Freedom's Truth

IMAGINE UPDATED, with no apologies to John Lennon, misguided idealist

Imagine there's No Castro,
Just like there's no more Saddam,
Imagine all Dictatorships,
Thrown in history's trash can,
Imagine all the people,
Living Their Lives In Freedom,

Imagine there's no Commies,
It's easy if you can,
No Socialized Economies,
From England to Japan,
Imagine all the people,
Living Their Lives In Freedom,

You-hoo You may say I'm a Freeper,
but you know it isnt just me,
I Hope Some Day You'll Join us,
So the world will soon be Free.

Imagine no reparations,
In a culture with no torts,
Imagine no taxation,
Honesty instead of courts,
Imagine peace through justice,
And virtue that make us free,

You-hoo You may say I'm a Freeper,
but you know it isnt just me,
I Hope Some Day You'll Join us,
So the world will soon be Free.

home

"Wish we could all do more on cultural issues like this one, which really do lie at the core of the conflict and define us as a people."

What to do: Change Minds. How to do it: Speak, write, make your views heard, any way you can. Support those organizations that are explicitly conservative and moving minds in that directly. Defund and refuse to support leftist organizations and media sources. How else to do it: Set a good example.

There are 3 aspects to changing the culture and power structures that influence culture:
1. Changing minds and beliefs (how this happens: media, communications, proseltyzation, evangelism of ideals)
2. Getting like-minded people empowered (organized campaigns to gain power and win on issues)
3. Using power gained to make positive changes (structural and organizational politics within institutions; turning them, etc.)

All three need to work together. All three are valid areas of activism. On the personal level, this can be:
#1) write letters to the editor, columns, post on websites, contact media to suggest stories, complain about bias, etc. Do 'freeps' against the left.
#2) helping conservative campaigns win election (put a bumper sticker on your car for your favorite candidate this year). Write letters and call legislators to influence them
#3) Getting into the university trustees, being a city council member or being on the school board and changing policies from within.

In the end it is all about how to win friends and influence people. "Honestly, I don't have a clue what to do to help other than send money to various organizations and vote. It's frustrating." It is. We need a "Conservative Activism 101" to explain how to be more effective. We need to do better than we do.

The one year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq is upon us (time flies does it not?) and it is time to reflect on the success of that effort. I'll write my own opinions, here is a view on it that in my view hits the right notes:

Jack Kelly: What's gone right in Iraq

" The Iraqi Governing Council has approved a provisional constitution which provides for democracy and a bill of rights. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the Arab world. The U.S. plan to hand over power to Iraqis on June 30 is on schedule, ... Resistance continues in Iraq, but is much diminished from last fall. ... Efforts to spark a civil war between Shiite and Sunni Muslims so far have failed. ... The outgunned Iraqi cops refused help from the 82nd Airborne Division, requesting only that they be resupplied with ammunition. ... Shops are filled with consumer goods, which are flying off the shelves. ... Electricity is on in Basra 23 hours a day now, compared with just two under Saddam. ... Nearly a million more Iraqis have cars since Saddam was ousted. ... Only the most blind of partisans can deny that significant progress has been made. And however hard the remaining steps toward a democratic Iraq may be, it seems pretty clear the hardest steps already have been taken."

Another meme rady to jump into the meme pool:

Will kerry want to "revise and extend" his remark that the threat of terrorism was overblown, now that the terrible attack on Madrid occured and drastically disproved his non chalance?

We have an accused spy on our hands, Susan Lindauer. In the article we find out that "Susan Lindauer is a 1985 Smith College graduate who describes herself as an anti-war activist." Here is what this spy who worked for Saddam did for a living: She worked for Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., in 1993 and Rep. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., in 1994, before joining the office of former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun as press secretary in 1996. From March to May 2002, she worked for Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif."

So we have her views, her career, and her actions. The AP headline? Accused Spy Is Cousin of Bush Staffer We find out that 'cousin' means "is a distant cousin of President Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card" which in turn means anything you want it to mean. They tell us that Kerry and Bush are distant cousins, for whatever that is worth. (Not much.)

So irrelevent and meaninless trivia is picked as the headline. Why? Just to tarnish Bush by a lame association. You just *know* they didnt want to run Former Democratic Congressional staffer caught spying for Saddam or "Anti-war activist found accused of spying because that would be just too easy to make the points that would harm the leftist cause, but to twist it in the other direction is quite shocking.

