THIS PAGE LISTS SOME OF THE ACTUAL ABSURDITIES THAT GO ON INSIDE AMERICA. THESE STORIES ARE NOT FABRICATED...THEY ACTUALLY HAPPENED!
Anti-U.S. Prof Enrages Columbia Alums
Columbia University alumni and donors are furious at a professor who wants to see a million U.S. troops killed and dragged through the streets.
Anthropology and "Latino studies" assistant professor Nicholas De Genova said last week at a so-called "teach-in" on the Iraq war: "The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military.
"I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus," he said, referring to the Somalian Muslims who desecrated the bodies of U.S. troops sent by Bill Clinton on a disastrous mission to assist them.
He also uttered this masterpiece of stupidity to 3,000 students and fellow eggheads: "Peace is not patriotic. Peace is subversive, because peace anticipates a very different world than the one in which we live - a world where the U.S. would have no place.”
Oh? If the U.S. had no place in the world, how would useless leftist pseudo-intellectuals rake in fat salaries for presiding over a whopping two or three classes a term?
De Genova is hiding as the uproar over his sickening remarks grows, the New York Post reported today.
Disgusted by the remarks of De Genova and other anti-American eggheads at Columbia, Dr. Stephen Rittenberg, Class of 1957, wrote the Web site of the student newspaper Columbia Spectator: "The infantile narcissism of the anti-war profs is sickening. Once upon a time, Columbia professors thought it was their duty to teach critical thinking rather than to indoctrinate in anti-Americanism."
Columbia President Lee Bollinger at first merely said that De Genova's views were not those of the university. But now, fearing he'll lose those precious dollars, Bollinger is finally speaking out.
"I am shocked that someone would make such statements," Bollinger said. "Because of the university's tradition of academic freedom, I normally don't comment about statements made by faculty members. However, this one crosses the line and I really feel the need to say something. I am especially saddened for the families of those whose lives are at risk."
By the way, here's what De Genova said in April 2002 at a pro-Palestinian rally at Columbia: "The heritage of the victims of the Holocaust belongs to the Palestinian people. The state of Israel has no claim to the heritage of the Holocaust."
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
WASHINGTON – A California college professor who told her students to write President Bush to protest a war in Iraq is causing a pro-American backlash. And a former U.S. attorney general says philosophical diversity in campus faculties is a remedy to such abuses.
“I think we need diversity of opinion and world outlook on campus faculties,” Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese told NewsMax.com.
Noting the lopsided leftist tilt of most university instructors (which NewsMax has documented in the past), Meese said: “Diversity in faculty view is important. Why not? They favor diversity on everything else.”
Thought Cop Kahn Gets Busted and Exposed
Professor Rosalyn Kahn of Citrus College in California not only gave students extra credit for writing President Bush an anti-war letter, she refused to give credit to those who wrote letters that did not agree with her view, according to wire reports today. Other news accounts have said the assignment was required. She refuses to talk.
The president of Citrus College apologized to President Bush, "penalized" Kahn with a paid leave of absence, and gave the students an alternative assignment.
Meese’s comments Tuesday to NewsMax came in a larger context of the issue of academic abuse. He had just participated in a Washington gathering of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). The coalition of groups from across the political spectrum launched a campaign to “challenge and end the censorship, kangaroo courts, double standards, violation of foundational rights, and arbitrary practices that currently prevail at too many of our college campuses.”
It was FIRE that brought the Citrus College case to national attention.
Guides to Student Rights
The meeting at the National Press Club celebrated the formal launch of Guides to Student Rights on Campus issued by the FIRE.
“We trust that these guides will enable a wholly new kind of discourse on college and university campuses,” said FIRE President Alan Charles Kors. “A nation that does not educate in liberty will not long enjoy it, and will not even know when it has lost it.”
Speakers at the panel discussion alluded to issues typified by campus speech codes, theft of campus newspapers that publish a “politically incorrect” view, and the practice of shouting down conservative speakers whose views depart from the left-wing establishment, sometimes driving them from the podium.
Hooray: ACLU Does Something Right
Varying political outlooks were represented at FIRE’s guides launch. Nadine Strossen, president of American Civil Liberties Union (organized decades ago by Roger Baldwin, “one of the nation’s leading figures in left-of-center circles,” according to the Web site Notable Unitarians), said the ACLU would defend student rights against speech codes and that FIRE is “a coalition beyond the usual suspects.” Although the ACLU has attracted some conservative support, it is generally considered well to the left on most issues.
Libertarian precincts were represented by CATO Institute Vice President Roger Pilon, who got a “D” at Columbia University from a professor who simply did not like his views expressed in a term paper, “What’s Wrong With the Welfare State?”
Jordan Lorence, a senior counsel for Alliance Defense Fund, called for a campus recognition of individual liberty and conscience, including religious beliefs often scorned in academia.
The campus ruling elites have an “impulse to suppress free speech,” he said. “They don’t call it that. They argue they are merely ‘re-educating.'”
FIRE intends to support students who have been harassed for expressing views unpopular with those who have the power and the campus megaphone.
The organization has implemented a Know Your Rights program to address its urgent need for students and parents to understand the legal and moral status of student rights on our nation’s campuses “and to understand the means to defend and assert these rights.”
Kors noted that the political and philosophical diversity on FIRE's board (including veterans of the Reagan and Clinton administrations) “demonstrates that campus liberty is not a matter of partisan politics, but of the rights and responsibilities of free individuals in a free society.”
Written by legal experts, each guide addresses ways in which students’ rights are curtailed on campuses today and the ways to make those rights whole.
The five volumes are titled “FIRE’s Guide to Religious Liberty on Campus," “FIRE’s Guide to Student Fees, Funding and Legal Equality on Campus," “FIRE’s Guide to Due Process and Fair Procedure on Campus," “FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus” and “FIRE’s Guide to First-Year Orientation and to Thought Reform on Campus.”
Apparently, if you don't think along the lines of Gays and Lesbians alike then you should be banned and censored!
Wednesday, March 5, 2003 10:46 a.m. EST
Gay Groups Keep Trying to Censor Savage
Several gay groups led by Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) are still fighting MSNBC's new weekend program with radio star Michael Savage.
The New York Post's John Mainelli reports that after GLAAD failed to stop Savage's TV broadcast this past weekend, the group called off plans for a powwow with MSNBC brass.
Now GLAAD is apparently taking its protest to MSNBC's advertisers.
"Write it up - it'll help my lawyer," a furious Savage told the Post.
He said he would take his critics, whom he has called "Nazi bastards from hell," to court.
"This is now interfering with business - it's a restraint of trade issue," Savage said. "They're violating federal law, and they'll find that out very soon."
According to the Post, Savage's debut had double the number of viewers who usually tune in to MSNBC.
GLAAD claims Savage is inciting hate and making "inflammatory diatribes targeting minorities."
Savage's nationally syndicated radio show is one of the nation's largest, and his new book, "Savage Nation," has topped the New York Times' best-seller list for weeks.
How's This For "Peaceful Resolutions"?
Tuesday, March 11, 2003
Appeasement Activists Burn U.S. Flags, Trash 9/11 Memorial
Those Marxist-led appeasement demonstrators are showing their true colors: A gang of them in La-La Land ripped up American flags, flowers and patriotic signs at a Sept. 11 memorial.
And get this: The P.C.-crazed police officers in Whittier, Calif., witnessed the vandalism Saturday on private property but refused to arrest the criminals.
The criminals were "exercising the same freedom of speech that the people who put up the flags were," La Habra Police Capt. John Rees claimed Monday. "For this to be vandalism, there had to be an ill-will intent."
He failed to define "ill-will intent." Who has more ill will than fanatical flag-destroying pro-Saddam leftists?
Residents erected the memorial on a fence along Whittier Boulevard days after the terrorist attacks in 2001 and have maintained it ever since, the Whittier Daily News reported today.
Jeff Collison, owner of The RV Center in La Habra, who allowed residents to add patriotic symbols to the fence on his property, wonders why cops are letting the left-wing criminals off.
"Their free speech stops at destruction of private property. If they are allowed to come on my property and burn flags, does that mean I can go to City Hall or the police station and light their flags on fire because that is freedom of speech? To me, this is vandalism," Collison noted.
Tracey Chandler, a mother of four who has maintained the spontaneous memorial since it was created by other area residents soon after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, expressed outrage at the destruction.
"They trashed 87 flags, ripped 11 memorial tiles made by myself and my children out of the ground and glued the Bob Dylan song to a sign that said, 'America, land of the brave, home of the free,'" she told the newspaper. The Dylan song she mentioned, "With God on Our Side," was an anti-war anthem of the 1960s.
"It's unbelievable, because there were absolutely no political messages on this fence. It was all about supporting our troops, which could mean bringing them home, and about remembering 9/11."
Mrs. Chandler plans to revive the Sept. 11 memorial.
"We are going to rebuild this memorial, and it will be brighter, bigger and better than ever."
Political Correctness: The Scourge of Our Times
Agustin Blazquez with the collaboration of Jaums Sutton
Monday, April 8, 2002
Does anyone know the origins of Political Correctness? Who originally developed it and what was its purpose?
I looked it up. It was developed at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, which was founded in 1923 and came to be known as the "Frankfurt School." It was a group of thinkers who pulled together to find a solution to the biggest problem facing the implementers of communism in Russia.
The problem? Why wasn't communism spreading?
