Squaring the Culture

Mark Steyn, witty Canadian journalist and author of America Alone, delivered a lecture at Hillsdale College on March 9, 2009, entitled “Live Free or Die.” His thesis was not a call to martyrdom, but rather a recognition that if the West does not protect its liberty, it will die. His analysis was sharp and relevant, and he argues that the indolence of the West will be her downfall.

This is long, almost 4,500 words. It will take about 20 minutes to work through it. Still, I think it’s worthwhile reading, as part of our learning what we’ve lost in the West, and how we lost it.

“I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.” Sorry, doesn’t work—not for long.

Take the time to read and digest the whole thing.

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MY REMARKS are titled tonight after the words of General Stark, New Hampshire’s great hero of the Revolutionary War: “Live free or die!” When I first moved to New Hampshire, where this appears on our license plates, I assumed General Stark had said it before some battle or other—a bit of red meat to rally the boys for the charge; a touch of the old Henry V-at-Agincourt routine. But I soon discovered that the general had made his famous statement decades after the war, in a letter regretting that he would be unable to attend a dinner. And in a curious way I found that even more impressive. In extreme circumstances, many people can rouse themselves to rediscover the primal impulses: The brave men on Flight 93 did. They took off on what they thought was a routine business trip, and, when they realized it wasn’t, they went into General Stark mode and cried “Let’s roll!” But it’s harder to maintain the “Live free or die!” spirit when you’re facing not an immediate crisis but just a slow, remorseless, incremental, unceasing ratchet effect. “Live free or die!” sounds like a battle cry: We’ll win this thing or die trying, die an honorable death. But in fact it’s something far less dramatic: It’s a bald statement of the reality of our lives in the prosperous West. You can live as free men, but, if you choose not to, your society will die.

My book America Alone is often assumed to be about radical Islam, firebreathing imams, the excitable young men jumping up and down in the street doing the old “Death to the Great Satan” dance. It’s not. It’s about us. It’s about a possibly terminal manifestation of an old civilizational temptation: Indolence, as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a republic. When I ran into trouble with the so-called “human rights” commissions up in Canada, it seemed bizarre to find the progressive left making common cause with radical Islam. One half of the alliance profess to be pro-gay, pro-feminist secularists; the other half are homophobic, misogynist theocrats. Even as the cheap bus ‘n’ truck road-tour version of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, it made no sense. But in fact what they have in common overrides their superficially more obvious incompatibilities: Both the secular Big Government progressives and political Islam recoil from the concept of the citizen, of the free individual entrusted to operate within his own societal space, assume his responsibilities, and exploit his potential.

In most of the developed world, the state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood—health care, child care, care of the elderly—to the point where it’s effectively severed its citizens from humanity’s primal instincts, not least the survival instinct. Hillary Rodham Clinton said it takes a village to raise a child. It’s supposedly an African proverb—there is no record of anyone in Africa ever using this proverb, but let that pass. P.J. O’Rourke summed up that book superbly: It takes a village to raise a child. The government is the village, and you’re the child. Oh, and by the way, even if it did take a village to raise a child, I wouldn’t want it to be an African village. If you fly over West Africa at night, the lights form one giant coastal megalopolis: Not even Africans regard the African village as a useful societal model. But nor is the European village. Europe’s addiction to big government, unaffordable entitlements, cradle-to-grave welfare, and a dependence on mass immigration needed to sustain it has become an existential threat to some of the oldest nation-states in the world.

And now the last holdout, the United States, is embarking on the same grim path: After the President unveiled his budget, I heard Americans complain, oh, it’s another Jimmy Carter, or LBJ’s Great Society, or the new New Deal. You should be so lucky. Those nickel-and-dime comparisons barely begin to encompass the wholesale Europeanization that’s underway. The 44th president’s multi-trillion-dollar budget, the first of many, adds more to the national debt than all the previous 43 presidents combined, from George Washington to George Dubya. The President wants Europeanized health care, Europeanized daycare, Europeanized education, and, as the Europeans have discovered, even with Europeanized tax rates you can’t make that math add up. In Sweden, state spending accounts for 54% of GDP. In America, it was 34%—ten years ago. Today, it’s about 40%. In four years’ time, that number will be trending very Swede-like.

But forget the money, the deficit, the debt, the big numbers with the 12 zeroes on the end of them. So-called fiscal conservatives often miss the point. The problem isn’t the cost. These programs would still be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover them each month. They’re wrong because they deform the relationship between the citizen and the state. Even if there were no financial consequences, the moral and even spiritual consequences would still be fatal. That’s the stage where Europe is.

America is just beginning this process. I looked at the rankings in Freedom in the 50 States published by George Mason University last month. New Hampshire came in Number One, the Freest State in the Nation, which all but certainly makes it the freest jurisdiction in the Western world. Which kind of depressed me. Because the Granite State feels less free to me than it did when I moved there, and you always hope there’s somewhere else out there just in case things go belly up and you have to hit the road. And way down at the bottom in the last five places were Maryland, California, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and the least free state in the Union by some distance, New York.

New York! How does the song go? “If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere!” If you can make it there, you’re some kind of genius. “This is the worst fiscal downturn since the Great Depression,” announced Governor Paterson a few weeks ago. So what’s he doing? He’s bringing in the biggest tax hike in New York history. If you can make it there, he can take it there—via state tax, sales tax, municipal tax, a doubled beer tax, a tax on clothing, a tax on cab rides, an “iTunes tax,” a tax on haircuts, 137 new tax hikes in all. Call 1-800-I-HEART-NEW-YORK today and order your new package of state tax forms, for just $199.99, plus the 12% tax on tax forms and the 4% tax form application fee partially refundable upon payment of the 7.5% tax filing tax. If you can make it there, you’ll certainly have no difficulty making it in Tajikistan.