Actually, not really shocking. The Media Bias meter rises in the election season and we are well into it. Wear hip-deep boots!

Nobody manages to be wrong about absolutely everything with more wit and flair than Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker. In his latest fulmination against left-wing dissent in "Reckless Driver" in The New Yorker magazine (Mar 8, 2004), Hendrik Hertzberg takes Ralph Nader to task for daring to make another quixotic run for President this year. Along the way he tells quite a few woppers that tells us more about his corrupted world-view than anything else.

Right from the get-go, Hertzberg escapes the orbit of truth, starting off with the inane yet charming myth that "Ralph Nader is more responsible for the existence of automobiles that have seat belts, padded dashboards, air bags, non-impaling steering columns, and gas tanks that don't readily explode when the car get rear ended." etc. It seems that Al Gore merely invented the internet, but Ralphie has been busy re-inventing cars lo these many years. My, these guys are busy.

The myth is a dangerous one on two levels. First, it presumes that real invention isn't important, implying a mere agitator has a greater claim than the real innovators who improve our world. The first U.S. patent for automobile seat beats was issued to Edward J. Claghorn of New York, New York on February 10, 1885. Swedish inventor Nils Bohlin invented the three-point seat belt - not the first but the modern seatbelt - now a standard safety device in most cars. Nils Bohlin's lap-and-shoulder belt was introduced by Volvo in 1959. The second point is pertinent to this factiod - that it is wrong to imply that only Government dictates drive innovation. Volvo introduced this safety device voluntarily as a consumer-friendly feature that would win sales, well before seat belts became a Government requirement. Our recently purchased car has non-Government required side air bags and other safety features not the product of Nader's activism, but products of innovative car makers in a competitive industry. Capitalism work for safety too.

The real inventor of the air bag was Allen K. Breed, who invented he world's first electromechanical automotive air bag system in 1968. Unlike Nader (who has many lawsuits but as far as I know not one patent to his name), Breed was a serial entrepreneur, starting several companies, and a prolific inventor. In 1987, he started Breed Technologies, to further commercialize his inventions in vehicle safety. Without Breed, we might not have the air bags we have today; without Nader we'd still have those air bags, we just would have perhaps fewer regulations related to them.

And so it goes. Hendrik claims that without Nader "baby foods are no longer spiked with MSG". His hagiographic idolization of Nader is amusing even though false, but one wonders: How did MSG-free Chinese food managed to come about without a Federal mandate? Does he really think consumers are dullards unable to make decent decisions for themselves?

"Yes" must be the answer to that rehtorical question because the premise of the whole column is the acute danger of giving the voting consumer in November another choice. Hertzberg thinks that consumers are too foolish to make choices on their own and lives in the dread fear that another choice will mean bad things for our country. Poppycock. Any nation that endured Jimmy Carter's feckless four years - the worst Presidential term in my lifetime - can survive and endure mistaken Presidential picks. And in 2004, America won't make a mistake. It will do the right thing and re-elect George W Bush.

Let us be clear about one thing: Bush was fairly elected President in 2000, and the person most responsible for that feat was George W Bush first, and secondly, those tens of millions who voted for him. But the next responsible person for Bush's election was Al Gore himself. Al Gore showed himself in many ways to be the small-minded type of micro-manager who is unfit to be a good President. (Jimmy Carter again comes to mind.) In his last-minute dirt-bomb drop against Bush and in his callous slanders in minority-targetted ads that tied Bush to a racist murder, Al Gore showed he was not above the worst kind of electioneering. Yet in his debate performances where most voters favored Bush as the winner, he showed himself unable to really match wits with Bush, a man the liberal intelligensia had assured us was a dunce. (What a great strategery to be mis-underestimated!) Al Gore managed to lose although we had the complacent impression of peace and the illusion of a boom in our heads at the time of the 2000 election.

"Blaming" Nader for the election of Bush is amusing but irrelevent. If Nader hadnt run, the dynamics of the race might have favored Gore even less, with less energy on the left and fewer voices espousing liberal positions. The Nader voters might have stayed home. Evidence suggests many would have voted for Bush. Had Al Gore been a better politician - another Clinton - he would have won. Had Bush been a worse politician, he would have lost. Had Bush not had a 30 year old DUI charge dredged up 5 days prior to the election, his 3 point margin would have held and the Florida vote would have been called in his favor by 9pm EST on the night of the election. Bring up any number of hypothetical changes and a different outcome falls out. The "butterfly effect" (no pun intended) of small differences magnifying into huge historical consequences was in full play that season.

