in dhimmitude to creeping militant Islamicism.

Update: Danny Boy links.

Update II: Stoutcat links with "An Unsustainable Narrative."

Sarah Palin = 1, Saul Alinsky = 0

Less is fewer? Why would you write "in less than" 140 characters when you knew the proper grammar would be "in fewer than"? [see Usage Note] Because you were twittering and honing your prose to keep the tweet count to at or below 140 characters, that's why. The written language evolving right before our eyes. Above, the eyes have it in fanciful Sunday breakfast fruit bowl with melon, strawberry-infused apple and blueberries.

Like President Obama when it comes to the rationale behind police work in Cambridge, when it comes to the rationale behind Sarah Palin's stepping down from her Alaska governorship Sunday, Palinologists have a nasty habit of rushing to judgment in a fact-challenged cloud of psychological denial and projection, curiously incurious about what makes "the other" tick. Why did she really quit? Scroll down beyond Mr. Potatoskin Head (below) for the answer, but first let's review the narrative. Most talking heads cast Palin's exit as a disastrous admission of defeat, but as Carl Cameron said when the Alaska Governor first announced her decision three-plus weeks back:

She's done it again. To some, it's the end of her career. To others, it's the start of her presidential campaign.

And as we blogged at the time:

Like Barack Obama, Sarah Palin can be a blank canvas upon which huddled masses yearning to breathe free — or in Obama's case, huddled masses yearning to be on the dole — project their inchoate longings. The difference is that while Obama speaks from the latest polls, Palin — in Fox Brit ex pat Stuart Varney's words — "speaks from the heart, and maybe that's what Americans want."

Forget about 140 or fewer characters. Tuck trumps Twitter with a postprandial Tw-eat that says "Great meal!" in five menu items: baked stuffed potato skin, mushroom, Stroganoff sauce, sweet potato puree and peas.

John Fund had put his finger on the problem weeks ago, reporting that frivolous "attacks inside Alaska and largely invisible to the national media had paralyzed her administration." Adding at least the appearance of impropriety to the series of accusations, it was reported last week that "the independent investigator who has accused Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin of violating state ethics laws is a major donor to the Democratic Party as well as a partner in a law firm that represented Barack Obama's presidential campaign."

But it was the self-described "Rodeo Clown" with a mission and a microphone, Fox News supernova Glenn Beck who connected the dots the other day with this 140-characters-or-fewer tweet [via KatyinIndy]:

Sarah P. Think like a Comm organizer.They were overloading the system. She is 6 steps ahead. VERY SMART lady.

Expanding beyond 140 characters, Palin recognized that her adversaries — from the dirt-digging thugs on the ground to the fancy lawyers and their bosses behind the curtain — were soldiers in an Alinskyesque, Cloward-Piven-inspired army of "community organizers" out to destroy her and the small-government, free-market principles she stands and fights for by sowing discontent from within the system. Understanding their modus operandi, she outfoxed them, quoting Gen. MacArthur as she exited stage right victorious [via goparchitect]:

We are not retreating; we are advancing in another direction.

Coda: "This guy has a social justice agenda," Glenn Beck told Fox & Friends this morning:

He is going to set all of the wrongs of the past right.

I have a feeling that the paradigm is about to change.

People who have been forced to live in a politically correct world … are just going to say "I'm not living in your politically correct world, and I don't care anymore." You've never seen the media really go after him. He's never really been cornered. How does he react?

The people he surrounds himself with, have you heard them with new ears? When you put in a science czar who has advocated forced abortions and made the case that we could put sterilants into the water to control the births, something's very wrong.

Tea party!

Update: Music to my ears:

Cambridge cop on Obama: 'I voted for him. I will not again."

Listen and take heart. The City Upon a Hill is shining still!

Update II: "Dan Riehl = 1, Palin haters = 0," we wrote in the comments to Dan's perfect-pitch "Sarah Palin: They Just Don't Get Her, Or Us." Thanks for the linky love!