Their answer? Because Western Civilization was in its way.
What was the problem with Western Civilization? Its belief in the individual, that an individual could develop valid ideas. At the root of communism was the theory that all valid ideas come from the effect of the social group of the masses. The individual is nothing.
And they believed that the only way for communism to advance was to help (or force, if necessary) Western Civilization to destroy itself. How to do that? Undermine its foundations by chipping away at the rights of those annoying individuals.
One way to do that? Change their speech and thought patterns by spreading the idea that vocalizing your beliefs is disrespectful to others and must be avoided to make up for past inequities and injustices.
And call it something that sounds positive: "Political Correctness."
Inspired by the brand new communist technique, Mao, in the 1930s, wrote an article on the "correct" handling of contradictions among the people. "Sensitive training" – sound familiar? – and speech codes were born.
In 1935, after Hitler came to power, the Frankfurt School moved to New York City, where they continued their work by translating Marxism from economic to cultural terms using Sigmund Freud's psychological conditioning mechanisms to get Americans to buy into Political Correctness. In 1941, they moved to California to spread their wings.
But Political Correctness remains just what it was intended to be: a sophisticated and dangerous form of censorship and oppression, imposed upon the citizenry with the ultimate goal of manipulating, brainwashing and destroying our society.
PC Cuba
My first conscious exposure to Political Correctness was in 1959 – the first year of Castro's revolution in Cuba – while attending an indoctrination session at a neighborhood elementary school in Havana. There I learned for the first time of the claimed superiority of life in the Soviet Union vs. the U.S.
There I also learned that the word "compañero" (filtered version of the communist "comrade" – Fidel was denying his communist preferences) was the correct way to refer to the other members of the new Cuban society-in-the-making.
Mr., Mrs. and Miss were no longer acceptable, and their further use could reveal that you were not a Fidelista. Since repression and violations of human rights came roaring in right behind Castro's sweep down from the mountains in 1959, objection or rejection of Fidel Castro's revolution would (and still will) land you in a lot of trouble. You could easily lose your life in those summary executions at La Cabaña prison under the direction of Che Guevara.
But don't worry about Che. Che was later transformed and cleansed by the masters of Political Correctness. His likeness became a revered icon of the far left, with T-shirts and posters still adorning the campuses of America.
The same techniques were used to cleanse one of today's "heroes," Mumia Abu-Jamal (even if he was convicted, by overwhelming evidence, of killing a cop).
And under the pervasive guidance of Political Correctness that took hold from elementary school to university, from the media to the arts, from the country fields to factories and offices, Cubans learned to say what it was safe to say. Always in line with the overpowering state. Always following the dictums of the only political party left: the Communist Party.
The self-censorship resulting from Political Correctness easily trampled freedom of speech. Political Correctness has succeeded in Cuba by creating a uniform political discourse that has lasted for 43 years.
Political Correctness has given the state (Castro) complete control of speech. That is the main reason why the U.S. media cannot extract the truth of what Cubans really feel when they interview regular citizens and deceptively present their comments as valid to the American public.
The same was true in the former Soviet Union and the former satellite countries. The same continues in the remaining communist world.
It's nothing new. The U.S. media must know that, so why don't they openly report that fact instead of misleading the public? Perhaps that is the reason why the American people are so uneducated about the Cuban tragedy and acted regrettably during the Elian Gonzalez affair.
The PC U.S.
With profound dismay, I have seen how the scourge of Political Correctness has taken hold in the U.S. It is very well entrenched in our educational system, at scientific, religious and community levels, the media, the workplace and even our government.
It is changing the American society from within, and the citizens of this nation are increasingly censoring themselves and losing their freedom of speech out of fear of Political Correctness repression.
It is the nature of Western Civilization to be civilized – respectful of others and concerned with correcting injustices. We don't need Political Correctness to make us think we are not civilized on our own and must have our thoughts and words restricted.
In December 2001, in Kensington, Md., an annual firefighters Santa Claus festivity to light the Christmas tree was objected to by two families. The city council, in the name of Political Correctness, voted to ban Santa from the parade. Fortunately, due to citizen outcry, the decision was reversed in the end and many people protested by dressing up as Santa.
Logically and respectfully, how can one person's benign icon be objectionable to the point of banishment? Offer to add other people's icons. Make it a broader celebration. That's the Perfectly Correct American way.
The rulers of Political Correctness reach absurd levels when they refer to the betrayal of America by the spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg – executed in 1953 – as "non-traditional patriotism"!
We see shameful situations created in our schools and universities in America that have fallen prey to Political Correctness. Some professors, students and publications are being attacked for expressing a point of view that differs from that imposed by a fanatical far left, under the guise of Political Correctness.
In schools and workplaces we see that "diversity" has degenerated into reverse discrimination, where often the less qualified are admitted and the incompetent cannot be fired. We have seen characters like Rev. Jesse Jackson shamelessly blackmailing and threatening to boycott entire corporations if they don't hire those selected by him or simply make "donations" to his organizations.
The Double Standard Emerges
Our Constitution requires the separation of church and state, which has always discouraged our public education system from teaching religion. However, in December 2001, while Christmas cards, symbols and decorations were being objected to for the first time in American public schools in Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Oregon, in an elementary school in Texas, a girl was allowed to give to her classmates an overview and show a video about her Muslim religion.
And in January 2002, a public middle school in San Luis Obispo, Calif., had its students pretend to be warriors fighting for Islam. Another school near Oakland, Calif., also encouraged 125 seventh-grade students to dress up in Muslim robes for a three-week course on Islam.
This arbitrary double standard was applied in the name of Political Correctness following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
According to Ellen Sorokin's "No Founding Fathers?" published by the Washington Times on its front page on Jan. 28, 2002, even our Founding Fathers have fallen victim to the travesty. The article says of the New Jersey Department of Education's history standards,
"The latest revisions to the state standards have disappointed educators across the country, who said the board's exclusion of the Founding Fathers' names is 'Political Correctness to the nth degree.' "
Sorokin points out that "the standards specifically note that students should identify slavery, the Holocaust and modern Iraq as examples in which 'people have behaved in cruel and inhumane ways.' " Conveniently, communism is absent from that short list.
In another article by Sorokin, published by the Washington Times on March 10, "Report Blames Anti-Americanism on College Teachers," she presents two examples of upcoming courses for next spring and fall. They are " 'The Sexuality of Terrorism' at University of California at Hayward; and 'Terrorism and the Politics of Knowledge' at UCLA, a class that, according to its course description, examines 'America's record of imperialistic adventurism.' "
Recently, a historic photograph of the New York firefighters raising the American flag over the ruins of the World Trade Center was going to be made into a sculpture as a memorial.
But history's revisionists used Political Correctness to dictate that other minority faces replace some of the faces in the historical photograph! Fortunately, in the end that didn't fly either, due to the outcry of firefighters and the public.
The Goal of the PC Dictators
For people with the background and firsthand experience of living inside a totalitarian communist society, the tilt and goal of the dictators of Political Correctness in America are obvious.
The beneficiaries in the end will be the fanatic believers in the totalitarian state, who, in spite of the dismal failure of communism and the 100 million people exterminated pursuing that criminal system, have not given up.
Political and religious fanatics, as demonstrated by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the subsequent war in Afghanistan, are extremely dangerous in today's world.
All citizens who cherish liberty must reject the scourge of Political Correctness. Freedom of speech must be preserved in America if we are to continue to be free.
Let's say it: Castro is not a 'president,' as the U.S. media's Political Correctness calls him. Castro has not been democratically elected to anything in Cuba. The correct word to define him is 'tyrant.' He is not just a 'leader,' as the U.S. media also calls him. He is more of a criminal Mafioso-type character.
Why criminal? Because he has caused the deaths of more than 100,000 Cubans. Thousands have died through his support of guerrillas in Central and South America. Thousands of blacks were killed by Castro's soldiers in Africa. Castro in the 1980s introduced the use of bacteriological weapons to kill blacks in Angola.
How many thousands have died in America as a result of his drug trafficking into the U.S.? How many thousands have died all over the world due to terrorists trained in Castro's Cuba?
Former Soviet colonel Ken Alibek, who defected to America, was once in charge of the Soviet Union's production of biological weapons. In Alibek's 1999 book, "Biohazard," he revealed that with the help of the Soviet Union, in the 1980s Cuba created laboratories to produce chemical and bacteriological weapons of mass destruction – just 90 miles from U.S. shores.
The information about Castro's involvement with bacteriological weapons also comes from various independent sources. We must not forget either that Cuba is on the U.S. State Department's list of terrorist nations.
Why Mafioso? Well, Castro is like an untouchable godfather, surrounded by bodyguards and thugs and a private army of about 40,000 soldiers for his personal protection (roughly the size of the entire army of Cuba prior to 1959).
He stole foreign and national properties in Cuba. He has become one of the richest men in the world, according to Forbes magazine. He has created a despotic and corrupt elite to exploit the Cuban people and keep himself in power. He has made the Cuban people hostages and slaves of his corrupt regime.
The U.S. media do not call Al Capone "the former leader" of the Italian Mafia. Why the double standard with Fidel and other far-left regimes? The answer can be traced to where the sympathies lie – with the elite dictating Political Correctness in America.
It's one thing is to be educated, considerate, polite and have good manners, and another to be forced to self-censor and say things that are totally incorrect in order to comply with the arbitrary dictums of a deceiving and fanatical far-left agenda.
