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.