On Washington...and Freedom

Excerpt from "Vanity Wares" by Jeffery Lord on The American Spectator:
"...Washington is notoriously unable to resist the crack cocaine of the conventional wisdom and the accompanying side drug of politics as horse race. In my time alone it has been completely wrong about everything from the Soviet Union and the future of Communism to the results of abolishing welfare-as-we-knew-it, the credibility of the CIA, the electability of Ronald Reagan, the inevitability of a President Michael Dukakis and the ability of Bill Clinton to hold on to his presidency. Long before I arrived the town was busy scorning Harry Truman for the certainty of a Dewey presidency, insisted the most qualified man in America for the White House was Herbert Hoover and that isolationism was the sure-fire answer to America's problems after World War I. It thought Lincoln was a failure, Harding was a saint and that buying Alaska was a folly. To this day it believes the mass murder of millions of Southeast Asians after the Democratic Congress forced an end to American financial backing of Vietnam is some sort of triumph and that Democrats really are the party of Civil Rights instead of the perpetrators of a 150 years of slavery and segregation..."

I think this description rings true to many folks of every political viewpoint except maybe the lunatic fringe. As long as it stays there and leaves me alone (unlikely), life is good.

Another piece from the same website is "The Daring Possibility of Freedom" by Quin Hillyer. The premise of the article is that freedom is a concept counter to the idea that "government knows best" that our current politicians on left and center right seem to believe much to my personal dissatisfaction. Here is an excerpt: "First, freedom is the quintessential American political value. (Not equality, not diversity, and not any number of other trendy concepts.) Second, freedom properly defined cannot exist without firm, and firmly enforced, limitations on governmental power and scope. Third, and most controversially, the American ideals of freedom not only are not at odds with organized Judeo-Christian religion, but actually sprang directly from those religious traditions and depend on those traditions to survive and thrive...". Good piece. Of course that presupposes that as a reader you tend towards the conservative or libertarian view of the world.

Well Said

Rebuttal of a liberal viewpoint on poverty in Milwaukee by Patrick McIlheran courtesy of Charlie Sykes' blog:
"The question isn’t why we tolerate these inequities so much as why we tolerate the personal dysfunction that is behind them. I suggest it’s because what we find more intolerable would be the kind of intrusiveness into the lives of the very poor that could help them become as prosperous as most Americans are. We cannot bring ourselves to forcibly make people not become pregnant while unmarried. We will not force children to pay attention in school or, for that matter, attend school. We won’t mandate a longer time horizon, a change in personal outlook, a resulting ambition to learn a useful career at MATC.

I don’t know that we should. I do know this, though: The question of North Ave. is not how it can be that some have so much while others on the same street have so little. Rather, it is why some fail to do the fairly simple things — stay in school, delay childbearing until marriage, learn a skill to permit employment — that most Americans of every race, ancestry and neighborhood manage to do, making them middle-class and relentlessly affluent."

Amen.

NFL--Another Confirmation as America's Sport

Here's another story in the news about how the NFL is now America's sport. Shoot, even I, previously a decidedly un-sports fan, have become a football fan and play in 2 fantasy football teams and watch a lot of football, especially in HD, in the fall.

I'll post something more on the rest of what I've been up to this weekend when I have the time.