Roger L. Simon is a genius

We caught Tiny in a Rembrandt Moment this afternoon as she stared atop Tuck's computer at things we don't see in the countdown to supper. Update from Tuck in the comments: "Here is a masterpiece. This portrait speaks to the wonder of our beloved companions; here is a thinking, compassionate, responsive, introspective being."

Alpha blogger Ann Althouse may protest — too much? — but we have never felt prouder of our association with Pajamas Media than we are at the thought of Roger L. Simon & Company's inspired decision to hire Joe the Plumber as Israel war correspondent for PJTV. Once there, JTP's hooking up with our sub rosa blogfriend Richard Landes and Danny Seaman, Israel’s GPO (Government Press Office) director, reports Roger. Being a bit behind in our blog reading, we happened to first hear about it all last night from the lips of Bret Baier, cutie-pie new host of Fox News's "Special Report with Brit Hume,"** and delving further today were delighted to see that everyone's talking about it, from the straight-reporting Times of India to a predictably snickering NYT. The usual suspects are horrified, as Roger explains:

This has created quite a brouhaha in the media — cable television, newspapers, wire services, etc.  Everyone from CNN to gawker.com has something to say about Joe heading for the Middle East …

To be honest, some (maybe much) of this reportage is pretty snotty. Nora O’Donnell of MSNBC — herself an MA in international relations, lahdeedah — fairly frothed at the mouth at the prospect of the unqualified Joe having the temerity to report news in a foreign land. Those hipoisie over at Gawker weren’t too charitable either.

Evidently, a lot of people are annoyed that Joe’s fifteen Warhol minutes aren’t quite over yet. Or perhaps they’re threatened that a common man can be a reporter simply by asking common sense questions — no Columbia J-school degree required.

Self Portrait as a Young Man by Rembrandt van Rijn. 1634, Oil on canvas. Uffizi, Florence, "It shows the artist with a strong-willed expression, in an extremely natural, uneffected three-quarter pose; the figure is illuminated by a light coming from the left whose spreading glow enlarges the space which serves as a background." Compare Tiny's natural, uneffected three-quarter pose with light coming from the right, above.

We totally agree with Althouse commenter ricpic, who asks rhetorically why Ann is not amused:

Why? Because he isn't credentialed? Intelligence and good sense — which Joe has in abundance — are fungible. He'll make an excellent war correspondent.

Ann has her reasons, discernible in a parsing of her own comments following her post, but we haven't been so energized since the moment last summer when Sarah Palin sprung full blown into our consciousness in a Larry Kudlow interview we stumbled upon at YouTube when rumors were rumbling that the Alaska Governor would be McCain's VP pick. And now Garbo Palin talks in a totally awesome exclusive interview with John Ziegler of howobamagotelected.com, featured today at Andrew Breitbart's spanking new run-against-the-cultural-herd Big Hollywood. Ziegler leaves Gibson and Couric and their fellow-traveling Northeast Corridor conservatives in the dust.

Now back to the cultural left's apoplexy at the idea of Joe the Plumber in Israel, from an imail conversation this evening:

We: You are known by your enemies. They feel threatened.

She: I am heartsick for Israel. I hope they stick to their rockets, and continue to STAND AND FIGHT!

We: They MUST.

She: The lying spinning that has become the mantra … "Israel is inhumane." The world has, indeed been co-opted by insane ideologies.

We: It is SO medieval. It is more important for leftists to be in solidarity with their "tribe" than to seek truth.

Speaking of truth seekers, here's Roger L. Simon with the next-to-the-last word:

I must say I find amusing the idea of Joe lined up with all the telephoto cameras at that Gaza media overlook with Cooper, Amanpour, et al. It’s certainly the stuff of Frank Capra.

And now the last word, from a post of ours back in March of 2005:

The importance of being noticed makes the world go 'round, from al-Queda types who intimidate through cold-blooded murder of innocents to impress their "brothers," to internet hackers who wreak havoc amongst online innocents to impress their own fellow travelers. On the good side, each one of us seeks, through our accomplishments, to earn a place of honor among our peers. The real issue is, whom do we select as our peers.