Do you recall that sense of awe and relief many of us felt when we paired the unbelievable catastrophe of the 9-11 attack with the razor-thin decision in Florida? When we felt "Wow ... Sure am glad Bush won!"? Sometimes history, like poker, deals you a hand and you play it like you're a genius but you know deep down it was dumb luck. Some saw the hand of God appointing the man to the hour. Who would have thought the 2000 would mean so much? As Mark Twain said, some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. Bush rose to greatness in the rubble of the World Trade Center towers. To me and to millions of Americans, when he healed the nation's wounds, turned our sorrow into determination, and with his vision set us on the task of defeating global terror, President Bush achieved his finest hour.

Which is why Hertzberg is wrong in the large scheme of things as well as the small details. He is living in the pre 9-11 world, gnashing his teeth at a vision of the Bush administration that was biased and phony enough even before our complacency was interrupted by the WTC attack. He engages in idiosyncratic hyperbole, accusing the Bush administration falsely of doing just about everything nefarious under the sun. Despite our current $2.3 trillion budget, Hendrik speaks of a "shift of resources from public purposes". Has he not noticed something consequential in the interim? Our real enemies attack us with real bombs; they dont become enemies because they think that 26 MPG is a sufficient fuel economy standard or because they think dividends should not be taxed so heavily.

Hertzberg's worry that Nader 's running this year will do anything dangerous to the Left is misplaced. Nader will not have a measurable impact at all. He fears that what happened in 2000 will happen again in 2004. It wont. The 2000 election was a small election based on small issues decided on small margins. The 2004 election is much larger. A lot more is observably at stake now. The differences are far starker.

The most Liberal Senator according to some interest groups in recent years was none other than John Kerry. Kerry has staked out opposition to everything in the Bush foreign policy arsenal, not wanting to let politics end at our shore. Kerry's Liberalism makes a Nader run superfluous, were it not for the fact that Kerry is fully a part of the 'corporate elite'; his near-billionaire wife spends millions on a Liberal foundation called the Tides Foundation that curiously has been backing anti-Bush activist groups. But never mind that, this kind of Liberal activism sponsorship by the mega-rich (think also Soros) is not the corporate influence that bothers the Left.

President Bush has a clear record, one of boldness that his opponents would call reckless; one of consolidating Republican and conservative gains in particular areas - like tax cuts; one of bipartisan refom in other areas, e.g., education and medicare policies. In the end the election will be mostly about President Bush.

It wont be a close election because the difference between Bush and Kerry is far from close, and the advantage in all areas points to Bush as the superior choice. But it will be important. The 2004 election will set our course in winning the war on terror, set our course on taxation and size and scope of Government, and set our course on whether elite values or "heartland" values should be guiding us. In this big issue election, America will decide that President Bush was right for America in 2000, and is right again for America in 2004. America is too productive, innovative and free not to make that choice. Don't fear Mr Hertzberg, even if a litigating activist like Nader sometimes is the one who gets mistaken credit for those safety inventions, Nader wont get the credit for Bush's coming victory. That credit will go fully to President Bush and the millions of us who will vote for him in November.

An FR poster asks: "I am a little confused by the statements of lost jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there was 135,999,000 people employed in Jan., 2001 (link) and 138,566,000 people employed in Jan., 2004 (link). ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/news.release/History/empsit.02022001.news Looks like more people working to me. What am I missing?"

My response: You are missing that this statistic benefits Bush's re-election. So the statstic will be ignored, twisted and in other ways met with a countervailing flurry of lies/damned-lies/biased-statistics to bamboozle people in thinking the worst. Thanks for sharing. I was wanting to know the real facts.

Reality: 2.5 million jobs created in the last 3 years.

Americans have diverse opinions about whether same-sex couples should be added to Government's definition of marriage, but one thing is clear: A question this fundamental and basic to our society should be decided through the democratic process.

The Massachusetts Supreme Court's 4-3 decision last November to force that state to accept same-sex marriage ignored the text, meaning and original intent of their state Constitution. The judges ignored precedent and neglected their duty to interpret the law with this activist decision. Now we see the result: Divisiveness, attempts to remake the US Constitution itself on one side, and lawless acts by mayors on the other. An out-of-control court has created an out-of-control issue.