New York, California… These are the great iconic American states, the ones we foreigners have heard of. To a penniless immigrant called Arnold Schwarzenegger, California was a land of plenty. Now Arnold is an immigrant of plenty in a penniless land: That’s not an improvement. One of his predecessors as governor of California, Ronald Reagan, famously said, “We are a nation that has a government, not the other way around.” In California, it’s now the other way around: California is increasingly a government that has a state. And it is still in the early stages of the process. California has thirtysomething million people. The Province of Quebec has seven million people. Yet California and Quebec have roughly the same number of government workers. “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” said Adam Smith, and America still has a long way to go. But it’s better to jump off the train as you’re leaving the station and it’s still picking up speed than when it’s roaring down the track and you realize you’ve got a one-way ticket on the Oblivion Express.

“Indolence,” in Machiavelli’s word: There are stages to the enervation of free peoples. America, which held out against the trend, is now at Stage One: The benign paternalist state promises to make all those worries about mortgages, debt, and health care disappear. Every night of the week, you can switch on the TV and see one of these ersatz “town meetings” in which freeborn citizens of the republic (I use the term loosely) petition the Sovereign to make all the bad stuff go away. “I have an urgent need,” a lady in Fort Myers beseeched the President. “We need a home, our own kitchen, our own bathroom.” He took her name and ordered his staff to meet with her. Hopefully, he didn’t insult her by dispatching some no-name deputy assistant associate secretary of whatever instead of flying in one of the bigtime tax-avoiding cabinet honchos to nationalize a Florida bank and convert one of its branches into a desirable family residence, with a swing set hanging where the drive-thru ATM used to be.

As all of you know, Hillsdale College takes no federal or state monies. That used to make it an anomaly in American education. It’s in danger of becoming an anomaly in America, period. Maybe it’s time for Hillsdale College to launch the Hillsdale Insurance Agency, the Hillsdale Motor Company and the First National Bank of Hillsdale. The executive supremo at Bank of America is now saying, oh, if only he’d known what he knows now, he wouldn’t have taken the government money. Apparently it comes with strings attached. Who knew? Sure, Hillsdale College did, but nobody else.

If you’re a business, when government gives you 2% of your income, it has a veto on 100% of what you do. If you’re an individual, the impact is even starker. Once you have government health care, it can be used to justify almost any restraint on freedom: After all, if the state has to cure you, it surely has an interest in preventing you needing treatment in the first place. That’s the argument behind, for example, mandatory motorcycle helmets, or the creepy teams of government nutritionists currently going door to door in Britain and conducting a “health audit” of the contents of your refrigerator. They’re not yet confiscating your Twinkies; they just want to take a census of how many you have. So you do all this for the “free” health care—and in the end you may not get the “free” health care anyway. Under Britain’s National Health Service, for example, smokers in Manchester have been denied treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk are refused hip and knee replacements. Patricia Hewitt, the British Health Secretary, says that it’s appropriate to decline treatment on the basis of “lifestyle choices.” Smokers and the obese may look at their gay neighbor having unprotected sex with multiple partners, and wonder why his “lifestyle choices” get a pass while theirs don’t. But that’s the point: Tyranny is always whimsical.

And if they can’t get you on grounds of your personal health, they’ll do it on grounds of planetary health. Not so long ago in Britain it was proposed that each citizen should have a government-approved travel allowance. If you take one flight a year, you’ll pay just the standard amount of tax on the journey. But, if you travel more frequently, if you take a second or third flight, you’ll be subject to additional levies—in the interest of saving the planet for Al Gore’s polar bear documentaries and that carbon-offset palace he lives in in Tennessee.

Isn’t this the very definition of totalitarianism-lite? The Soviets restricted the movement of people through the bureaucratic apparatus of “exit visas.” The British are proposing to do it through the bureaucratic apparatus of exit taxes—indeed, the bluntest form of regressive taxation. As with the Communists, the nomenklatura—the Prince of Wales, Al Gore, Madonna—will still be able to jet about hither and yon. What’s a 20% surcharge to them? Especially as those for whom vast amounts of air travel are deemed essential—government officials, heads of NGOs, environmental activists—will no doubt be exempted from having to pay the extra amount. But the ghastly masses will have to stay home.

“Freedom of movement” used to be regarded as a bedrock freedom. The movement is still free, but there’s now a government processing fee of $389.95. And the interesting thing about this proposal was that it came not from the Labour Party but the Conservative Party.

That’s Stage Two of societal enervation—when the state as guarantor of all your basic needs becomes increasingly comfortable with regulating your behavior. Free peoples who were once willing to give their lives for liberty can be persuaded very quickly to relinquish their liberties for a quiet life. When President Bush talked about promoting democracy in the Middle East, there was a phrase he liked to use: “Freedom is the desire of every human heart.” Really? It’s unclear whether that’s really the case in Gaza and the Pakistani tribal lands. But it’s absolutely certain that it’s not the case in Berlin and Paris, Stockholm and London, New Orleans and Buffalo. The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government “security,” large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time—the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff. It’s ridiculous for grown men and women to say: I want to be able to choose from hundreds of cereals at the supermarket, thousands of movies from Netflix, millions of songs to play on my iPod—but I want the government to choose for me when it comes to my health care. A nation that demands the government take care of all the grown-up stuff is a nation turning into the world’s wrinkliest adolescent, free only to choose its record collection.

And don’t be too sure you’ll get to choose your record collection in the end. That’s Stage Three: When the populace has agreed to become wards of the state, it’s a mere difference of degree to start regulating their thoughts. When my anglophone friends in the Province of Quebec used to complain about the lack of English signs in Quebec hospitals, my response was that, if you allow the government to be the sole provider of health care, why be surprised that they’re allowed to decide the language they’ll give it in? But, as I’ve learned during my year in the hellhole of Canadian “human rights” law, that’s true in a broader sense. In the interests of “cultural protection,” the Canadian state keeps foreign newspaper owners, foreign TV operators, and foreign bookstore owners out of Canada. Why shouldn’t it, in return, assume the right to police the ideas disseminated through those newspapers, bookstores and TV networks it graciously agrees to permit?

