sisu

Shirley Sherrod: Cultural Marxism disguised as multiculturalism

"Intellectuals and political hustlers who blame the plight of so many blacks on poverty, discrimination and the 'legacy of slavery' are complicit in the socioeconomic and moral decay," writes Walter E. Williams, quoting Booker T. Washington's  1901 autobiography Up From Slavery, where the author is describing the motivations and modus operandi of the Jesse Jacksons and Reverend Sharptons of his day:

"There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

Booker T. Washington's homegrown grievance industry turned toxic in the last decades of the 20th century, when multiculturalism arose from the ashes of the New Left, as Linda Kimball explained in her American Thinker essay "Cultural Marxism" a couple of years back:

Because the New Left lacked cohesion it fell apart as a political movement. However, its revolutionaries reorganized themselves into a multitude of single issue groups. Thus we now have for example, radical feminists, black extremists, anti-war ‘peace' activists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, and ‘gay' rights groups …

Both communism and the New Left are alive and thriving here in America. They favor code words: tolerance, social justice, economic justice, peace, reproductive rights, sex education and safe sex, safe schools, inclusion, diversity and sensitivity. All together, this is Cultural Marxism disguised as multiculturalism.

This unholy alliance of homegrown and imported grievance mongering has come home to roost in the person of Shirley Sherrod. While legacy media and fellow travelers in the blogosphere heard what they wanted to hear on those notorious NAACP videos and fashioned a narrative of Sherrod as earthly saint, our friend Dan Riehl actually sat down and listened to the whole thing. Far from the uniter portrayed by the usual suspects, Sherrod in her own words turns out to be a divider capable of accusing video promulgator Andrew Breitbart of wanting "to get us stuck back in the times of slavery." Then came the equally sainted husband Charles and Dan's latest coup this morning, videos of the former SNCC organizer declaring "We Must Stop The White Man And His Uncle Toms ..." But don't tell "former self-hating white person" Joan Walsh of Slate. She "grew up adoring black people" and let Matt Lewis know in no uncertain terms yesterday that "because Sherrod's father was murdered by a white man, she was entitled to call Fox News and Andrew Breitbart a "racist."

Update: Michelle Malkin "Buzzworthy" link!

Update II: The News Junkie at Maggie's Farm links. He's taking the month of August off 'cause he's "sick of having to see all of the outrages du jour."

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Hayek: In social evolution nothing is inevitable but thinking makes it so

  
Father's Day 2010 Down East at Camelot-by-the-Sea with an ambiguous sunrise that could go either way.

The "little people." The "small people." The "folks." When did the rugged individualism that is our American birthright get sucked down into the Gramscian cesspool that is the marxist meme of "the masses"? The term is used unthinkingly even by some of our admired allies on this side of the aisle. Then there's BP Chair Carl-Henric Svanberg, who bowed down to politically correct pressure to issue the usual "apology" for speaking truth to powerlessness:

"I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are greedy companies or don't care, but that is not the case with BP. We care about the small people." He later said he was sorry for speaking "clumsily."

Opinionators tried to make it okay due to a loss in translation. But frankly, we see little difference between the "little" and the "small" people. It all comes down to a self-appointed elite's disdain for tea party "folks" like ourselves who aren't buying their statist utopia. We've started rereading F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, and we're getting revved up with the frenzied underlining and margin scribbling — which we still totally agree with! — of our first reading, perhaps twenty years ago. Loaded for bear. A taste:

In social evolution nothing is inevitable but thinking makes it so.

Thanks to Glenn Beck's promulgation, Hayek's brilliant insight is now #1 on Amazon. Maybe it's not too late for the masses our fellow Americans to wake up from our long national nightmare.

Update: The Divine Little Miss Attila links this post and our previous one with transcendent insight:

To put it in Christian terms light without darkness is Christ without the cross: a sad, vapid character.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

A Declaration of Independence: Art for freedom's sake

Bill Whittle, you may have put the nation on the road to recovery of the Founders' enlightened vision of freedom singlehandedly. Longhandedly, that is, as in writing out the Declaration of Independence longhand. We've completed the first part (three 8 1/2 x 11 sheets, above) and found the exercise a revelation. Two examples: 1. it was the united (l.c. "u") States of America (emphasis on individual states), not the United States. 2. The goal was to "effect" rather than "affect" the people's "Safety and Happiness," a positive intention rather than a vague hope (yes you, Hopenchangers). Also, bonus revelation, we can still write longhand!