Let's preserve our freedom and say NO to the scourge of Political Correctness.
Commencements of 2002 Achieve New Degree of Political Correctness
Marc Levin
Tuesday, June 18, 2002
As the season of college graduations draws to a close, it is clear that, despite the massacres of September 11, many colleges are more determined than ever before to send graduates into the world with divisive and politicized ceremonies, eschewing the themes of optimism and unity traditionally associated with commencements.
Perhaps the most disturbing trend is the advent of separate ceremonies for minority groups. While the blood shed at the World Trade Center and Pentagon was the same color for all who were murdered, many universities have decided that the best way to prepare their graduates for an increasingly diverse society is to hold segregated graduations.
In 2002, the University of California at Santa Cruz held a special ceremony for over 45 gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students. This event even included local high school and community college graduates, indoctrinating them into the separatist campus orthodoxy. At Iowa State University, the "Lavender Graduation” was held to honor lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students. The University of Michigan also sponsors a separate homosexual graduation.
Other segregated ceremonies focus on race and ethnicity, sometimes with curious omissions. This year the University of Texas at Austin held a separate graduation event for racial and ethnic minorities that included African-American, Hispanic and Native American students, but excluded Asian-Americans. Similarly, the California State Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo convenes a special ceremony only for black students.
The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) attempts to cover all the bases, holding a "Lavender Graduation” for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Students and a "Raza Graduation” for Latinos, as well as separate graduations for Filipinos, Asian Pacific Islanders, African-Americans, Iranians and American Indians.
Even when graduations do not themselves promote divisiveness through separate minority ceremonies, left-wing commencement speakers often create discord by making egregious remarks. Perhaps the most offensive commencement address in 2002 was delivered by Professor bell hooks (sic), who rejects capitalization as an invalid social construct, at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.
Hooks stated, "The radical, dissident voices among you have learned here at Southwestern how to form communities of resistance that have helped you find your way in the midst of life-threatening conservatism, loneliness and the powerful forces of everyday fascism which use the politics of exclusion and ostracism to maintain the status quo. Every terrorist regime in the world uses isolation to break people's spirits."
Hooks declared, "Indeed our nation's call for violence in the aftermath of 9/11 was an expression of widespread hopelessness, the cynicism that has been at the heart of our nation's ongoing fascination with death." She said that following 9/11:
Many Americans experienced for the first time a moment of clarity when they knew without a doubt that to choose life, we must stand against violence, we must choose peace. And yet that moment of collective clarity was soon obscured by the imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal hunger to show the planet our nation's force, to show that this nation would commit absolute acts of violence that will wipe out whole nations and worlds. The world was held spellbound by our government's declaration of its commitment to violence, to death.
At Smith College in Massachusetts, law Professor Lani Guinier, responding to President Bush’s statement at the Yale commencement last year that he demonstrates that even "C" students can be president, remarked, "You, too, can be president, but only if you're a straight white man." Apparently, Guinier is unaware of polls showing that the vast majority of Americans would vote for a minority president, including specific surveys indicating that Colin Powell could have won the presidency in 2000.
While leftists who do not hold public office, like hooks and Guinier, are often invited to give commencement speeches, a Young America’s Foundation study shows conservatives who do not hold public office are rarely asked to speak.
Even when conservatives do deliver commencement addresses, a protest can almost always be counted on. For example, students protested Condoleezza Rice this year at Stanford University. Liberal students even denounced apolitical children's entertainer Fred Rogers, who spoke this year at Dartmouth University, his alma mater, because he is not a "human rights activist."
Black soldiers fighting valiantly for America beside whites in World War II helped inspire the great civil rights movement of the 1960s. Likewise, September 11 has renewed similar feelings of patriotism and unity in American society. However, as the commencements of 2002 show, academia remains a bastion of political correctness that rejects the integrationist model of the original civil rights movement and instead sows divisiveness and dissension into the hearts and minds of America’s young people.
Race Fanatics and Political Realities
Neal Boortz
Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2000
Race Warlord Wannabe Moves In
I guess you knew it was going to happen. After all, little Ashley Smith, the girl who was kicked out of the Cobb County school because of her Tweetie Bird key chain, is black.
Let’s see, a black child is the victim of an idiotic disciplinary action by a white-run school system. Ahhhhhh! Just too good.
No, it didn’t have anything to do with race – not one thing. But you do have the essential ingredients. So it’s only a matter of time before the race whores come rushing in for a little publicity.
In this instance it’s some publicity pig named Gerald Rose with a so-called civil rights group called New Order.
He’s out there parading his face in front of any microphone he can find demanding an apology from the Cobb school system to the Smith family. Oh, and Gerald Rose also wants that teacher who told a couple of black girls in her class to stop calling each other that N-word kicked out of the district!
Ohmigawd! She said the word! Off with her head!
Mr. Rose is going to lead a little protest and see just how much face time the pandering Atlanta media will give him. Time for your 15 minutes of fame, Mr. Rose!
Speaking of race relations, this item out of Rhode Island is a hot potato.
Maybe you didn’t know it, but Mr. Potato Heads are popping up all over Rhode Island. It’s part of a tourism campaign. I guess Rhode Island is some kind of a potato haven. So much for Idaho.
Anyway, one artist put a Mr. Potato Head in front of the Warwick, R.I., city hall. This particular Mr. Potato Head was supposed to be the "Tourist Tater." Like so many tourists, this one was wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt, a hat and some sunglasses. Oh, and this tater had a tan. Too much time in the sun for old Mr. Tourist Potato Head.
Well, a picture of the Tourist Tater ended up in the newspaper. Then one Onna Moniz-John, the affirmative action officer for East Providence, saw the picture.
Uh, oh! Ms. Moniz-John thinks that the Tourist Tater looks like Little Black Sambo.
So …
Now the Tourist Tater is gone from the Warwick city hall. A victim of political correctness and one super-thin-skinned affirmative action officer.
In case you haven’t checked lately, potato skins are usually brown. Except for the red ones. Maybe the Indians need to get in on the act here, too!
Seriously, how in the hell does anyone expect to see an improvement in race relations in this country when all hell breaks loose over a Mr. Potato Head wearing a Hawaiian shirt? Should Onna Moniz-John get a life?
Joe Lieberman's Lie
It appears Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman has caught the same malady that prevents Al Gore from telling the truth.
On the Don Imus radio show recently, Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, was asked whether traditional Judaism bans "interracial or inter-religious marriage or dating or that sort of thing."
Lieberman's response: "No, there is no ban whatsoever. Certainly not on interracial. And not on inter-religious."
Enter Dov Hikind, a Democratic New York state assemblyman who represents Brooklyn. He's considered the most influential political figure representing Brooklyn's Orthodox community. And he knows a thing or two about traditional Judaism.
He says Judaism clearly does not allow intermarriage. In a column he wrote for the New York Post, Hikind says: "In trying so hard to appeal to everyone, Joe resorted to patent dishonesty. ... I have gone from being excited about Joe Lieberman's candidacy to being totally turned off."
Hikind goes on to slam Lieberman for wanting to meet with Louis Farrakhan, whose track record of anti-Semitism is well established.
Congratulations, Mr. Hikind. You've just caught on to what many Americans already realize: Just like Al Gore, Joseph Lieberman will say anything to anyone in order to ensure a Democratic win in November. He's already flip-flopped on issues ranging from affirmative action to school vouchers. What makes you think he'll hold the line on Orthodox Judaism if doing so takes votes away from the Gore-Lieberman ticket?
Gore’s 164 Percent Marginal Tax Rate
Let's say that Al Gore becomes president, and let's say that he gets his tax and income redistribution plan put into law. Here's a bit of a shocker for you. Under Gore's plan some taxpayers out there would end up paying $1.64 in taxes for one additional dollar in income!
Nader Scams College Kids
Thursday, March 13, 2003
By Radley Balko
Each semester, Meremac Community College in St. Louis, Mo., charged Crystal Lewis for a service called "MOPIRG." "I hadn't the slightest idea what it was," she says. The fine print on her bill read: "If you opt not to support MOPIRG, please deduct this amount from your payment." So she did. But she still wasn't sure what she was no longer paying for.
She was paying for a myriad of causes and advocacy efforts sponsored, endorsed and overseen by Ralph Nader. And if you're in college or have kids in college, the odds are pretty good that you're supporting Ralph Nader too. You probably didn't know that, did you? And that's just the way Nader and his nationwide network of Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGS) would like to keep it.
The PIRG idea was born in the late 1960s, but really caught on through the 1970s and 1980s. It has again picked up momentum in the last few years, due mainly to the publicity that accompanied Nader's presidential campaign. The scam varies from campus to campus, but it basically works like this:
Each time a college student registers for classes, he or she is automatically billed somewhere between three and eight dollars, all of which goes directly to the local PIRG chapter. There, it's funneled directly to the state chapter, where it's used to lobby state legislatures on issues like tougher emissions standards, campaign finance reform and a bevy of other environmental and anti-corporate causes. Very little if any of the money actually stays at the campus where it's generated.
It's also used as "seed money" for more fund-raising campaigns. And about 10 percent of the money goes to USPIRG, the national chapter, where it's used to lobby on the federal level.
The standard procedure for start-up campus PIRGs works like this:
First, they attempt to institute mandatory, nonrefundable "contributions" from the student body either through a student referendum, a petition drive or by going through school administrators. The University of Wisconsin requires all of its students to donate to the local PIRG chapter, as does the University of Oregon, and about a third of the state colleges in New York's SUNY system.