We're throwing in our lot with the brothers and sisters of Pajamas Media and Big Hollywood.

Update: Roger tickles our funny bone in the comments:

Thanks, Sissy. I have sent this post to my mother.

That's her Barney!*

Update II:  Ziegler's Palin interview at Breitbart's Big Hollywood gets the red-link treatment at Drudge (screenshot above). You go, boys!

Update III: Unlike Althouse, Instapundit is amused:

WELL, DUH. Still, there’s a value to stating the obvious.

Thanks for the link, Professor.

Update IV: Michelle Malkin asks — and answers —"Who’s afraid of Joe the Journalist?"

Update VI: Lots more amusements at Modulator's Friday Ark #225.

*"That's my Barney" is one of our sis's favorite quotations from her favorite musical, "The Music Man," the words every proud mother calls out when she sees the flesh of her flesh doing her proud.

** Thanks to readers kimsch of Musing Minds and megrez 80 in the comments for FoxNews corrections.

Where has Peggy Noonan been?

"Even in this room full of proud Manhattan Democrats, I can't shake that feeling that some people here are pulling for me," quipped a crowd-pleasing John McCain at last night's 63rd annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner/Roast to benefit Catholic charities, pausing for maximum comic effect before turning with a melodramatic show of affection toward Senator Hillary's table to deliver a punchline that left HIllary (above) and assembled A-list guests rolling in the aisles:  "I'm delighted to see you here tonight Hillary." McCain's perfect comic timing and razor-sharp material left Obama's lame offering in the dust. Our fave joke of the night: "The press is really an independent-minded, civic-minded, non-partisan group … like Acorn."

"More than ever on the campaign trail, the candidates are dropping their G's," writes an exasperated Peggy Noonan in the WSJ:

Hardworkin' families are strainin' and tryin'a get ahead. It's not only Sarah Palin but Mr. McCain, too, occasionally Mr. Obama, and, of course, George W. Bush when he darts out like the bird in a cuckoo clock to tell us we are in crisis. All of the candidates say "mom and dad": "our moms and dads who are struggling." This is Mr. Bush's former communications adviser Karen Hughes's contribution to our democratic life, that you cannot speak like an adult in politics now, that's too austere and detached, snobby. No one can say mothers and fathers, it's all now the faux down-home, patronizing — and infantilizing — moms and dads. Do politicians ever remember that in a nation obsessed with politics, our children — sorry, our kids — look to political figures for a model as to how adults sound?

We couldn't agree more re the toe-curling G-dropping, moms-and-dads infantilization of the language that pollutes the public square [Who knew it was all Karen Hughes's doing? … We would have said Oprah!), but political figures as a model for adult behavior? No, Peggy, no. Again the Northeast Corridor Conservative in her starts off on the right foot re Thursday's debate [cf. our own post, "Obama unmasked"]:

[McCain] also scored Mr. Obama on his eloquence, using it against him more effectively than Hillary Clinton ever did. When she said he was "just words," it sounded like a bitter complaint. Mr. McCain made it a change: Young man, you attempt to obscure truth with the mellifluous power of your words.

… but then goes off the track in her conclusions:

From Mrs. Clinton it sounded jealous, but when Mr. McCain said it, you looked at Mr. Obama and wondered if you'd just heard something that was true. For the first time, Mr. Obama's unruffled demeanor didn't really work for him. His cool made him seem hidden.

"For the first time"? Where has Peggy Noonan been? We had Barack Obama's number way back in December of 2006, when the smooth-talkin' hope-and-changester, in the wake of Oprah's ecstatic endorsement, got away with calling us a racist while our fellow Americans from the other side of the aisle and their media enablers were being distracted by "thrills up their legs."

Update: What comes to mind? Check out Dr. Sanity's Carnival of the Insanities for your therapeutic needs.

Richard Landes asks "What do my colleagues think?"