"Bill Whittle has given me a new idea for an art project for my sixth graders," writes  blogbuddy and art teacher extraordinaire Laura Lee in the comments to our previous post. "I've just ordered new calligraphy pens and paper":

OBJECTIVE: The students will recover, evaluate, analyze and create an artwork by writing in longhand, with calligraphy pens, the Declaration of Independence.

I have a large copy of the Declaration hanging in a place of honor in my art room.

Detail of one of Laura Lee's student artworks. It looks to be a technique we remember from our own enchanted childhood, where you make a drawing with waxy crayons and then overwash with poster paint. The layered result evokes a pentimento, revealing something of the artist's thinking as the work progressed.

At her own blog in a must-read call to arms infused with the tea party spirit, Laura Lee expands on the theme of what's the matter with education today (see Gramscian march through the institutions) and her lonely fight to foster a richly-textured understanding and appreciation of the Shining City Upon a Hill that is at the heart of American exceptionalism:

Forget the NCAA tournament, the Iditarod, and the Academy Awards, it’s Art Season for me. Three art competitions in recent weeks have had me working day and night to prepare my “players” for their chance to shine.

"A must view" we wrote in our post Too Late to Apologize: Music video as history lesson. "Rousing music, sublime production values and compelling performances blend 18th- and 21st-century perspectives into the perfect historically-aware antidote to the 'ideas' of clueless North Carolina education 'leaders' who are proposing to revamp the state's 11th-grade curriculum by skipping the Revolution and Civil War and covering U.S.history only from 1877 onward.'"

"Why do I do it when most of the Arts establishment discourage competition in art? (and other areas)," she asks rhetorically:

The art establishment discourages competition in art just as educational elites frown upon any kind of competition in schools. Children are not being encouraged to compete or to strive to achieve in many schools in America, unfortunately.

Talent is the great equalizer; I’ve taught in high socio-economic schools as well as the low socio-economic school where I am teaching presently. I much prefer schools in poor neighborhoods. The children aren’t as distracted by ipods, video games and other prizes of the well off. Many of my students are immigrants and appreciate the education that our school is providing. Many, of course, not all, of the students who I taught who came from richer neighborhoods did not have aspirations to achieve.

"When life comes easy, achievements are few," observes Laura Lee:

What does the national art educational establishment consider important? Not achievement, nor excellence but social justice."

See what you've started, Bill Whittle? And while we're on the subject of re-enlightening that Shining City:

A "Call to action! March 16th, 2010 — Stop Obamacare 2.0" from Tabitha Hale of FreedomWorks:

We are calling everyone that is able to come to Washington, DC on March 16th, 2010 for one last push against Obamacare. We will meet at the Cannon building at 9 am and speak with as many representatives as possible, encouraging them to vote NO on this version of health care reform.

Hey, Heather J. You'll be in the area. How's about representing the clan for us? Field reports sought. You take pictures, we'll post 'em here.

EPA Cult of Death would "reap the profits of doom"

"We believe deeply that the denial of 'life's dark side in ourselves' is the key to what's wrong with the utopianist left world view," we wrote the first time we featured Max Ernst's 'L'Ange du Foyeur ou le Triomphe du Surréalisme' (1937. Oil on canvas. Private collection) back in April of 2004. The second time it accompanied our skeptical appreciation of NYT token conservative David Brooks's assertion in a column of that title, that "The darker view of human evolution is gaining clout." Third time, "the unthinkable. Self-described 'brain-dead liberal' playwright David Mamet has seen the light." Now individual revelations like Mamet's have cascaded into a tsunami of rediscovery of our nation's roots in the tragic view of human  nature.

"There are many vested interests hoping to reap the profits of doom," writes Shannon L. Goessling in a clear-eyed exposition of the stealth motives behind Obama's international progressivist Environmental Protection Agency ruling last April that carbon dioxide — the very stuff of life — is a dangerous pollutant that threatens the public and therefore must be regulated under the 1970 Clean Air Act. But the truly dangerous pollutant that threatens the public is the the soul-deadening pc propaganda of the decades-long Gramscian march through the institutions that has allowed these vulturous vested interests to get a seat at the head of the table of the body politic. More on that below, but first a few facts. As the WSJ reported in April:

This so-called "endangerment finding" sets the clock ticking on a vast array of taxes and regulation that EPA will have the power to impose across the economy, and all with little or no political debate. 