If that doesn't work, PIRG chapters attempt to institute a "reverse check" system, where each student automatically donates to PIRG each time he registers for classes, unless he specifically knows to look for an already checked box asking for his support -- and "unchecks" it.
If they can't win support there, PIRG groups will attempt a "refundable fee" system, where each student is automatically billed, but can request a refund by taking the bill to the university registrar or bursar's office, filling out some paperwork, then taking the form to the local PIRG's campus office to get the money back.
Such systems rake in millions for PIRGs because they put the burden on college students to educate themselves about each line item on their tuition bill, or to go to great effort for a comparatively small refund, particularly unlikely when mom and dad or Mr. Perkins and Mr. Stafford are paying for college anyway.
Craig Rucker is executive director for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, an organization that's been fighting the PIRG scams for years. Rucker estimates that Nader's causes take in somewhere between $10 and $20 million annually from college students, most all of it unwittingly.
What's remarkable is the blatant, transparent hypocrisy the PIRGS use to defend their tactics. The USPIRG Web site claims that mandatory student fees earmarked for liberal activism are "protected by the First Amendment," and are intended to "foster a marketplace of ideas."
Yet that same USPIRG Web site is a staunch supporter of radical campaign finance reform, and says that contributions to political candidates are not political speech and, therefore, not protected by the First Amendment.
Get it? The act of forcing students at state colleges to fund causes they don’t believe in is "protected speech," but voluntarily giving to a political candidate isn't. Remarkable.
This is also the same Ralph Nader who (correctly, at least on this issue) rails against corporate welfare, because he says it's deplorable to take money from taxpayers and then funnel it to corporations whose interests might be different from those of said taxpayers. It's the same Ralph Nader and USPIRG organization that cries out against the "injustice" of ATM fees, and criticizes credit card companies for preying on the naivete of college kids.
Yet this same Ralph Nader and USPIRG has no problem with mandating, tricking or manipulating college students into donating to leftist activism.
But there is at least a bit of good news. Rucker's organization has had some success in fighting PIRGS at the ballot box, in the state house and in the courts. Organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education are working to educate college students of their right to withhold funding.
Two recent U.S. Supreme Court cases (Rosenberger v. University of Virginia and Southworth v. University of Wisconsin) have validated at least the concept of mandatory student fees, but also require that the system for distributing those fees be "viewpoint neutral."
So the PIRGs' mandatory fees it would seem are bound for litigation, and will likely be found unconstitutional.
But it's at least possible that the "reverse check" and similarly underhanded funding methods could survive a court challenge. At that point, it will be up to organizations like C-FACT and FIRE, as well as concerned taxpayers, to make state legislators and university boards of regents aware of their displeasure with such schemes.
More importantly, it will, and is, up to individual college students and their parents to scrutinize their tuition bills, as Crystal Lewis did, and be sure the checks they write are funding an education, not causes for Ralph Nader's 2004 campaign platform.
VIOLENT END TO N.Y. PROTESTS
By ASHLEY CROSS, JOE McGURK and CYNTHIA R. FAGEN
March 23, 2003 -- What had started out as a peaceful anti-war march by more than 125,000 turned ugly yesterday when thousands of stragglers refused to leave Washington Square Park and some started pelting cops with rocks and spraying Mace.
The peaceful mood turned truculent when cops started clearing the park around 3:30 p.m. - about a half-hour before the march was expected to end.
Cops in riot gear used pepper spray during a raucous push-and-shove showdown as demonstrators chanted: "Shame! Shame! Shame!"
Police said 17 cops were injured in the melee. By late last night they had announced 91 arrests. Norman Siegel, former head of the NYCLU was detained but not arrested.
After more than an hour, hundreds of agitators marched up University Place only to be met by a roadblock of motorcycle cops and mounted police.
Hundreds remained in Washington Square and continued their face-off with cops into the evening.
The rally started peacefully in Midtown as anti-war protesters marched in the spring sunshine from Herald Square down Broadway to Union Square and on to Washington Square Park.
"If you really want to show shock and awe, you should show love and justice - that would shock them all," said the Rev. Bob Edgar.
Along the 30-block stretch of Broadway, parents pushing baby carriages marched alongside World War II veterans.
Carol Laverne, with a pair of angel's wings on her back, marched down Broadway carrying a sign: "Thou shall not kill."
"Which one of these words don't you understand?" Laverne asked, pointing at her poster as the protesters flooded past. "There's no fine print here. This is it."
World War II veteran Lawrence Lader, 83, who saw action in the South Pacific said, "World War II was the last good war. This is a totally crazy war because Iraq is not a threat to the United States."
His army buddy George Avakian, 84, chimed in, "It's way of keeping attention away from people's real problems, unemployment, inflation and the tax cuts for the rich."
Among those marching were Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), singer Patti Smith, and actors Roy Scheider, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.
The organizers, United for Peace and Justice, estimated the crowd at 250,000. Police estimates put the number at more than 125,000.
Sunday, March 23, 2003
N.Y. Times Finds Anonymous CIA Sources to Attack Bush Administration
In what has to be the sleaziest attempt yet by the New York Times to attack the Bush administration, Sunday’s edition quoted a host of unidentified Clintonite sources in the CIA as claiming the administration was pressuring the agency to slant intelligence analysis to bolster their policies on Iraq.
In a lengthy hatchet job by someone named James Risen, not one single source is named. And in one instance, a vitally important fact is omitted, creating a completely false impression unfriendly to the administration.
The story hinged on "the recent disclosure that reports claiming Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger were based partly on forged documents."
This, the Times reports, "has renewed complaints among analysts at the CIA about the way intelligence related to Iraq has been handled," but the so-called analysts are never once identified. According to the Times, "The forged documents were not created by the CIA or any other United States government agency,” but the Times fails to note their source. Moreover, anonymous CIA officials, the Times claims, were always suspicious of the documents.
What the Times failed to report is that source of the documents is known, a fact disclosed by the Washington Post, which revealed that they "came to British and U.S. intelligence officials from a third country." The Post added that the identity of the third country, however, was not known.
The Times article also neglects to report if any of the allegedly suspicious anonymous CIA analysts ever related their alleged suspicions to the White House or anyone else.
The Times goes on to report that these anonymous sources claim that for months a few anonymous CIA analysts have been "privately" voicing concerns to colleagues and congressional officials that they have been pressured to emphasize links between Saddam Hussein's government and al-Qaeda in writing their intelligence reports.
"Several people have told me how distraught they have been about what has been going on," one anonymous government official, who said he had talked with several CIA analysts, allegedly told the Times. Not surprisingly, the Times says that the anonymous government official claimed that none of the anonymous analysts are willing to talk directly to news organizations.
Another anonymous senior CIA official told the Times that none of the agency’s analysts has told CIA management "that they were resigning in protest over the handling of Iraqi intelligence." The Times then informs its readers that at the State Department, "by contrast, three foreign service officers have resigned in protest over Mr. Bush's policies."
The same anonymous official is said to have told the Times that some anonymous analysts felt frustration because administration officials had frequently been asked the same questions over and over again about their intelligence reports concerning Iraq. Many of these questions concern sourcing, the official said, adding that the anonymous official admitted, however, that the anonymous analysts had not been pressured to change the substance of their reports. They just intuited that they had been pressured, it seems.
"As we have become an integral component informing the debate for policy makers, we have been asked a lot of questions," the anonymous senior CIA official said. "I'm sure it does come across as a pressured environment for analysts. I think there is a sense of being overworked, a sense among analysts that they have already answered the same questions. But if you talk to analysts, they understand why people are asking, and why policy makers aren't accepting a report at face value."
Not satisfied by its attack on the Bush administration, the Times apparently felt the need to take a swing at another hated target: the Reagan administration. It goes out of the way to report that another of those anonymous intelligence officials said that many anonymous "veteran analysts were comparing the current climate at the agency to that of the early 1980s, when some CIA [anonymous] analysts complained that they were under pressure from the Reagan administration to take a harder line on intelligence reports relating to the Soviet Union," a nation for which the Times often showed great affection.
An anonymous source, formerly an editor an at anonymous supermarket tabloid, told NewsMax.com: "We would never have been allowed to run a slanted piece like that, especially when we would have had to rely on nothing but unidentified sources with an axe to grind. That's not journalism; it's out and out propaganda."
N.O.W. Approves Porn Magazine Fundraiser for Tom Hayden
The National Organization of Women has approved a plan for Los Angeles City Council candidate and radical leftist Tom Hayden to hold a fund-raiser at the offices of Larry Flynt's "Hustler Magazine," which specializes in particularly degrading pornographic depictions of women.
Shelley Mandel, president of the Los Angeles chapter of N.O.W., signed off on the "Hustler" event after Hayden checked to see if the organization had any objections.
"They have said it is acceptable," Hayden told the Los Angeles Times Saturday, explaining that he would have moved the venue from the pornography king's offices had Mandel or her N.O.W. colleagues made the request.
Hayden's "Hustler" fund-raiser came to light when Jack Weiss, his opponent in the June 5 election, complained of a double standard. Hayden had made a point of criticizing Weiss on the issue of women's rights.
Despite the fund-raiser, the candidate told the Times that he disagrees with "Hustler's" content and had even complained to Flynt about its pornography. Still, explained Hayden, "I respect what (Flynt) has gone through, particularly his battle against censorship."