You are being watched. As we were deciding how to crop this image of a bowl of glass baubles (x 3.25) in the kitchen, we discovered our own Pentax Optio 450 camera lens looking back at us (inset) in the reflection.

"What do my colleagues think?" wonders blogfriend Richard Landes in his latest Augean Stables must-read about the subtle and not-so-subtle tactics of intimidation employed by multi-culti, p.c. groupthinkers in academia. His blog is inaccessible at the moment because of an early-morning Instalanche. Can you say mixed blessing? Meanwhile, here is what we were trying to enter into Richard's comments before being timed out:

That letter from Mr. Tate sent chills up my spine. A cold-hearted coward, I'd say. PLUS, like the good folks of MESA, he's projecting his own evil motives onto the other.

That "growing band of highly credible public intellectuals who could have chosen to keep their dissenting views to themselves but decided instead to put their reputations and careers on the line for the sake of truths that badly needed to be spoken" mentioned above by Diane in the comments put me in mind of the early Christians. There is nothing like the courage of one's convictions in the face of what I call -- in Natan Sharansky's term -- "fear societies, heavy and lite."

As Oriana Fallaci said -- and I am forever quoting at my blog -- "If an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It's that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion."

I'm no Catholic, but I do think that Pope Benedict XVI is an important ally in our struggle. Check out my latest  post for related thoughts: "The Holy Father is not interested in public opinion polls." Keep up the good fight!

Be sure to head back to Richard's later on once the hits from Instapundit slow down. Our distinguished friend is on the front lines of the culture wars, and it's up to us here behind the lines to keep the home fires of moral support burning.

Update: We tried accessing Augean Stables early afternoon and got this message:

This website is currently being moved to a different server. The change should finalize shortly. Please check back soon.

Now we're wondering whether it wasn't the Instalanche that made the site inaccessible but an intentional attack?

Some pigs are more equal than others*

"Lard: The New Health Food?" The skinny re the layer of fat found along the back and underneath the skin of a hog is coming soon to a Cold Turkey Cookbook near you. Watch this space. Pictured above, our first trial batch -- water-filtered drippings from a pan of fried bacon -- of what food writer and lard fan Corby Kummer calls "The great misunderstood fat."

"Your editorial is a breath of fresh air in the overwhelmingly repressive atmosphere of elite opinion that prevails in academia, but . . ." we wrote in the comments to a Harvard Crimson editorial [via Pajamas Media] that rightly criticizes UC-Davis's recent snub of Larry Summers but seems to be in denial re Harvard's own climate of fear lite that led to then President Summers's humiliation and resignation -- termed "voluntary castration" by Dr. Sanity -- last year. Citing our own "Chomsky, Moore, Fisk: Pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant" post of last year, we pointed out the error of their ways:

I do have to disagree with your positing a moral equivalence re thought control on the part of "progressives" vs. those on the other side of the political spectrum. The left has infiltrated academia up to its ears. President Summers's kangaroo court and ouster from Harvard itself was a travesty worthy of the Maureen Stantons [Stanton is the professor in the Department of Evolution and Ecology at UC-Davis who started an online petition drive "to put the kibosh on Summers’s impending speech"] of this world.

"More generally, the quashing of Summers’s speech points to a troubling trend in academia," wrote the Crimson editors sensibly, getting the first part right:

Increasingly, the unrestricted marketplace of ideas that must form the heart of any university worth the name is being poisoned by a perverse pressure to conform truth to political agenda and stifle any speaker who espouses uncomfortable or inconvenient opinions.

So far, so good, but then they put their denial caps back on:

In the present case, the culprits are academics who fashion themselves as progressives eager for social justice and tolerance, but the other side of the political spectrum is no less guilty in others.

Say what? Everyone knows academia leans heavily left, routinely intimidating into silence those who don't toe the party line, even as it flirts with tyrants. Crimson Commenter Stephen W. Stanton detects another blind spot in the editors' world view:

Focusing on Summers' credentials as a progressive only panders to the troublemakers. Don't try to make Summers more palatable because he is "one of your own" on the Left. Focus on your main point . . . Academic "freedom" does not exist where opposing views cannot be heard.