When Maclean’s magazine and I were hauled up in 2007 for the crime of “flagrant Islamophobia,” it quickly became very clear that, for members of a profession that brags about its “courage” incessantly (far more than, say, firemen do), an awful lot of journalists are quite content to be the eunuchs in the politically correct harem. A distressing number of Western journalists see no conflict between attending lunches for World Press Freedom Day every month and agreeing to be micro-regulated by the state. The big problem for those of us arguing for classical liberalism is that in modern Canada there’s hardly anything left that isn’t on the state dripfeed to one degree or another: Too many of the institutions healthy societies traditionally look to as outposts of independent thought—churches, private schools, literature, the arts, the media—either have an ambiguous relationship with government or are downright dependent on it. Up north, “intellectual freedom” means the relevant film-funding agency—Cinedole Canada or whatever it’s called—gives you a check to enable you to continue making so-called “bold, brave, transgressive” films that discombobulate state power not a whit.

And then comes Stage Four, in which dissenting ideas and even words are labeled as “hatred.” In effect, the language itself becomes a means of control. Despite the smiley-face banalities, the tyranny becomes more naked: In Britain, a land with rampant property crime, undercover constables nevertheless find time to dine at curry restaurants on Friday nights to monitor adjoining tables lest someone in private conversation should make a racist remark. An author interviewed on BBC Radio expressed, very mildly and politely, some concerns about gay adoption and was investigated by Scotland Yard’s Community Safety Unit for Homophobic, Racist and Domestic Incidents. A Daily Telegraph columnist is arrested and detained in a jail cell over a joke in a speech. A Dutch legislator is invited to speak at the Palace of Westminster by a member of the House of Lords, but is banned by the government, arrested on arrival at Heathrow and deported.

America, Britain, and even Canada are not peripheral nations: They’re the three anglophone members of the G7. They’re three of a handful of countries that were on the right side of all the great conflicts of the last century. But individual liberty flickers dimmer in each of them. The massive expansion of government under the laughable euphemism of “stimulus” (Stage One) comes with a quid pro quo down the line (Stage Two): Once you accept you’re a child in the government nursery, why shouldn’t Nanny tell you what to do? And then—Stage Three—what to think? And—Stage Four—what you’re forbidden to think . . . .

Which brings us to the final stage: As I said at the beginning, Big Government isn’t about the money. It’s more profound than that. A couple of years back Paul Krugman wrote a column in The New York Times asserting that, while parochial American conservatives drone on about “family values,” the Europeans live it, enacting policies that are more “family friendly.” On the Continent, claims the professor, “government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff-to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family.”

As befits a distinguished economist, Professor Krugman failed to notice that for a continent of “family friendly” policies, Europe is remarkably short of families. While America’s fertility rate is more or less at replacement level—2.1—seventeen European nations are at what demographers call “lowest-low” fertility—1.3 or less—a rate from which no society in human history has ever recovered. Germans, Spaniards, Italians and Greeks have upside-down family trees: four grandparents have two children and one grandchild. How can an economist analyze “family friendly” policies without noticing that the upshot of these policies is that nobody has any families?

As for all that extra time, what happened? Europeans work fewer hours than Americans, they don’t have to pay for their own health care, they’re post-Christian so they don’t go to church, they don’t marry and they don’t have kids to take to school and basketball and the 4-H stand at the county fair. So what do they do with all the time?

Forget for the moment Europe’s lack of world-beating companies: They regard capitalism as an Anglo-American fetish, and they mostly despise it. But what about the things Europeans supposedly value? With so much free time, where is the great European art? Where are Europe’s men of science? At American universities. Meanwhile, Continental governments pour fortunes into prestigious white elephants of Euro-identity, like the Airbus A380, capable of carrying 500, 800, a thousand passengers at a time, if only somebody somewhere would order the darn thing, which they might consider doing once all the airports have built new runways to handle it.

“Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor,” wrote Charles Murray in In Our Hands. “When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome.”

The key word here is “give.” When the state “gives” you plenty—when it takes care of your health, takes cares of your kids, takes care of your elderly parents, takes care of every primary responsibility of adulthood—it’s not surprising that the citizenry cease to function as adults: Life becomes a kind of extended adolescence—literally so for those Germans who’ve mastered the knack of staying in education till they’re 34 and taking early retirement at 42. Hilaire Belloc, incidentally, foresaw this very clearly in his book The Servile State in 1912. He understood that the long-term cost of a welfare society is the infantilization of the population.

Genteel decline can be very agreeable—initially: You still have terrific restaurants, beautiful buildings, a great opera house. And once the pressure’s off it’s nice to linger at the sidewalk table, have a second café au lait and a pain au chocolat, and watch the world go by. At the Munich Security Conference in February, President Sarkozy demanded of his fellow Continentals, “Does Europe want peace, or do we want to be left in peace?” To pose the question is to answer it. Alas, it only works for a generation or two. And it’s hard to come up with a wake-up call for a society as dedicated as latterday Europe to the belief that life is about sleeping in.

As Gerald Ford liked to say when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” And that’s true. But there’s an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. That’s the position European governments find themselves in. Their citizens have become hooked on unaffordable levels of social programs which in the end will put those countries out of business. Just to get the Social Security debate in perspective, projected public pension liabilities are expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8% of GDP in the U.S. In Greece, the figure is 25%—i.e., total societal collapse. So what? shrug the voters. Not my problem. I want my benefits. The crisis isn’t the lack of money, but the lack of citizens—in the meaningful sense of that word.

Every Democrat running for election tells you they want to do this or that “for the children.” If America really wanted to do something “for the children,” it could try not to make the same mistake as most of the rest of the Western world and avoid bequeathing the next generation a leviathan of bloated bureaucracy and unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme. That’s the real “war on children” (to use another Democrat catchphrase)—and every time you bulk up the budget you make it less and less likely they’ll win it.

Conservatives often talk about “small government,” which, in a sense, is framing the issue in leftist terms: they’re for big government. But small government gives you big freedoms—and big government leaves you with very little freedom. The bailout and the stimulus and the budget and the trillion-dollar deficits are not merely massive transfers from the most dynamic and productive sector to the least dynamic and productive. When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher—and you make it very difficult ever to change back. Americans face a choice: They can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea—of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest—or they can join most of the rest of the Western world in terminal decline. To rekindle the spark of liberty once it dies is very difficult. The inertia, the ennui, the fatalism is more pathetic than the demographic decline and fiscal profligacy of the social democratic state, because it’s subtler and less tangible. But once in a while it swims into very sharp focus. Here is the writer Oscar van den Boogaard from an interview with the Belgian paper De Standaard. Mr. van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay “humanist” (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool), was reflecting on the accelerating Islamification of the Continent and concluding that the jig was up for the Europe he loved. “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.” In the famous Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, Mr. van den Boogard is past denial, anger, bargaining and depression, and has arrived at a kind of acceptance.