Questioned about "Hustler Magazine's" degrading portrayals of her sisters, Mandel said, "I think it's garbage. But regardless of who gives money to Tom or hosts a fund-raiser for him, Tom Hayden's committment to women has been proven time and time again."
During the 1980's Hayden was married to one-time leading feminist Jane Fonda before Fonda married, then divorced CNN founder Ted Turner.
Politically Correct Dysfunction: Our Schools Are Victimizing Our Children
Mike Siegel
Wednesday, May 22, 2002
Periodically, there is a flurry of examples demonstrating the irrational nature of our public education system. That irrationality has been demonstrated by extreme examples in nearly every walk of American life. Unfortunately, our children are suffering at the hands of our public schools.
There is the case of the 11-year-old honor student in Pennsylvania. She failed her vocabulary test. Her mother had advised her to express her anger in writing or drawing. She did just that by drawing a picture with two stick figures representing her teacher and substitute teacher.
The problem was they were drawn on a gallows with arrows through their necks. The teacher saw the drawing and the school suspended the girl because of what it called a "terrorist threat."
All that was needed was a conference with the parents and student in the principal's office to make it clear that this was unacceptable. Instead, the three-day suspension simply "stuffs" the problem and is likely to make the child more hostile toward the school. Where is the thought???
Then there was the 7-year-old boy who stabbed four of his classmates with a pencil in Florida. He was expelled for the remainder of the year. That seemed to be enough of a punishment, and hopefully, the school had the sense to have the child learn to deal with his anger. None of the students was hurt, so the matter should have been resolved.
Not so when Political Correctness is the driving force. The county prosecutor decided to prosecute this 7-year-old for "felony aggravated assault"!!!
Then, of course, there was the kindergarten class in California where there was blood found in the lavatory used by the children. The parents were naturally outraged when they found out the principal brought the 17 children to the nurse and required each to take their pants off or lift up their dresses in order to determine which child had been bleeding.
It turns out the blood was from a child with a small cut on her knee. There was no thought to the humiliation these children faced at the expense of the school administration covering its posterior end!
Even more humiliating was the case of the high school dance in San Diego where the girls attending were required by the vice principal to lift their skirts or dresses to determine whether they were wearing thongs. What in the world gives a school the right to inspect the private parts of a student for such an inane reason? In a free society, no one is required to wear any undergarments.
The issue is whether there is behavior that should be sanctioned by the school. Only parents have any authority over minors and what undergarments they wear. Many parents rightfully wanted this vice principal fired.
As a former educator in the public schools and at the college level, I am appalled at the reprehensible behavior of our school administrators and the decisions they are making in the name of Political Correctness. Maybe they will learn that these behaviors are irrational and Humanely Incorrect.
Politically Correct Times at Santa Monica High
Traditional values have been under assault on college campuses for two generations now. But the vast majority of Americans have no idea how thoroughly these same left wing, libertine sensibilities are being enforced these days even at the high school level.
In New York, one public secondary school has for years dispensed two kinds of condoms from its nurse's office - "Regular" and "Mint Flavored." The mint flavored condom dispenser is labeled helpfully, "For Oral Sex Only," a photograph accompanying the New York Times report on the school revealed.
On the West Coast, things aren't much better, according to Stephen Miller, a student attending Santa Monica High, where, he says, school district policy states: "Condoms are available to students in grades 9-12 in a manner which promotes greatest accessibility.”
Legally speaking, Miller notes, it would seem that a school policy encouraging sex between minors is flirting with the statutory rape laws. "The law aside, fourteen-year-olds are a little young to be having sex," he complains.
Then there's SM High's gay club, which to those unenlightened in the ways of modern academe may sound uncomfortably similar to a gay recruitment program.
"In case your son or daughter decides at their tender age that they are gay, we have a club on campus that will gladly help foster their homosexuality," Miller reports. (Imagine the outcry if the Catholic Church suddenly became so publicly accommodating.)
Do school officials notify parents when their minor age children enroll in SM High's gay club? "Of course not," says Miller.
Still, while the school's condom availability program is a matter of rigorous enforcement, other official policies have fallen by the wayside.
The daily ritual of having students recite the Pledge of Allegiance, for instance, succumbed to earlier waves of political correctness years ago.
"It took months of effort to get the school to stop resisting and finally bring back the pledge, and required intervention from the superintendent," complains Miller. "Even then, it is still only said twice a week, while policy dictates it should be said every day."
School holidays at SM High are another sticking point.
Veterans Day and Thanksgiving, for instance, have become little acknowledged anachronisms, the traditional values advocate notes. Rather then honor those who fought and died in America's wars to preserve freedom, the prevailing view, Miller says, is that "the U.S. has used its soldiers to kill innocent people, and the same Indians that helped the pilgrims were either shot, or put on reservations."
Meanwhile, SM High teachers and their favored textbooks concentrate on less offensive cultures.
"We do nothing for American holidays but everything for Mexican holidays," Miller says. "Teachers insult and demean the president [while] history teachers denounce the U.S. as wickedly imperialistic, some supplementing standard history texts with something comfortably more liberal."
In the wake of 9-11, SM High even invited a Muslim leader to the school to explain the splendor of Islam. "But no such proclamation was ever made about America," says Miller. "Scarcely a student at my school covered their heart when the national anthem was played in the September 11th memorial."
Meanwhile, the school newspaper condemned the U.S. military attacks on Afghanistan.
"Osama bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School," Miller concludes.
Don't Ask the Media Who's Winning the War
Bobby Eberle
Tuesday, April 1, 2003
(Note: The Media began the assault on the U.S. Military success/tactic after only ONE WEEK of war. I think it's very safe to say that it is extremely obvious who controls the main-lame-stream media. It is a shame. It is a tragedy.)
The United States military is truly one of the marvels of the modern world. With sophisticated weaponry, exceptional training and superior leadership, the men and women of our armed forces represent the absolute best combat force on the planet.
Couple this force with the seasoned military planners and strategists back in Washington, and America has the team and the plan to win a decisive victory against Iraq.
That is, unless you ask the media. According to America's media, not only is the war plan ill-conceived, but worse yet, America is losing the war.
A review of the transcripts from recent press briefings at the White House, Pentagon and Central Command reveal an array of questions designed not to solicit information but rather to solicit a denial.
In fact, in many instances the government and military briefers are not asked questions in which a simple statement of the facts will suffice. Time and time again, the briefers are presented with theoretical situations which they must deny and rebut.
In other words, the media are often not working to report the news. Instead, they are looking to make news by throwing out wild statements to see how the briefer responds. This is irresponsible at best and a disservice to the American people, who want to know what's going on with the war.
Part of the media's angle is to cast doubts on the war plan because, after a week and a half, the war is not over yet. Are we "bogged down?" Why hasn't the entire Iraqi military surrendered already?
In a recent briefing at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked, "Mr. Secretary, as you know, there has been some criticism, some by retired senior officers, some by officers on background in this building, who claim that the war plan in effect is flawed."
To his credit, Secretary Rumsfeld responded by saying, "Well, we're one week into this, and it seems to me it's a bit early for history to be written, one would think."
Leading up to the war, officials in Washington often spoke to the fact that the Iraqi people are oppressed, tortured and terrorized by Saddam Hussein's regime. These officials mentioned that many Iraqis would welcome the presence of U.S. and coalition forces.
After a week and a half, the singing in the streets is not as deafening as one would hope, but did anyone really think it would happen so soon? The Iraqi people were encouraged to defy Saddam Hussein before, only to be left hanging in the wind.
The fact that they are cautious and not yet convinced that Saddam Hussein will be removed from power is understandable, but it has not stopped the media from hammering on this point.
Their implied message is “Why are you here when the Iraqi people don't even want you?”
An example comes from the recent Pentagon briefing. A reporter asked Secretary Rumsfeld: "Is it possible that you've miscalculated the desire of the Iraqi people to be liberated by an outside force, and that because of their patriotism or nationalism, that they'll continue to resist the Americans, even after you prevail militarily?"
Secretary Rumsfeld responded, "Don't you think it's a little premature, the question? We'll know the answer to that. As portions of the country are liberated, we'll have people on the ground, embedded with our forces, who will have a chance to see what happens and see how they feel about it. Why do we want to guess?"
In addition to portraying the image that the war with Iraq has gone on for too long, the media are also trying to dig for anything that might convey a sense of cover-up or misdeeds within the military and the administration.
The topper was a question asked of Secretary Rumsfeld about numbers of killed and wounded soldiers: "The casualty figures currently officially released by the U.S. military show 28 dead and 40 wounded. Now, the proportion of wounded and dead would be – would seem to be historically way out of skew, because the number of wounded is usually far more than the number killed in action. Is there – can you explain why that would be, or – and is there any effort to either unreport or underreport casualties from the battlefield?"
With that question, even the usually unflappable Don Rumsfeld was left in a stupor. He responded by saying: "Oh, my goodness! Now, you know that wouldn't be the case. There's no – no one in this government, here or on the ground, is going to underreport what's happening. That's just terrible to think that. Even to suggest it is outrageous. Most certainly not! The facts are reported."
The bombardment of questions is not limited to the Pentagon. In a briefing at the White House, Spokesman Ari Fleischer was asked whether the detailing of Saddam's atrocities against the Iraqi people was used to "continue to justify the war to the American people." Fleischer replied by saying, "Well, no, I think it's part of describing the horrible reality that Saddam Hussein is putting his people through."