Another commenter, haha, perhaps unwittingly exemplifies the mindset:

As a university president it's your JOB to be politically correct and not offend a subset of people -- it makes the university look bad.

Haha's blind acceptance of patent nonsense calls to mind that punchline of all punchlines from the 1940 Bob Hope classic "Ghost Breakers":

Richard Carlson character: A zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.

Bob Hope character: You mean like Democrats?

Watch the video here.

**Blogtitle taken from Orwell's Animal Farm, "a comment on the hypocrisy of governments [and by extension, academic communities] that proclaim the absolute equality of their citizens but give power and privileges to a small elite."

Simon says OJ dunnit

When Ann Althouse's Li'l Greenie (above) was "Mugged by reality?" a couple of years back, we used her misfortune as a jumping-off point for a little light liberal bashing, contrasting "those of the right, who believe government ought to get out of the way and provide incentives for citizens to become proud, contributing members of society vs. those of the left, who know what's best for us and are into squeezing the money out of the productive citizens' pockets to perpetuate dependency -- humiliation, at bottom -- for the "little people." (Ann Althouse photo)

"Aid given to people -- no matter who they are -- when it is not earned carries with it a level of insult and denigration. It comes from on high to down low and carries with it an implicit message of lowness," writes Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon, "reminiscing about the trial that changed his life -- or at least his political leanings -- forever":

“OJ Changed My Life” may sound like a headline from the National Enquirer, but it’s true . . . partially anyway.

When people ask me about my relative soft shoe to the political center after decades as a dedicated left-liberal, they usually say something like: “You’re one of those 9/11 Democrats, aren’t you? Like your buddy Ron Silver.” I mostly nod. It’s hard to deny 9/11 altered my view of things considerably. But what I almost always don’t tell them is those views were already changing -- because of the OJ Trial. In a sense, weird as this may sound, the Juice prepped me for 9/11 . . .

I began to think of Johnnie Cochran as condescending to the African-American community, as their enabler, treating them like children who would believe something as imbecilic as “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Cochran was in a way the racist in how he dealt with his own people. He was certainly a racist in the way he dealt with white people.

I didn’t say that out loud in those days, at least not very often, but I began to think it. It was the first chink in my very traditional liberal armor, the first time I thought outside a conventional wisdom that I had never questioned in my life.

In a riveting narrative, Roger puts his finger on exactly what's wrong with the liberal project. Reader RJH of That Political Blog sums it up nicely in the comments:

That's a good read and I have heard several variations on that theme from others. Not so much OJ specifically but people that had been life long liberals that changed their beliefs after taking a long hard honest look at what affirmative action and other Democrat causes had done to the black community. The black family structure was the strongest in the country. Today it has been decimated by Democrat "compassion." I doubt they could have done more damage if they had tried.

Democrat "compassion" was never about the have-nots -- however defined -- anyway. It's always been all about "feeling good about themselves," a theme blogged here early and often. As we wrote last year in "Even when you win you lose because there's no learning curve":

Feeling good about themselves is where they're at. Consequences be damned. While Rome burned.

"That old Scrooge Roger L. Simon spent his entire Sunday writing an article relating OJ to 9/11 of all things (well sort of)," quips the man of the hour at his own website. OJ's loss is our gain.

The sun comes shining through

"I've got a face for radio," quipped milblogger Blackfive (TV screen shot above), who attempted to pitch some of his favorite milblogs -- including three of our own favorites, Technicalities, Major K and Marine Corps Moms -- on MSNBC's "Connected Coast to Coast" with Monica Crowley and Ron Reagan this afternoon.

"The women who live with you and the men who work with you will judge your personality by the old standards. Live up to them!" instructs "War Department Pamphlet 35-3 May 1945: WAC Life," brought to the blogosphere by Ann Althouse, whose Mom and Dad both served in the Army in WW II:

Keep your hair neat, your make-up fresh, your uniforms tidy. Use deodorant frequently. Check to see whether you have unpleasant breath. Above all, act and think like a person who expects to be liked and admired.  Maintaining your feminine appeal will buck up your morale tremendously. When you're happy about life in general, you'll be happy about your life in the Army.