“I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.” Sorry, doesn’t work—not for long. Back in New Hampshire, General Stark knew that. Mr. van den Boogard’s words are an epitaph for Europe. Whereas New Hampshire’s motto—”Live free or die!”—is still the greatest rallying cry for this state or any other. About a year ago, there was a picture in the papers of Iranian students demonstrating in Tehran and waving placards. And what they’d written on those placards was: “Live free or die!” They understand the power of those words; so should we.

Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

In the never-ending hit parade of evidence that President Barack Obama has relieved the US of the worldwide embarrassment caused by the Bush Administration, and has restored America’s good reputation in the world, Pravda — the Russian journal and former official organ of the Soviet Communist Party, whose name means “Truth” — published an editorial this week guffawing at the US’ rapid slide into pure Marxism.

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

The author of this piece needs an American editor to correct his grammar and word usage, but does not need anybody to correct his vision. After correctly describing the dismemberment of the institutions of liberty in America, he snorts at the ease with which President Obama has instituted policies that are every bit as oppressive as the Soviet socialism, and has hardly heard a peep from Congress or the American people about it.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe…

The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

Brace yourself for repeated misuse of the word “then” where “than” is proper, and go read the whole thing.

It’s granted that policy is not to be constructed solely to suit the opinions of foreign observers, but gee — aren’t you glad that our Messiah President has so quickly restored the world’s good opinion of America?

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

Victor Frankl, holocaust survivor

Those of us who stand for virtue and individual liberty have been deeply dismayed by the flood of destruction being produced at break-neck speed by the Obama administration. Government is mushrooming and gobbling private businesses, partisan donors are being paid off, the currency is heading for collapse, eco-loons have been unleashed to emasculate our economy and micromanage our tiniest decisions, abortionists have been blessed and given carte blance, our leaders are bowing and scraping to our enemies, and soon our doctors will all become bureaucrats. Liberty is vanishing faster than record players.

We’re all making noise as it happens, but our noise seems to make no impression. One of my readers, expressing frustration after a few years of unaccustomed activism, expressed his frustration in a poignant question: what can we do?

I don’t have answers, I have the same question. But I do have some thoughts.

I was encouraged recently by the example of the Catholic Church standing up to abortion. Recent polls are showing an increase in the number of people who call themselves “pro-life.” Abortion is the one arena in the culture war where decency has taken a stand and may yet win. In every other matter — sexual restraint, child-rearing, public expressions of faith, moral education, public decency, and so forth — the culture has laid down and permitted “progressive” dogma to overrun sound thinking and moral behavior. In this one arena, the Church took a stand en masse and publicly refused to bow to political correctness. It’s by far the most successful battle being fought in the culture war.

Republicans, conservatives, Christians — anybody who’s fighting the culture war on the side of the angels, in fact — needs to see this example and learn from it. We don’t win when we make friends with evil; it does not help to reason with it, or to attempt to find a middle ground. Evil is evil. To resist it and succeed, one must simply stand firm, like a rock, and say “No. I won’t change that. What’s right is right.”

As we grow older, we become aware of our individual limitations. When I was a young man, I used to think in terms of changing the world. Then it occurred to me that the only thing I could really affect was my own family. Now it appears that I can only change myself.

Given my limits, what I’ve chosen to do is what I do best — think, talk, and write. My goal is to comprehend those things that made the West great and good, to recover and document as much of what’s been lost as I can, to become the best, most knowledgeable, most courageous person I can become, and to trust God for the results.

Please don’t minimize the crucial importance of the last phrase. Trusting God is what keeps us doing good when it looks like all is lost. History is not a circle, it’s an upward spiral, and God wins in the end. Along the spiral, there are times when good men lead and produce greatness, and times when bad men lead and produce destruction. Bad people always carry with them the seeds of their own destruction, and the things they build always collapse in the end. During those bad times, which seem to be upon us now, good men suffer martyrdom — they lose their freedom, then they lose their prosperity, then they lose their good reputations, and then some lose their lives. But the blood of the martyrs becomes the foundation on which the greatness of the next round of good gets built.

It looks like we and our children get to be martyrs. I don’t mean we’re all going to die, although it’s possible some of us might; I mean for a while, the good people stand to lose a great deal, and will be vilified for their goodness. We get to stand for what’s decent while the rest of the world sinks into the bog. Let’s do it well, and with joy. The better we do our part, the greater the result will be after evil collapses.

So I guess I’m saying, find out what you do best, do it with great energy, become the best person you can become, and don’t lose hope. The goal is something that you may not live to see, but it’s coming, and cannot be stopped. God wins in the end, and He’s given us an honorable role to play in His victory.

I hope that doesn’t sound too cheesy or overblown. I’m not any great man, just a guy with big words and too much information. But there it is. That’s what I think we can do.

Among the flood of outrageous acts^* from the Obama White House, the government has pretty much taken over Chrysler and General Motors, two ailing auto manufacturers, stolen whatever value is left from the individuals who worked for, financed, and earned that value, and given ownership to the government and the United Auto Worker’s union. This raised fears of partisan favoritism in the conduct of business, fears which are today being amplified.

About 2 weeks ago, Chrysler filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy and announced a plan to close roughly 25% of its dealerships that were “just not pulling their weight in terms of sales.” The dealerships selected to be closed, allegedly based on sales and service records, were to receive notice and be given a chance to appeal, and the final evaluation of the bankruptcy filing was to be heard by US Bankruptcy Court in New York on June 3.