The point is that rather than asking questions that lead to a better understanding of the war, the media are focusing on questions that are unproductive and are designed to put the briefers on the defensive.
In another example regarding the expectations of a quick war with Iraq, a reporter asked: "You did very little to lower expectations in the run up to this. Even if you didn't raise them yourself, you did nothing to lower what we were hearing from the Pentagon and from other outside pundits about how well, how quickly, this war would go."
Fleischer responded: "I could not dispute that more strongly, and let me cite it for you. If you take a look at what the President said on October 7 in Cincinnati in a major speech to the country, the President said, 'Military conflict could be difficult. An Iraqi regime faced with its own demise may attempt cruel and desperate measures. There is no easy or risk-free course of action.' That's what the President said some six months ago, five months ago."
In a recent CNN report on civilians killed in a neighborhood blast, the on-air reporter referred to the U.S. military as "attacking civilian neighborhoods" in order to destroy military targets.
How twisted is that statement? The military does not "attack" civilian neighborhoods. The military attacks military targets of the enemy. If those targets are close to civilian areas, then there is certainly a risk of civilian casualties, but to say that civilian areas are being "attacked" is patently false.
The examples go on and on, but the point is clear. At a time when the country needs to come together to support the troops and support the president, the media are working double time to sow the seeds of doubt in the American public.
As of this writing, the war is one and a half weeks old. Are we winning? Yes. When will it end? I don't know.
What I do know is that, in a very short time, the American military has accomplished unprecedented successes in troop movement, bomb accuracy and human intelligence. Saddam Hussein and his sons could very well have been taken out with the first bomb dropped.
We are winning the war, and we don't need the media to tell us otherwise.
More Political Correctness or Hypocrisy – What’s the Difference?
Neal Boortz
Wednesday, June 14, 2000
Finally – Something Hillary and I Agree On
Sayeth Hillary Clinton yesterday:
"One million women are stalked each year. And when women are still being raped and assaulted more than 300,000 times in 1998 alone, our job is far from done. I don't believe law enforcement yet has the resources needed to track down and to punish those who hurt women with the full force of the law. ... Make no mistake about it, this is still a national priority that we intend to keep focusing on and pushing until we see that every woman has the protection she needs and law enforcement has the resources they require and protective orders actually protect women."
Yes, that's exactly what she said. She said rapists should be tracked down and punished with the full force of the law.
I'll agree with that.
I’ll bet Juanita Broaddrick agrees with that, too!
There is one person out there who certainly has not been tracked down and punished. That would be Shrilllary’s own so-called husband.
Remember, folks. Juanita presented a sound case, supported by evidence, that Bill Clinton raped her – and he has never stepped forward to deny the charges.
I don’t know about you, but I certainly wouldn’t hide behind a press secretary if someone accused me of a crime such as this.
It’s amazing, isn’t it. The wife of a probable rapist and serial sexual harasser pontificating on matters of tracking down and punishing rapists.
Mel Gibson – Policially Incorrect
Sony Pictures has a bit of a brouhaha on its hands.
"The Patriot" is set to open later this month. It's a Revolutionary War period piece starring Mel Gibson. Apparently there's a scene in the movie where Gibson's character takes two smoothbore muskets out of a chest and gives them to his sons, aged 13 and 10. The kids go off into the woods and proceed to ambush the British Redcoats. They manage to kill more than a dozen men.
Matt Drudge reports that, during a screening last Thursday night in Los Angeles, there were gasps in the audience.
Shock! Horror! Young men taking up arms in defense of their country! Gibson spent part of his weekend defending the scene. He said he'd let his kids take up weapons in self-defense, and that he's taken them to shooting ranges.
Doesn't Gibson know that it's taboo to be pro-gun in Hollywood? Hell, you're not even supposed to use the words "children" and "guns" in the same sentence unless you're pushing for legislation that keeps the two far away from each other. Because, as the anti-gun lobby has taught us, guns have the capacity to transform ordinary people into bloodthirsty criminals.
Mel Gibson's "Sexiest Man Alive" title may not mean much to the ol' Talkmaster, but he just earned a whole lotta brownie points in my book. Now, let's see if Sony Pictures has the cojones to keep those scenes in the movie.
Racial Scorched-Earth Policy
Guess what?
Two plaques bearing symbols of the Confederacy have been quietly removed from the lobby of the state Supreme Court building in Austin, Texas. The new plaques say equal justice is available to all Texans "regardless of race, creed or color."
The Texas Capitol building was constructed with money taken from a Confederate pension fund and dedicated to Texans who had served in the Confederacy. Yet the local NAACP and other groups called for the state to remove those plaques because they were offensive to minorities. They called on George W. Bush to have them removed. So down they went.
The State of Texas takes money from a pension fund for Confederate veterans, uses that money to build the Capitol building, dedicates the building to those who served in the Confederacy, and then caves to pressure from the chip-on-the-shoulder crowd and removes all traces of the history of the building.
These so-called civil rights groups are out to obliterate every trace of the Confederacy they can find, folks. It's a scorched-earth policy. Everything goes.
Which begs the question: Is Dubya willing to be politically correct to avoid a firestorm over racism in his home state? You're damned right he is.
And another question: Just when are these race warlords going to demand that the carving of the Confederate generals on Stone Mountain be destroyed? It’s coming, folks – just a matter of time.
So, will this make any difference? Let’s say – for the sake of argument – that the race warlords succeed in removing every single symbol or memory of the Confederacy from public property in every state in the nation. Just what will this accomplish?
Will this eliminate the anti-achievement mentality that permeates sections of the black urban culture?
Will this stop black students from teasing other black students who actually study and strive for good grades in school about trying to "act white"?
Will this improve the lagging work ethic in the urban black culture?
Will this suddenly cause young black males to want to support the children they father by their various girlfriends, and to become a meaningful part of their children’s lives?
Will this slow down the predatory violence that terrifies urban black communities across the nation?
Yes, I know. The same problems exist in other cultures – but to lesser extents. Plus you don’t find whites, for instance, insisting that their lives will be better and their problems solved if people will just start calling them "European Americans" or if flags, public monuments and plaques would be changed or taken down.
OK, so I’m ranting a bit here. It just gets so damned old. When a college instructs its students, faculty and employees that they aren’t going to be allowed to use the phrase "slaving over a hot stove" because it minimizes the horror of slavery, you start to get the idea that things are getting just a bit out of focus.
I can take the heat, so I’ll say it. The race warlords who spend all of their time focusing on symbolism (flags and plaques) are doing so because they won’t last long in their leadership positions if they start focusing on substance. They get more mileage out of complaining about a Confederate battle flag than they would get suggesting that some parents ought to support their children or monitor some homework.
Political Correctness Goes Hi-Tech
Saturday, Jan. 27, 2001
It’s getting costly to be politically correct – for the nation’s cops, that is.
In an effort to cope with the controversy over racial profiling, some police departments are coughing up big bucks for a high-technology device to defend themselves against charges they stop many motorists purely on the basis of their race.
Critics claim that cops have invented a brand new offense, DWB – Driving While Black – and the matter has become a hot-button issue across the country and a first-class problem for the nation’s law enforcement agencies.
The problem of tracking alleged racial profiling traffic stops is widespread. Ten states have passed laws to keep tabs on racial profiling and, according to Forbes magazine, others are considering joining them.
The paperwork imposed on road patrol officers needed to justify every traffic stop is putting an enormous strain on many of the nation’s police agencies, and patrol officers say their regular police duties are enough of a burden without adding more red tape to their routine.
According to the Feb. 5 issue of Forbes, the Mongomery County, Md., police department was wrestling with the problem of collecting data about every traffic stop in order to defend itself against racial profiling charges being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department, when a computer whiz showed the department how to do it.
Robert Michels, head of the fledgling Mobile Commerce & Computing outfit in Reston, Va., came up with TrafficStop, a software program that allows an officer to use a handheld computer to instantly upload 27 pieces vital information about each traffic stop, including the age, race, sex and location of each driver pulled over.
The officer need only to tap the appropriate boxes to record the needed data. At the end of his patrol the officer downloads the day’s data into the department’s central computer.
The Montgomery County cops jumped at the chance to ease some of the PC burden and has coughed up $380,000 to buy 1,200 handheld Compaq computers equipped with TrafficStop software for their officers on road patrols.
"It’s working very, very well," David Lean, the department’s head techie told Forbes. "TrafficStop will pay for itself within a year."
Since his first breakthrough, Michels has signed up two other departments and 18 others are negotiating with him for TrafficStop.
"We’ve been inundated with calls," he told Forbes.
A SIX PART SERIES ON THE IMPERILED FUTURE OF AMERICA
Part One:
Smug in a No-Think Existence
Paul Craig Roberts
April 25, 2002
From a superpower to a Third World country, the United States is in rapid decline. It is a change of which the population – especially the "experts" – is unaware. Because of past success, Americans live in a smug no-think world.
Wake up! This is the first in a series of columns about Americans' no-think smugness, in an effort to alert Americans to their true prospects.
Today, the United States has the export profile of a 19th century Third World colony. Columnist Bruce Bartlett takes exception to this characterization, citing official Commerce Department data that capital goods account for 44.7 percent of U.S. exports and agricultural goods account for only 6.2 percent.