Marriage is if nothing else an institution for we the people. As we decide this for our future we need to end activist judicial imperialism and restore Government "Of the people, by the people, for the people".

It's so good I can only excerpt it in full. I will make an effort to model my own writing on Sowell - incisive, concise, to-the-point, and very clear. In a little over 700 words, he got to the real nub of the issue. What is fascinating is this: I checked my own previous post - same number of words exactly ... both on the same subject. WHICH SAID MORE? Which said it better ? Let me know what you think.

The problem with the gay marriage issue
Thomas Sowell (back to web version) | Send

March 2, 2004

The problem with the "gay marriage" issue is that the more fundamental issue is not gay marriage. The real issue is who should decide such issues -- that is, what kind of country and what kind of government do we have or want to have?

What does democracy mean if any headstrong minority can violate the laws passed by a majority and enshrined in centuries of legal precedents?

Some headstrong minorities have taken to the streets and some have violated the rule of law in the very courts of law, while wearing their judicial robes. In San Francisco, a mayor is openly defying state law, and both the judges and the state attorney general are too scared to do anything, for fear of angering homosexual voters.

Even those who incessantly repeat the mantra of "diversity" do not follow up the logical implications of that diversity. A diverse society can degenerate into a fragmented society and an internally warring society unless the various groups and interests agree to respect some over-arching principles and authority.

The history of the human race around the world shows how hard it is to create and maintain a national unity when different segments of the society think that what they want over-rides what everyone else wants and justifies violating the very accord that makes a society possible.

Race riots, military coups, anarchy and civil wars have erupted again and again, for centuries on end and in countries around the world, because some group decided that what it wanted was all that mattered. It has happened from the Balkans to Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Rwanda and a seemingly endless list of others.

History has told us repeatedly what is at the end of that road -- and we don't need to go there.

Gay marriage is an issue solely because a few headstrong judges in Massachusetts and an opportunistic mayor in San Francisco decided that they were above the law. Even in two ultra-liberal states like California and Massachusetts, the voters do not want gay marriage.

To those for whom their own goals over-ride everything else, this just means that the voters and the law must be disregarded. But if those on the left feel free to violate the law, why not those on the right? And where does that lead?

After years of tolerating lawlessness and violence by liberal and radical groups, especially since the 1960s, some were shocked when someone on the other end of the spectrum bombed a building in Oklahoma City.

Some blamed it on conservative talk radio -- which neither advocated nor condoned such acts -- while remaining utterly silent about the liberal media's sympathetic treatment of lawlessness and violence by those espousing the causes of the left. The New York Times, for example, ran a sympathetic account of one of the radical domestic bombers of the past on the very day when a more horrendous act of violence occurred -- September 11, 2001.

Gay marriage is not a local issue but a national issue because maintaining the rule of law -- or what is left of it -- is a national issue of historic importance if we are not to see America degenerate into the world's largest banana republic, or worse.

The time is long overdue to start impeaching judges who think their job is to veto laws they don't like or condone lawlessness that they agree with. The time is also long overdue to re-examine lifetime appointments of judges, which allows them to act like little tin gods, at the expense of our freedom and the country's elected government.

An independent judiciary does not mean judges independent of the Constitution from which they derive their power or independent of the laws that they are sworn to uphold.

When voters go to the polls this November, they need to consider not only what particular candidates will do in office but, at the federal level especially, what kinds of judges those candidates will appoint or confirm. There is no point complaining about judges -- or about taxes or any other laws or policies -- if you go into that voting booth on election day and vote on the basis of how candidates look or talk.

©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

The current media flareup on redefining marriage to incorporate same-sex couples has all the earmarks of a 'media campaign'. That is, the gay-friendly media is trying its darndest to change minds on this issue before minds jell. But something is not quite right, because common sense people are not buying it.

Remember the New York Times' Jihad to get Augusta National Golf course to admit women as members? They created hundreds of news stories to raise the issue. End result: Nothing. The people in charge of that golf course neither cared nor were swayed by what the newspaper dictated to them. All it took was for people to ignore their cat-calls and the power of the mainstream press dissipated.

Here in the same-sex marriage debate we have a confluence of two powers, intermingled but both bulwarks of the culture elites. The power of the legal profession and liberal activist Judiciary, and the power of the elite liberal press, namely the Boston Globe, The New York Times and related organs. The two will act like jaws to snap shut the voices from the "other America", the heartland that doesnt see same-sex marriage as a reform, but as a move towards moral degeneration.