In the past two days, bloggers reviewing the list of closings have reported a deeply disturbing pattern. It appears that of all the franchisees who have been selected to close, virtually none are Obama supporters, but lots and lots are major Republican donors. From yesterday’s WorldNetDaily article:

WND reviewed the list of 789 closing franchises and databases of political donors and found that of dealership majority owners making contributions in the November 2008 election, less than 10 percent gifted to Democrats while 90 percent gave substantial sums to Republican candidates.

The listed franchise owners contributed at least $450,000 to Republican presidential candidates and the GOP, while only $7,970 was donated to Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign and $2,200 was given to Sen. John Edwards’ campaign.

Obama received a combined total of only $450 in donations – $250 from dealer Jane Baldock in Wenatchee, Wash., and $200 from Waco, Texas, dealer Jeffrey Hunter.

Ten percent to Democrats makes it seem slightly less suspicious… until you realize that all the Democrats were Obama’s adversaries.

Doug Ross has been leading the charge on the research (here Monday, here Wednesday,) and other bloggers have been tracking the political angle as well, including this one dedicated solely to tracking political donations of the Chrysler franchisees. It’s not proof positive, but it’s awfully damning.

The bankruptcy filing makes sense — Chrysler’s been in trouble for a while — but closing dealerships does not. Chrysler dealers are franchised, which means they don’t cost the company anything besides administrative costs at the home office, and those are nominal. The franchise buys the cars from the manufacturer and pays for them immediately; the cars that you see on the dealers’ lots are already revenue to the Chrysler Corporation, and are assets owned by the franchisee. In one sense, it pays Chrysler to have as many franchises open as it possibly can. It would suit them if there was a franchise on every block. They sell more cars that way, and what do they care if the franchisees can’t make any money because there are too many Chrysler dealerships?

They care because they can’t get good dealers unless the dealerships are profitable. For this reason, franchise agreements usually include market protection clauses, that say, for example, that Chrysler will only permit so many dealers per 1,000 population in a given area, or that no other franchisee will be authorized within a certain county, or some such. This is done to protect the franchisee, and smart franchise buyers check market protection clauses carefully before investing their money to buy the franchise.

So, while revoking the franchises of non-performing dealers perhaps streamlines an administrative task for the home office, and (if done fairly) might improve dealer relations, it’s not the first move one would expect a company to commence when filing for bankruptcy, nor the second, nor the third. This is not where the company needs to restructure.

It makes sense, though, as part of a partisan move to reward political allies under the cover of bankruptcy proceedings. Chrysler is most decidedly not playing fair; it’s playing hardball with the franchisees. In many states laws protect franchise owners from suddenly losing their franchise rights without compensation, and forces the franchisor (Chrysler, in this case) to help the franchisee recoup losses — buying back parts and inventory, for example. Not this time, though. From a Gannet story describing a lawsuit being filed by cut dealerships:

Chrysler’s request goes far beyond just ending dealer contracts. It would bar an affected dealer from selling any Chrysler vehicle or part under warranty after June 6. Any payments or damages from ending the contract would be left with the “old” Chrysler whose liquidation won’t cover the liabilities it assumes.

And Chrysler wants to block dealers from appealing the decision with state authorities, and asked U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Arthur Gonzalez to rule that federal bankruptcy law supersedes all state laws over dealer contracts.

Under the laws of most states, if Chrysler wanted to end a dealer contract it would have to give the dealer several months to wind down its business, offer to buy back vehicle and parts inventory and, in some cases, offer reimbursement for a number of costs, such as remodeling.

But in bankruptcy, Chrysler contends it can avoid any such liabilities as part of the case.

Take note of that phrase, “payments or damages from ending the contract would be left with the ‘old’ Chrysler.” Since Chrysler is filing bankruptcy to protect itself from creditors, this means that the franchise owners who are being shouldered out can’t obtain satisfaction from a lawsuit; they might win, but they’d have to wait in line for payment out of whatever is set aside to satisfy creditors, usually a long, drawn-out repayment process that returns pennies on the dollar.

In short, the dealers who are being cut, are being ruined financially. They’re suing based on a 5th Amendment complaint; they’re being deprived of property without due process of law, and without just compensation, by the government.

Anecdotes are surfacing suggesting that some of the cut dealers are high performers. Others complain of grossly unfair practices, like this dealer who had just finished a company-mandated facelift for his dealership when he received his cut notice. Writes Josh Painter at Red State:

Some of the dealers chosen to be terminated were among the more successful outlets in the Chrysler dealership network, and many of them had been loyal Chrysler and Dodge agents who had maintained an excellent working relationship with the Detroit automaker for decades.

Some dealers who got a thumbs down from Obama’s automotive panel told compelling stories about their situations that raised doubts about the process of selecting them for closing. One example, a dealership in Alvin, Texas, had increased its new car sales by 50% in the first four months of 2009, while other MOPAR dealers’ sales were in the tank. Another in Melbourne, Florida, had, at Chrysler’s insistence, totally renovated its facility financed by incurring millions of dollars of debt in the form of a bank mortgage.

Adding fuel to the fire, a lawyer for the excised dealers deposed Chrysler’s chief executives, and reported that it was his impression that cutting dealerships was not favored by Chrysler’s board, but was in fact the result of pressure from the Obama administration’s auto czar. The Chrysler Corp’s official statement denies this, but do we believe it?

Doug Ross claimed yesterday he has statistical proof that the closings were selected by political donation, calculating that the probability of the pattern he’s detected is roughly 1 over 1 billion. In fact, this does not prove that the complaint is true — the sample of closed dealerships is not a random sample, and correlation does not prove causation — though it does suggest it strongly.

But proof hardly matters. What matters is the perception.

Last year about this time, Kenya erupted into violence because of a national election that many perceived was rigged. Hundreds died, and hundreds of thousands fled their homes in fear. Have you ever wondered why that does not happen in the US? It’s because here in the US, losing an election does not usually mean you won’t be able to feed your family or keep your business; in Kenya, it does, because the elected officials hand out huge favors to all their political backers, normally members of their own tribes who help keep them in power. Patronage here in the US has been chicken feed by comparison — until now. Now, we’re beginning to perceive that the government is choosing winners in the economic lottery by which party they’ve donated to, and which candidate. If people begin perceiving that losing an election means they’re financially ruined, we’re on the road to civil war, and the US becomes Africa.