"The science is ultimately what should carry the day for public policy on climate change," declares Goessling, whose Southeastern Legal Foundation is taking 'em to court: 

There are many vested interests hoping to reap the profits of doom …

With huge vested interests pursuing a globalist agenda, it's been a Galileo-like effort to make the "skeptic" view known to the American people. Yet we are winning.

The best news is that the American people are beginning to wake up to the reality that they've been had, and they're mad as hell. Even as word of climate-science fraud and attempts to stifle skeptics began to break through the legacy media's "tribal filter on green news" last fall, a majority of our fellow citizens were telling pollsters they didn't see "global warming" as a crisis. Like the energizing spirit of the Tea Party movement itself, voters' growing recognition of Al Gore & Company's great con is "part of something bigger," as Glenn Reynolds wrote the other day in "Nashville Shows Tea Party Is America's Third Great Awakening," one of Instapundit's great distillations of what's "happening here."

Ron Futrell at Big Journalism puts it even more succinctly in a rollicking cogitation on the "Democrats and their activist old media … running in circles and working themselves into pretzels trying to define the 'Tea Party' movement":

It's the Constitution, stupid.

Exceptionalist America's brand of environmentalism used to be about individual initiative and stewardship of the earth in the trandscendentalist John Muir sense, most lyrically expressed in our all-time favorite quotation from Henry David Thoreau:

The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

Compare and contrast nature red in tooth and claw — that part of our own human nature the "why-can't-we'all-just-get-along" left can't abide — with the totalitarianesque Green-Police Utopia of what Jonah Goldberg calls "Audi's Gorewellian Super Bowl ad." Recognition of nature and human nature is life-affirming. Green fantasies of sacrificing human freedom in the name of "saving the planet" embody a cult of death.

Soylent Green revisited

"The Tribal Filter on Green News," Insight July 23, 1990. Update: Click here for larger, legible image.

It's been nearly twenty years we've been calling out the warmenists and their media allies, wondering when, already, the truth would finally out. Now it finally has, as Drudge headlines "Climategate: 'Greatest scandal in modern science,'" and mainstream outlets can no longer deny there's something rotten in the state of warmening "science." Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhoffe says the leaked correspondence suggests researchers "cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not," and now "Congress May Probe Leaked Global Warming E-Mails." In celebration of this day of cleaning out the Augean Stables, herewith we offer republication of one of our earliest blogposts on the subject, "Soylent Green." Note Palinophobe Andrea Mitchell's unabashed confession way back when (1990): "Clearly the networks have made the decision now, where you'd have to call it advocacy." Enjoy:

January 3, 2004. Blogging is nothing new.  Before the glory of the internet, we were madly clipping and underlining and annotating the margins of tree-based publications.  Take this snail blog post, "The Tribal Filter on Green News," by Woody West, having "The Last Word" in the July 23, 1990 issue of Insight:

Only lately have the pooh-bahs of the national press felt secure enough to admit publicly that they filter the news through their personal-tribal creed. As a result, of course, they often report as fact that which is both unsettled and disputed.

. . . At a conference on the environment in Washington earlier this year, reported by The Wall Street Journal's David Brooks, Charles Alexander harrumphed:

"As the science editor at Time I would freely admit that on this issue we have crossed the boundary from news reporting to advocacy." There was applause from the pressies in conclave assembled, after which Andrea Mitchell, an NBC correspondent, said that "clearly the networks have made the decision now, where you'd have to call it advocacy."

It gets even better:

An environmental reporter at The Boston Globe, Dianne Dumanoski, is quoted as saying, "There is no such thing as objective reporting . . . I've become even more crafty about finding the voices to say the things I think are true.  That's my subversive mission." Then spake Barbara Pyle, environmental editor of Cable News Network, which shows distressing signs of aping the older networks in cooking the news: "I do have an axe to grind. I want to be the little subversive person in television."

Pardon our French, but, plus ça change . . . Oh, and Andrea, there's a message for you from someone called Alan . . . and David Brooks, You're the man!  Clearly.

Update: "Somewhere, a tree is planted." The Anchoress links, and links and links.

[Thanks to susis for title]

"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 canteloupe, 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?