Americans have diverse opinions about whether it is right thing to change marriage to incorporate same-sex couples, but one thing is perfectly clear: How marriage is defined and recognized by the Government should be decided through the democratic process by the legislative branch of Government. The courts that are forcing a radical redefinition of marriage have short-circuited the democratic process and have unleashed a pandora's box of dangerous side effects.

The Massachusetts Supreme Court over-reached massively when in a 4-3 decision they required Massachusetts to include same-sex couples. The court decision ignored the plain meaning of their Constitution, ignored precedent, and ignored original intent and the promises of the authors of the very provisions the court used to mkae this ruling. (Those authors explicitly promised only 25 years ago that "equal rights" clause that was added to the Massachusetts Constitution did not include same-sex marriage. The court in 2003 deliberately misread the term "sex" to mean "sexual behavior" instead of gender, which the dissent correctly noted.) Most importantly the Massachusetts court ignored their own duties as Judges - to interpret the law not make the law.

People talk about this as a "divisive" issue, yet the temperature on this issue would be no greater than with other issues if it were kept within the legislative process. Moreover, such a process would lead to the kind of incremental changes where slow cultural and social changes would be matched by the By talking away the power of the people, the courts have sown division, angering people whose voices are silenced by this undemocratic process. Nothing is more divisive than taking away the right of the people to make a democratic decision on a sensitive subject. Now some contemplate a Federal Constitutional Amendment as the only cure for restraining the court power gone amok.

We should keep the power to make fundamental decisions like how what we recognize as marraige as a conensus decision of the people, not as an imposed decision by an imperial Judiciary. For those who either agree or disagree with same-sex marriage, the rejection of the imperial judiciary forcing the answer on Power to the people!

Two very wise columnists have picked up this meme: Thomas Sowell: "The problem with the "gay marriage" issue is that the more fundamental issue is not gay marriage. The real issue is who should decide such issues -- that is, what kind of country and what kind of government do we have or want to have?"

Charles Krauthammer also has an article in the Washington Post lamenting how the court have stepped in and ruined the politics in this area, turning it into a political minefield. This column showed up in the Statesman as well.

If there is one positive outcome with the gay marriage flap (and for conservatives lamentably it seems the best we can hope for is a 'draw' ie the status quo), it may be this: That people will be so dramatically turned off by these extreme rulings they will for once and for all turn away from judicial activism and support Republican efforts to make the Federal (and state judiciaries) more conservative.

Pat Buchanan quotes Perle and Frum:

“[A] radical strain within Islam,” says Perle, “ ... seeks to overthrow our civilization and remake the nations of the West into Islamic societies, imposing on the whole world its religion and laws.”

Then he tries to tear it apart. He misses. Just as the Cold War had its anti-anti-communists, we see that Pat B and others dont take seriously the threat of islamofascism and want to pretend its not a threat. His first slip is to creat a strawman - since the Islamofascists desire to destroy us, he shows how its abusrd to think they could destroy us and hence tries to discredit Perle and Frum on that basis. He discredits only himself.

To suggest Frum and Perle are over the top is not to imply we not take seriously the threat of terror attacks on airliners, in malls, from dirty bombs, or, God forbid, a crude atomic device smuggled in by Ryder truck or container ship. Yet even this will never “overthrow our civilization.” In the worst of terror attacks, we lost 3,000 people. Horrific. But at Antietam Creek, we lost 7,000 in a day’s battle in a nation that was one-ninth as populous. Three thousand men and boys perished every week for 200 weeks of that Civil War. We Americans did not curl up and die. We did not come all this way because we are made of sugar candy.

The comparisons with the Civil War are absurd. That was a dreadful scar on our history and literally destroyed the south for a generation. We are supposed to be smug about this threat because it wasnt as bad as our bloodiest war? And yet ... there is a reason Buchanan had to reach a civil war battle. Because IN NO TIME SINCE THEN, UP UNTIL SEPT 11, 2001 DID SO MANY AMERICANS DIE IN A SINGLE DAY AND IN A SINGLE EVENT.

In other words, Buchanan actually validated the uniqueness and the depth of the tragedy of September 11, 2001. You have to go back 150 years in our history, to the worst battle of our worst war, to find a comparable tragedy.

See http://www.amconmag.com/3_1_04/cover.html