This cannot happen if the government stays out of private business, and remains relatively small. The reason we don’t have Africa’s level of political violence is not that we’re better people than they are, it’s that we’ve by and large kept government out of private business, and kept patronage to a minimum. As strange as it may sound, we Americans have had relatively little at stake from the outcome of political fortune, compared with the rest of the world. President Obama seems intent on changing that.

The investigation of this matter should continue, and if it turns out that the Obama administration is deliberately ruining private businesses along partisan lines, I will call for his impeachment. This is completely unacceptable in the United States. The government must be kept out of business, because an economy ruled by political self-interest is never preferable to one ruled by economic self-interest.

^*The flood of outrageous acts is a tactic, designed to prevent any individual act from getting the attention it deserves. I would say that President Obama learned it from President Clinton, who used the same tactic, but it appears that both learned it from Saul Alinsky.

There’s no obituary, and certainly no fanfare — that’s the last thing in the world the gay lobby wants in this case — but the American Psychological Association has quietly changed it’s public stance concerning the cause of homosexuality.

The only way we know is that they’ve recently published a brochure entitled “Answers to Your Questions for a Better Understanding of Sexual Orientation & Homosexuality” (catchy title, that,) and it contains the following statement:

There is no consensus among scientists about the exact reasons that an individual develops a heterosexual, bisexual, gay or lesbian orientation. Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social, and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors. Many think that nature and nurture both play complex roles….

This sounds innocuous, right? Consider how they put it just 10 years ago:

There is considerable recent evidence to suggest that biology, including genetic or inborn hormonal factors, play a significant role in a person’s sexuality.

No, there wasn’t, at least not for homosexuals, but that didn’t stop them from saying it. It was the favored position of the gay lobby, and the APA was singing their tune. There’s been a great deal of research since, but nothing new that would warrant such a dramatic shift in position.

My guess is that the APA had lost so much credibility over the years from their blatantly political positions, in the face of actual research, that they decided to back off. Either that, or the fact that the population at large is so thoroughly saturated with misinformation (most everybody believes homosexuality is genetic, whereas the research is clear that it is not) that they didn’t need to perjure themselves any longer. They don’t exactly tell the truth, but at least they’re not lying outright anymore.

The reason is immaterial. One of the favored ways for researchers to identify traits that are purely genetic is by studying identical twins; since identical twins have identical DNA, genetically-determined traits will appear in both twins 100% of the time. If one has blue eyes, for instance, so will the other — eye color is entirely genetic. There have been three studies of identical twins in which at least one twin was gay, two of them by gay researchers hoping to find a genetic link. None of the three studies found 100% correlation in sexual preference between identical twins; in fact, none of them even produced 50% correlation. The question regarding what does cause homosexuality is not settled by these studies, but one thing certainly does not cause it, and that’s genes. There may be influencing genetic factors (the way height, a genetic trait, influences basketball ability, for instance), but there is no gay gene.

For those who are interested in the history of this matter, Dr. Jeffrey Satinover has written a remarkably lucid essay, entitled The Trojan Couch, explaining how the APA succumbed to political correctness when it stopped calling homosexuality a disorder back in 1973. He also covers some of the more dishonest representations of research regarding homosexuality that advocates of gay rights have foisted on the public, and explains what recent research actually says. It’s definitely worth a read.

The California Supreme Court announced its decision yesterday in Strauss v Horton, the case challenging the amendment to the state’s Constitution that explicitly defines marriage as between a man and a woman, passed this fall as Proposition 8. They declared the proposition constitutional, and have put a stop to the state of California issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples for the time being. Meanwhile, some 11,000 same-sex couples who have been married since the same Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the statute defining marriage as between a man and a woman will be recognized by the state as legitimate, legal couples.

Take a minute with that. The state supreme court declared a statute unconstitutional, then declared more or less the same language proper when submitted as an amendment to the Constitution.

That’s not so surprising, when stated that way. What’s interesting is the reason they did it. In effect, they declared that gay marriage is an essential right, but calling it marriage is not part of that essential right. They claim that all the benefits of marriage have been obtained for gays already through other means, so gays have the same rights as straights. But, they said, there’s no Constitutional right to have what they’re doing called marriage, so Prop 8 passes muster. In effect, what they’ve just done is set up “separate but equal” for gay couples.

This is insane, and I’m guessing it will not survive.

On the same day, a challenge to Prop 8 was filed by David Boies and Theodore Olson. These are the two attorneys who argued Bush v Gore before the Supreme Court, Boies for the Democrats, Olson for the Republicans. Olson is a conservative stalwart, and I’m very disappointed that he’s participating in this case.

The challenge is apparently an Equal Protection claim, and given the fact that the California Supreme Court has just created the equivalent of what was going on in education before Brown v Board of Education in 1954, it may win. Volokh has details of the complaint.

This is all insane. There is no such thing as gay marriage. Marriage, by definition and under general agreement when just about all of these state statutes passed, means a union between a man and a woman. Such unions have been protected, encouraged, subsidized, and honored throughout human history primarily because they perpetuate our species.

There is no violation of any Constitution in any of the state laws concerning marriage; gays are permitted to marry just like anybody else. A gay man can marry any woman he chooses, if she consents, and the law does not ask him whether he’s gay or not, so there’s no discrimination. A gay woman can marry any man she likes, if he consents, and the law doesn’t care whether she’s gay or not, so there’s no discrimination. The fact that they don’t want to marry cross-gender does not mean a thing, legally, same as the fact that I don’t want to own a handgun does not mean the 2nd amendment does not apply to me. They’re protected equally under the law.

What’s going on is the same thing that’s been going on in America for about 50 years. Social progressives are forcing the nation to change in directions it does not want to change, by way of judicial tyranny. They can’t win in the legislature, so they bypass constitutionally proper procedures, pack the court system with activist judges who couldn’t care less what the law says, and force their agenda by creating rights where none existed before. This is why that now-infamous video of President Obama’s recent nominee to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayer, is so important — the one in which she says “Appellate Courts make policy.” She immediately chuckles, backpedals, and says all the right words to mollify the people watching the tape, and the crowd laughs, but the cat was out of the bag; she knew the requisite words, but she also knew how progressives like herself use the courts, and so did her audience. Make no mistake, this is tyranny, and they know perfectly well what they’re doing.