The specifics re B.O. and halitosis (pardon our French) grate on the contemporary ear, and you'd justifiably never get away with dispensing such advice to women in today's P.C. military, of course. But woman or man, acting and thinking "like a person who expects to be liked and admired" only makes sense, as long as you don't let it go to your head (yes, you, John McCain).  PLUS.  While such things as bodily odors would be off limits in official manuals in this nuanced era, they're still front and center in big-time advertising, one of the few places today -- other than the blogosphere -- where the truth about human nature can still be addressed. As the unspeakable Irish Spring anti-perspirant-soap ads used to say:

Made for a man, but I like it too.

And as for bad breath, even your best friends won't tell you.

Update:  Our first BlackfiveLanche (The "'fly'" mint green shirts on TV" link. No, we don't know what it means either, but this is the military. Don't ask, don't tell. --ed). Always fun to discover these things in a routine obsessive visit to the Site Meter stats.

"Wonderful theory, wrong species"

Ted Kennedy, horrified that GW appellate-court nominee Judge Janice Rogers Brown has "criticized the New Deal" -- tributary of his own out-of-the-mainstream political career -- tries to convince himself she and other GW nominees are "outside the mainstream." (Senator Edward M. Kennedy Online Office photo)

"The things she says and does could lead other blacks to begin to think independently -- and that in turn threatens the whole liberal house of cards," writes Thomas Sowell re Janice Rogers Brown, associate justice of the California Supreme Court nominated by President Bush for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In advice-and-consent limbo for more than two years, her nomination is expected to enjoy a coveted up-or-down vote of the Senate in the next few days thanks to last night's "Group of 14" deal, blogged here. "She is a champion of property rights and an opponent of the Nanny State, both of which directly oppose the position of today’s Democratic Party," notes the Blogger News Network. Now here's Judge Brown in her own words, excerpts from a speech to The Federalist Society at the University of Chicago Law School a couple of years back [thanks to blogfriend Mr. Kurtz for the link]. It's full of quotable quotes, and you must read the whole thing to savor the excellence of her thinking, her scholarship and her rhetorical style:

We are living in a world where words have lost their meaning. This is certainly not a new phenomenon. It seems to be an inevitable artifact of cultural disintegration.

It is my thesis today that the sheer tenacity of the collectivist impulse — whether you call it socialism or communism or altruism — has changed not only the meaning of our words, but the meaning of the Constitution, and the character of our people.

[Socialism's] ambitious project was the reformation of human nature. Intellectuals visualized a planned life without private property, mediated by the New Man. He never arrived. As John McGinnis persuasively argues: "There is simply a mismatch between collectivism on any large and enduring scale and our evolved nature." As Edward O. Wilson, the world's foremost expert on ants, remarked about Marxism, 'Wonderful theory. Wrong species.'"

It's the tragic vs. utopian view of human nature we're forever blogging about. Brown continues:

I have argued that collectivism was (and is) fundamentally incompatible with the vision that undergirded this country's founding. The New Deal, however, inoculated the federal Constitution with a kind of underground collectivist mentality. The Constitution itself was transmuted into a significantly different document.

At the risk of being skewered by historians of ideas, I want to suggest that the belief in and the impulse toward human perfection, at least in the political life of a nation, is an idea whose arc can be traced from the Enlightenment, through the Terror, to Marx and Engels, to the Revolutions of 1917 and 1937. The latter date marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution. All of these events were manifestations of a particularly skewed view of human nature and the nature of human reason. To the extent the Enlightenment sought to substitute the paradigm of reason for faith, custom or tradition, it failed to provide rational explanation of the significance of human life. It thus led, in a sort of ultimate irony, to the repudiation of reason and to a full-fledged flight from truth -- what Revel describes as "an almost pathological indifference to the truth."

Can you say Marcusian inversion?