Bartlett is offering an Enron-Arthur Andersen view of trade. A country's trade profile resides in its net exports, not in the gross figures Bartlett cites.
The gross numbers make the United States look like a manufacturing powerhouse. The latest numbers reporting the first two months of this year show America exported $82.6 billion in manufactured goods and only $9.3 billion in agricultural goods.
However, exports are only half of the story. During the same period, the United States imported $135.7 billion in manufactured goods and $6.2 billion in agricultural goods.
The net result is a $53 billion trade deficit in manufactured goods and a $3 billion surplus in agricultural goods. A large trade deficit in manufactured goods and a surplus in agricultural goods is the profile of a Third World colony.
Looking at net exports, it is obvious that the United States does not have trade surpluses in areas associated with high tech industrialized economies. The United States' largest trade surplus is in soybeans. Except for small and apparently diminishing surpluses in airplanes and airplane parts, scientific instruments, specialized industrial machinery and spacecraft, U.S. trade surpluses reside in hides and skins, cigarettes, scrap metal, cotton, animal feeds, wheat, coal, rice, corn and meat.
Not all U.S. exports actually are exports. Last year, U.S. firms sent $45.6 billion in goods "in bond" to their Mexican facilities. Such goods are counted as "exports" because they cross national borders. However, such goods are not sold to Mexicans. It is illegal for "in bond" goods to enter the Mexican economy.
U.S. facilities in Mexico used Mexican labor to add $30 billion in value to these goods before they were returned to the United States as $75 billion in imports. In truth, there was no $45.6 billion in exports – just $30 billion in imports.
Another misconception is that China's economy is a gigantic sweatshop – cheap labor but low tech. According to the April 19 Financial Times, this comforting view is out of date. The rapid shift of manufacturing to China by multinational firms has taken research and development with it.
Intel, IBM, Motorola, Lucent Technologies, G.E. and Microsoft were among the first to set up R&D labs in China, where skilled researchers can be hired at one-third the U.S. wage. The United States has trained enough Chinese scientists and engineers to support a massive shift in R&D from America (and Japan) to China.
The R&D trickle has become a flood. This month, Emerson Electric announced that it is moving at least half of its engineering work to China and India by the end of this year. Emerson CEO David Farr said, "When we finish this calendar year 2002, 70 percent of our manufacturing will be in low-cost countries."
Black & Decker, battery maker Evercel and auto parts maker Lear Corp. have recently announced closure of U.S. operations and moves to China.
The Japanese are headed there, as well. Matsushita has opened an R&D lab in China that will employ 1,750 Chinese engineers within a few years. Nomura is shifting software projects to China and will soon be employing 1,000 Chinese engineers. For its new chip development center, Toshiba is hiring 1,000 Chinese engineers. Hitachi, Sony, Pioneer, Fujitsu, NEC, Honda and Yamaha have announced plans for R&D operations in China.
When these facts are mentioned, free-traders have a knee-jerk reaction and rush to the defense of free trade, while excoriating the messenger. However, we are not confronted with phenomena that fit the free trade vs. protection framework. We are confronted with massive desertion of industrial and high-tech production and R&D to China, and a consequent decline in middle-class jobs and incomes in the United States.
America is not trading with China in the normal sense. The Chinese have access to U.S. markets for products made with Chinese labor. In exchange, U.S. firms have access to Chinese markets and U.S. markets with products made by Chinese labor. In this "exchange," where lies the advantage for the U.S. economy?
Free-traders, forgetting that consumers have to work in order to consume, think everything is fine as long as consumers are paying lower prices.
But U.S. consumers are also earning lower wages. The lost manufacturing and high tech jobs are being replaced with low productivity retailing jobs. Wal-Mart is now the largest U.S. corporation – with larger revenues than Exxon-Mobil and Microsoft combined.
The old free-trade argument that high American productivity underwrites high American incomes is undercut when U.S. capital, technology and education move abroad and make Chinese equally productive.
Eventually, Chinese labor will be bid up as wages and salaries in the United States fall. But before a new equilibrium is established, the American middle class, the American dream, U.S. political stability and the mighty dollar will take a beating.
Part Two:
Power Without Belief
Who are we? What are we?
Fifty years ago, there was only one answer. We were Americans, and most knew what that meant. When American principles were found lacking in practice, reformers stepped forth. In those days, reform meant to apply the principles, not to overthrow them.
Today, there are as many answers to the questions as there are hyphenated Americans and organized "victim groups." Assimilation is no longer a function of America's educational system. Not even native-born whites are being assimilated. The real answer to the questions is that America is a Tower of Babel, not only in races, languages, religions and cultures, but also in beliefs.
Multiculturalism teaches that all cultures are equal, with the exception of traditional American culture, which is a racist, sexist, homophobic, hegemonic white male engine of oppression. The formerly venerated Founding Fathers are despised as "hegemonic oppressors." A common interpretation of the U.S. Constitution is that it is an anti-democratic device for protecting rich property owners and "hate speech" offensive to minorities and women.
In his best seller "The Death of the West," Patrick Buchanan shows how American intellectual confidence was sapped by the relocation of the Frankfurt School of German Cultural Marxism to U.S. universities. Substituting accusations, propaganda and emotion for knowledge and reason, cultural Marxists have blocked the transmission of the beliefs that cemented America together.
With the cement gone, what once was a nation is dissolving into a collection of victim groups taught to regard white males as oppressors. We are left with a thin gruel of comity between the races and the genders.
Hatred cannot be taught without consequences. Communists taught hatred of the upper classes, and the result was tens of millions murdered in Russia and China.
German intellectuals taught hatred of Jews, and millions were murdered.
Now it is whites who are demonized. Earlier this year, a number of black youths were arrested in idyllic Charlottesville, Va., for a series of brutal racial attacks on white university students. Just the other day, when Cincinnati police broke up a street fight between two teen-age girls, 300 blacks, shouting "Get whitey," attacked the police and white motorists who were driving by.
Recently, at the University of California-Berkeley, a student publication criticized a Hispanic student group for advocating the liberation by "bronze people" of California and the Southwest from "the gringos." The Hispanics responded with violence, breaking into the publication's offices, destroying copies of the publication and issuing death threats to the staff.
Nonwhites feel confident and justified in assaulting whites. Nonwhites have been taught that they are victims of white oppressors and that they are justified in responding to oppression with violence.
Nonwhites have learned that, despite the "hegemonic" white power structure, they have little to fear from confrontations with white students. A double standard operates. Hispanic violence is due to "anger and resentment" and is met with "understanding," but whites who respond to violence with violence would definitely face expulsion and hate-crime charges.
In multiculturalspeak, whites lack the moral status of a victim group. When whites are beaten and shouted down, it is seen as retribution. The confidence and courage of whites to defend free speech is undermined, because everything whites say can be said to be "offensive" to preferred minorities.
"Anger and resentment" have also become a protective cover for women's violence against men.
Once violence is exonerated by "understanding" the motives, all constraint is gone. Donald Kagan, perhaps Yale's' most distinguished scholar, writes in the current issue of the Intercollegiate Review that among the faculties of the prestige universities, the main response to 9-11 is to sympathize with the desperate, angry and bereaved Muslims who, understandably, replied to offensive cultural messages with violence.
A country, especially a moralistic one, whose intellectual elites do not believe its history and culture are defensible, and whose politicians will not protect its borders from illegal immigration, will become a country whose youth will not serve it in combat.
The United States does more to defend the borders of Kosovo and Bosnia than it does to secure its own border with Mexico. How long can a country portrayed by its own educators as a bastion of white racism continue to bomb brown-skinned Muslims in a war on terror?
We are told that the war on terror will last for years, but where is the belief system to sustain it? Will multiculturally indoctrinated youth kill and die for racist, sexist, hegemonic power?
Part Three:
Is Time Running Out For The Dollar?
The U.S. current account deficit is running at an annual rate of 4 percent of Gross Domestic Product. That's about $1 billion per day.
For a number of years, the large U.S. current account deficit has been accompanied by a strong dollar. Could the dollar's strength be coming to an end?
Since January, the dollar has declined almost 6 percent in value against the euro, which has been a weak and uncertain currency since its introduction. Is this a harbinger that a large dollar overhang is beginning to worry those who are holding our currency?
Let's explore some of the reasons the dollar has been strong despite many years of accumulated trade deficits.
Perhaps the most important is that the dollar is the world's reserve currency. It is the world's money and has taken the place of gold in central bank vaults. In addition, in many countries the dollar is not only the preferred currency for daily transactions but also the required one for major purchases. Countless individuals in foreign lands keep their savings in dollars.
The worldwide role of the dollar is due to the size of the U.S. economy and to America's economic and political stability. Together these have created what has appeared to be an almost limitless demand for dollars. Many people in many places have been willing to hold the $1 billion per day that the U.S. pumps out to cover its current account deficit.
Can this go on forever? Conceivably, yes – as long as there is no good alternative to the dollar that people can use to hedge their bets on America. The decade-long collapse of Japanese economic performance took the yen out of contention. The German mark has been replaced by the euro, to date a weak currency. Gold has not been a good investment and is costly to hold, especially during the last 20 years of rising values of U.S. financial assets.
There is another reason that the dollar has kept its strength. Foreigners have been swapping their growing holdings of dollars for our real assets. They are also buying U.S. patents, brand names and the rights to make economic choices.