An article in this morning’s UK Telegraph highlights the problem President Obama and the Federal Reserve have created with their ill-considered attempts to stimiluate the US economy. It seems the US is having a little trouble selling its bonds — and so is every other nation on earth that’s doing the same thing.

The US is not alone in facing a deficit crisis. Governments worldwide have to raise some $6 trillion in debt this year, with huge demands in Japan and Europe. Kyle Bass from the US fund Hayman Advisors said the markets were choking on debt.

“There isn’t enough capital in the world to buy the new sovereign issuance required to finance the giant fiscal deficits that countries are so intent on running. There is simply not enough money out there,” he said. “If the US loses control of long rates, they will not be able to arrest asset price declines. If they print too much money, they will debase the dollar and cause stagflation.

“The bottom line is that there is no global ‘get out of jail free’ card for anyone”, he said.

As a result of competition for the available funds and of wariness about the US “printing money” to pay back their debt with debased currency, investors have driven up the price of bonds 90 basis points since March. That’s not a crippling amount — yet — but it’s an indicator of what’s to come. It’s only going to get worse.

The Obama administration needs to raise $2 trillion this year to cover the fiscal stimulus plan and the bank bail-outs. It has to fund $900bn by September.

“The dynamic is just getting overwhelming,” said RBC Capital Markets.

As the price of the US debt goes higher, the cost of maintaining the debt goes higher, and interest rates in the US go higher as well.

The world is watching to see how much money the Fed is going to “print,” which they do by buying their own debt issues. If they buy too much, the world may stop buying our debt, and then the dollar would crash:

The US Treasury is selling $40bn of two-year notes on Tuesday, $35bn of five-year bonds on Wednesday, and $25bn of seven-year debt on Thursday. While the US has not yet suffered the indignity of a failed auction – unlike Britain and Germany – traders are watching closely to see what share is being purchased by US government itself in pure “monetisation” of the deficit…

The dollar has fallen 11pc against a basket of currencies since early March. Mutterings of a “dollar crisis” may now constrain the Fed as it tries to shore up the bond market. It has so far bought $116bn of Treasuries as part of its “credit easing” blitz, out of a $300bn pool.

The crash has not come, but it may be on its way.

The Washington Race Course in Charleston, South Carolina was one of several sites converted to prison camps for Union soldiers when the Confederacy evacuated the Andersonville Prison Camp in Georgia to prevent General Sherman from freeing the prisoners during his March Through Georgia in 1864. The soldiers, who arrived there already starved and diseased, were herded into the track’s infield and kept there in the open, without shelter. They soon began to die. Two hundred fifty seven were buried in shallow, unmarked graves behind the judge’s stand.

Freed blacks from the city of Charleston saw the irony of the race course, a symbol of the planter aristocracy, being used to house ill-treated prisoners of the war to free them, and decided that the soldiers who died there needed proper burial as a means to honor their sacrifice. In April of 1865, just days after the Confederacy’s surrender at the Battle of Appomattox Courthouse, a few dozen volunteers calling themselves “Friends of the Martyrs” and “the Patriotic Association of Colored Men” spent 10 days exhuming the bodies and burying them properly in individual graves with caskets and headstones, although there was no way to identify most of them.

On Monday morning, May 1, 1865, 10,000 freed black residents of Charleston attended the funeral for these, their liberators. Almost 3 thousand black children filed past them singing “John Brown’s Body”. They were joined by several “colored regiments” of the Union Army: the 104th and the 35th, and the famous Massachusetts 54th, the first colored regiment. They prayed, listened to sermons, dedicated the place as a Union cemetery, and held picnics. They called it Decoration Day. And in the next few years, they returned to decorate the graves at the race track with flowers.

Celebrations to honor the Union dead spread for several decades, and then were recognized as a national holiday. There were separate days to honor the Confederate dead created by southern states, who did not want to celebrate the honoring of the Union dead; these continued until the mid-20th century, and then were merged into the national Memorial Day.

Memorial Day has been expanded to commemorate all those who have died defending the United States of America in any fashion. The first Memorial Day, however, was a spontaneous expression of genuine gratitude by freed blacks for those who had died to free them.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Day
http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2009/may/24/the_first_memorial_day83450/
http://home.att.net/~edboots/racecourse.htm
http://www.uufhc.net/s020526.html

Discussing President Obama’s proposed plan for handling Guantanamo detainees yesterday, the New York Times provided us with a picture of how “shredding the Constitution” gets treated when it’s performed by a Democrat rather than a Republican.

In a somber, thoughtful tones, they inform us that we’re “uncomfortable” with departing from “how we see ourselves” — although, they remind us right at the top, in paragraph 2, there are already several circumstances where we already allow departures for the purpose of safety.

President Obama’s proposal for a new legal system in which terrorism suspects could be held in “prolonged detention” inside the United States without trial would be a departure from the way this country sees itself, as a place where people in the grip of the government either face criminal charges or walk free.

There are, to be sure, already some legal tools that allow for the detention of those who pose danger: quarantine laws as well as court precedents permitting the confinement of sexual predators and the dangerous mentally ill. Every day in America, people are denied bail and locked up because they are found to be a hazard to their communities, though they have yet to be convicted of anything.

Still, the concept of preventive detention is at the very boundary of American law, and legal experts say any new plan for the imprisonment of terrorism suspects without trial would seem inevitably bound for the Supreme Court.

It’s naught but a necessary extension of existing practices, opposed mostly by our feelings, neh?

This stands in stark contrast to measures practiced by the Evil Bush Administration, which shredded the Constitution and damaged the rule of law. Here’s an editorial from just 7 months ago, regarding the Uighurs (who are likely to be included in President Obama’s thoughtful, creative but uncomfortable “prolonged detention” solution):

A federal judge in Washington has struck an important blow for the rule of law by ordering that 17 detainees be freed from Guantánamo Bay. But the Bush administration is fighting the ruling to avoid having the case become an open window into the outlaw world of President Bush’s detention camps.