For complex reasons, attempts to impose a collectivist political solution in the United States failed. But, the political failure was of little practical concern, in a way that is oddly unappreciated, that same impulse succeeded within the judiciary, especially in the federal high court.

It thus became government's job not to protect property but, rather, to regulate and redistribute it. And, the epic proportions of the disaster which has befallen millions of people during the ensuing decades has not altered our fervent commitment to statism. The words of Judge Alex Kozinski, written in 1991, are not very encouraging."'What we have learned from the experience of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union . . . is that you need capitalism to make socialism work.' In other words, capitalism must produce what socialism is to distribute." Are the signs and portents any better at the beginning of a new century?

Better watch your back, Teddy. Talking heads are saying Judge Brown's going to be a shoo-in.

Update:  Beautiful Atrocities links with "A Message from Barbara Boxer."

"Ulster Scots were not born to be obedient"

We asked, and our readers delivered: Where in Britain did the forebears of our All-American southern rednecks come from? Those are the ones whose culture Thomas Sowell -- blogged here -- identifies in his new book Black Rednecks and White Liberals as the true source of what is known in politically correct circles as the "authentic" black culture of the ghetto:

"My guess is it's Scots-Irish culture," commented Donna B. (herself a proud southerner) of Pajama Pundits. "See Born Fighting : How the Scots-Irish Shaped America by James Webb," added The Prop of coffeegrounds.

That title reminded us of Arthur Herman's 2001 book -- How the Scots Invented the Modern World -- in our own library. But a little Googling, together with a quick review of that volume in our collection shook out the cobwebs. Herman's Scots were the Adam Smiths and other eighteenth-century Scottish intellectuals who "created the modern civilized values America and the Western world still uphold" (from Michael Barone's bookjacket blurb), while James Webb's Scots-Irish were cut from a coarser if equally sturdy cloth. Wrote Webb in Opinion Journal when his book was published last fall:

True American-style democracy had its origins in the Scots-Irish culture. Its values emanated from the Scottish Kirk, which had thrown out the top-down hierarchy of the Catholic Church and replaced it with governing councils made up of ordinary citizens."

The Scots-Irish are derived from a mass migration from Northern Ireland in the 1700s, when the Calvinist "Ulster Scots" decided they'd had enough of fighting Anglican England's battles against Irish Catholics. One group settled initially in New Hampshire, spilling over into modern-day Vermont and Maine. The overwhelming majority -- 95% --  migrated to the Appalachians in a series of frontier communities that stretched from Pennsylvania to northern Alabama and Georgia. They eventually became the dominant culture of the South and much of the Midwest.

Matched with this rebelliousness was a network of extended family "clans," still evident among the Scots-Irish, built on an egalitarianism that measured a person by their own code of honor, courage, loyalty and audacious leadership.

Arthur Herman, who makes a larger claim for Scots' having "invented" the entire modern world, fills in some of the details for this history-challenged blogger:

America became the final destination for all three branches of the Scottish ethnic and cultural family:  Lowlanders, Highlanders and Ulster Scots.

We were bowled over by this:

The first Ulster Scots turned up in 1712.  In Worcester, Massachusetts [just down the pike from us here in Chelsea], they were much in demand as Indian fighters . . . When they tried to build a Presbyterian church, though, their neighbors tore it down . . . colonists soon discovered that Ulster Scots were not born to be obedient.

It's hard to stop typing (thanks again, Goomp, for making us take that Catherine Gibbs course in the day).  There's so much good stuff there, but we'll conclude with a final Scots-Irish observation from Herman's How the Scots Invented the Modern World:

A transfer of people also involves a transfer of culture.  At the same time that a new, refined Scotland was taking hold in its urban captals and then spreading itself to the rest of Europe, the older, more traditional Scotland was finding a new home in America, and thriving . . . By the time enlightened Scotland reached American shores, the two would meet in a kind of cultural crosscurrent: the United States, as a republic and a nation, would be the result.

Can't wait to read Thomas Sowell's contribution to this debate.