Oh, those evil, evil, evil Bushites. They oppose the “rule of law.” Theirs is an “outlaw world.”

Or check this article, from March, 2007:

The start of military commission proceedings has opened one new chapter in the five-year saga of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay. The Supreme Court may soon open another.

The court is likely to announce within days whether it will hear appeals filed on behalf of two groups of detainees who have been held at the United States naval base in Cuba, many since early 2002. Their lawyers are asking the justices to strike down a new law that stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear challenges to the validity of the detainees’ confinement…

Only 10 of the 385 prisoners at Guantánamo have been formally charged… the cases challenge the core assumption on which the Bush administration based its legal strategy for handling the hundreds of prisoners the government acquired on and off the battlefield, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Muslim areas of eastern Europe and elsewhere in the months after Sept. 11, 2001: By holding them outside the boundaries of the United States, it could keep them away from the protection, or at least the scrutiny, of the federal courts.

“At issue in this case is nothing less than this country’s commitment to the rule of law,” says the brief filed for one group of detainees, six Algerians seized by the Bosnian police in Sarajevo in 2001.

I guess perpetual detention without trial does not trouble the Constitution at all, so long as it occurs inside the boundaries of the United States. How else are we to explain the newfound calm of those Defenders Of Our Liberties at the Times, given that that is the only detectable difference between Obama’s proposal and the Outlaw World of Bush Detention?

The Times continues its consistent efforts to act as an extension of President Obama’s Ministry of Truth.

Sing with me: “What a difference a ‘D’ makes…”

Victor Davis Hanson yesterday drew attention to the “tales told by idiots” department, declaring the era of “Bush Shredded the Constitution” over in the wake of the Senate Democrats’ defeat of funding for Obama’s plan to close down Guantanamo.

With the Democratic no-go on Guantánamo (I’ll leave it to the better informed to ascertain the degree that the Democratic Congress came to the rescue of an embarrassed Obama administration and cut off funding for the shutdown to allow him an out with the now familiar excuse of “they did it — not me, who keeps promises”), I think we now have come to the end to the five-year left-wing attack theme of Bush “shredding the Constitution.”

Except for the introduction of euphemisms and a few new ballyhooed but largely meaningless protocols, there is no longer a Bush-did-it argument. The Patriot Act, wiretaps, e-mail intercepts, military tribunals, Predator drone attacks, Iraq, Afghanistan — and now Guantánamo — are officially no longer part of the demonic Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld nexus, but apparently collective legitimate anti-terrorism measures designed to thwart killers, and by agreement, after years of observance, of great utility in keeping us safe the last eight years…

And I guess as well that the good old days of supposedly flushed Korans in Guantánamo and Omar the poor liberationist renditioned to Cairo are over. We are now in the age of a sober and judicious President Obama who circumspectly, if reluctantly and in anguish at the high cost, does what is necessary to keep us safe.

And we won’t see a brave young liberal senator, Obama-like, barnstorming the Iowa precincts blasting a presidency for trampling our values with the shame of Guantánamo, wiretaps, intercepts, renditions, military tribunals, Predators, Iraq, etc. That motif just dissolved — or rather, it never really existed.

It short, all the fury, the vicious slander, the self-righteous outbursts, the impassioned speeches from the floor, the “I accuse” op-eds by the usual moralistic pundits — all that turned out to be solely about politics, nothing more.

Hanson characteristically states the case plainly, but he’s far too polite. False accusation is evil. False accusation from those tasked with running the country, aimed at good and competent men, for the purpose of gaining political power for themselves, with complete disregard for the welfare of the nation — they’re fortunate they’re not being tarred, feathered, and ridden out of Washington on a rail, but that’s no less than what they deserve. And in the wake of their rank dishonesty, millions of unthinking drones within the Democratic party will go the rest of their lives thinking of the Bush years as battles furiously fought to protect their rights from ravagement by the dastardly Bush Crime Family, and the Obama years as years of restored sanity and safety, without once recognizing that both metaphors refer to the same set of policies.

Obama’s real agenda is economic and social. He cares about turning the United States into a Worker’s Paradise and a bastion of True Justice, as defined by world Marxism. He wants to redistribute income, capital, and opportunity to make America fair; he wants to force us all to drive smaller cars, use alternative energy sources, and produce less in order to save the planet; he wants to liberate all Americans from the iron-fisted tyranny of old-world morals; he wants all industry under the thumb of government so they cannot steal from the people; all as defined by world Marxism. (Translation: He wants to tax the productive and give their money to the unproductive, he wants to adopt the full socialism that the rest of the world rejected as a failure twenty years ago, he wants to institute unnecessary and scientifically irrelevant controls on harmless gases, he wants to legalize every possible social distortion, and he wants to prevent any businessman from actually making money.)

But he doesn’t care all that much about foreign policy, except that he wants to apologize for how arrogant we’ve all been and stop our interfering with the advance of World Socialism. The reality of the fact that America has been attacked, and will be attacked again if we’re not vigilant, is an incidental reality that cannot be obscured by his preconceived notions of A Just America. Consequently, his foreign policy so far has been a quick and red-faced reversal of every article of faith in the left’s War on Terror dogma. We now know that the Bush administration was thoughtful, foresightful, and legally correct on virtually everything they did to protect America, and that the Obama administration has quietly admitted that everything they said about his policy was either politically-motivated lie, or vicious ignorance of the facts.

The good news is that the safeguards developed by the Bush administration will not vanish overnight; we’ll remain somewhat safe for a while. The bad news is that they’re doing it grudgingly, hoping they can gradually convert us back to our 9/10 strategy of prosecuting terrorists as though they were simple criminals, and not an attacking army.

They will never admit what they did, but it behooves us to remind our adversaries every time it comes up that their entire campaign of slander against the Bush administration was an evil game, and that when offered the chance to repudiate his decisions, they meekly adopted every one.

A tip of the blogger hat to Michelle Malkin, who declares “For now, the adults have prevailed.”