Some commentators, who do not look at the figures closely, think that the dollars that go out to cover our trade deficit are coming back to us in the form of businesses and jobs created by foreign investment in the U.S.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. The Survey of Current Business reports that "outlays by foreign direct investors to acquire or establish businesses in the U.S. were $320.9 billion in 2000." Of this amount, "$316.5 billion, or 99 percent," were "outlays to acquire existing U.S. companies rather than to establish new U.S. companies." The data for 2001 are not yet available.
In other words, foreigners are using our $1 billion-per-day trade deficit to buy up American firms.
No-think says this doesn't matter, because the jobs stay in the United States. However, putting U.S. profits in foreign hands contributes to the outflow of dollars. Moreover, if the dollar is being kept up in value by foreign purchase of U.S. companies, what happens to the dollar when foreigners decide they own enough U.S. holdings to own the entire economy?
Keep in mind that as foreigners are buying up American firms, many of the remaining U.S. companies are moving both production and research and development out of the United States. Sooner or later, the domestic economic base won't support a strong dollar.
If the dollar falls in value, those "cheap foreign goods" won't be cheap any longer. American consumers will be squeezed by a declining dollar and by the loss of domestic manufacturing and high-tech jobs.
The economic shock would take political stability with it, as politicians scramble to offset declining incomes with more income redistribution programs. America's continuing importation of massive numbers of poor, uneducated, welfare-dependent immigrants from Third World countries will add to the political pressures. Politicians will further squeeze the incomes of those Americans who hold the shrinking supply of productive jobs, not yet moved offshore.
What is the solution? There might not be one. If crisis arrives, it is a good bet that Washington will have no clue.
Part Four:
The Demise Of The American Legal System
Americans reassure themselves about their country's competitive future by invoking the U.S. legal system. Americans think that they need not worry about corporations deserting the protection of the U.S. legal system merely to gain access to cheap labor abroad. Americans believe that cheap-labor countries are legally undeveloped and cannot compete with the rule of law and protection of contracts and property that the United States provides.
Fifty years ago, this argument was valid. Today, the U.S. legal system has been laid low by a great profusion of law and regulation, much of which is contradictory; class action and plaintiff civil suits that blame deep-pocket defendants for the plaintiffs' mistakes; unscrupulous prosecutors who abuse their powers; asset freeze-and-forfeiture laws that have destroyed the security of property; and Benthamite legal influences that have stripped away the individual's protections, which were once the glory of the Anglo-American legal system.
Today, not even lawyers know what the law is. This is due not only to the law's sheer bulk, but also to the ability of prosecutors and regulators to create law on the spot by interpreting statutes and regulations to suit their purposes. In effect, law has become a kind of silly putty out of which prosecutors and police fashion bills of attainder.
Most "white collar crimes" are based on nothing more than the fact that a businessman or his attorney interpreted a complex regulation differently from the way a regulator or prosecutor chose to interpret it in order to bring charges.
Can law become more arbitrary than this? Mexico and China, where difficulties that arise can be handled with a bribe or a political understanding, have fewer legal unknowns and risks than the United States. There is ample evidence that the once-vaunted U.S. legal system has lost its worth. Look at the number of U.S. corporations that are moving production and R&D to China, and the number of firms that are reorganizing as offshore foreign entities.
Attorneys point out that in the United States, it is much easier and less risky for prosecutors to frame a wealthy white-collar defendant than to frame a poor minority. Common law crimes associated with the poor, such as theft, assault and murder, are well-defined. Frame-ups for these crimes require prosecutors to withhold exculpatory evidence, suborn perjury and coerce false confessions. In contrast, a white-collar victim can be framed merely by how a prosecutor interprets a regulation.
The Exxon Valdez oil spill is a prime example. The U.S. Department of Justice chose to interpret an accident as a deliberate criminal intent to dump refuse (valuable crude oil) without a permit and to kill migratory birds without a license. To get the criminal charges dropped, Exxon had to pay the DOJ hundreds of millions of dollars more than China or Mexico would have extorted.
In the U.S. today, law is so absurd that an American lawyer, A. James Clark, has filed suit against the U.S. government for $41 million on behalf of families of 11 Mexicans who died of thirst while illegally attempting to enter into Arizona from Mexico. The plaintiffs' legal claim is that the U.S. government was negligent for not leaving water tanks along the route to aid the immigrants in their illegal entry.
Any day now a burglar, injured while breaking into a home, will sue the homeowner for not leaving the key in the lock. (I will not be surprised if I receive 100 letters asking: "Where have you been? It has already happened!")
Microsoft's rivals can use political donations and an ambitious federal prosecutor seeking name recognition to immobilize the software giant with an antitrust suit.
President Clinton can use the IRS to audit his opponents.
Apple juice maker Ben Lacy can be criminally prosecuted, exhausting his life savings, because he made a few mistakes filling out a routine environmental form.
Janet Reno can make a name for herself by prosecuting innocents on bogus child abuse charges (see the Oct. 28, 1996, Wall Street Journal, page A18).
Charles Keating on the West Coast and Clark Clifford on the East Coast – and everyone in between – can be indicted on the basis of nothing but a prosecutor's "novel theory."
Financial privacy is ceasing to exist. It is even illegal to use the official legal tender to make a cash purchase of a $10,000 used car.
These complaints just scratch the surface.
Part Five:
Making Citizens The Enemy
Are Americans threatened more by terrorism or by the war on terror?
Democrats feel imperiled by the war on terror. Who can forget the expressions on the faces of the New York Democratic twosome, Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, captured on national television, when the two realized that 9-11 had changed the political environment, thus allowing President Bush to slip off the leash of a closely contested election.
Democrats were characterizing Bush as an illegitimate president chosen over the popular vote by a Republican Supreme Court. The national media, Democratic to the core, had already begun the process of Bush's destruction, but 9-11 made it impossible for Democrats to continue their assault on President Bush.
Democrats and their media allies are so frustrated that their attack on President Bush was foiled by 9-11 that they are now alleging that Bush knew about the event in advance and permitted it to happen as a way to save his presidency.
Power-mad Democrats aside, there are legitimate reasons why the rest of us are imperiled by the war on terror. The certain effect of panic, fear and war is to erode constitutional protections and civil liberties. This is especially the case when the enemy consists of terrorists in our midst who are believed to have access to weapons of mass destruction.
Unable to differentiate terrorists from non-terrorists, laws are enacted that treat loyal citizens as the enemy. An article in a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (Vol. 346, No. 17) shows this to be the case with the Centers for Disease Control's "State Emergency Health Powers Act."
The provisions in this act come from the assumption that neither physicians nor citizens would cooperate with public health officials in the event of a bioterrorism attack. Consequently, the act grants wide police powers that permit public health officers to override civil liberties.
The act would frustrate public health measures by undermining the public's confidence in health officers. The sweeping police powers suggest that public officials would be unable to provide valid and persuasive reasons for their emergency actions and would need to rely on coercion. By conveying broad immunity to public officials, the act gives them arbitrary power, thus undermining accountability and public trust.
The article concludes that an act that makes citizens the enemy cannot achieve its purpose.
Making citizens the enemy is precisely the approach taken by airport and airline security. The security system is based on the assumption that everyone who flies – including pilots and flight attendants, U.S. representatives, senators, Secret Service officers, presidential appointees, federal judges, young mothers with children, elderly people who require assistance to board and Marine generals awarded the Medal of Honor – is a potential Muslim terrorist who might seize control of the airliner in order to crash it into the White House or other target.
How many frequent flyers have ever seen a Muslim or person from the Middle East selected for a security search? Airport "security" is widely regarded as nothing but an opportunity for immigrant minorities to hassle native-born citizens.
None of the rules make any sense. If an airline passenger rises from his seat within 30 minutes of arriving or departing Reagan National in D.C., the airliner is immediately diverted to another airport. No terrorist would be deterred by such a rule, but innocent passengers can be needlessly inconvenienced by a forgetful elderly person in need of a toilet or blanket from the overhead bin.
Pilots, many of whom are former military officers competent to handle complex multimillion-dollar weapons systems, can't be trusted with a pistol in the cockpit. But semi-trained National Guard privates are posted in airports with automatic weapons.
Heaven forbid if pilots are armed. They might prevent a hijacking and save the U.S. Air Force from having to shoot down a commercial airliner.
Seasoned travelers have concluded that the real purpose of U.S. airport "security" is to establish a precedent for unreasonable and warrantless searches. By making citizens the enemy, the suspension of civil liberties that is imposed on air travelers can be extended to pedestrians, motorists, and people in their homes and hotel rooms.
Terrorists can endanger some of us, but the war on terror endangers us all. How much more can the Constitution be diminished before it is completely replaced by arbitrary government power?
Part Six:
Destroying The West With Political Correctness
Does democracy undermine a country's future by shortening the time-preference of rulers? Does racial diversity produce conflict? Are America's "two greatest strengths" in fact the country's two greatest weaknesses?
In an important new book, "Democracy: The God That Failed," political economist Hans Hermann Hoppe makes the case that democracy causes rulers to use policy for their short-term gains at the expense of the long-term welfare of the country.
A king or hereditary line of rulers has a long-term view because he and his heirs have a proprietary interest in the country. Although all kings will not be well-informed or in possession of good judgment, their proprietary interest causes hereditary rulers to pay attention to the repercussions of their actions on the economic, social and cultural strength of their country.
A democracy, on the other hand, is ruled by temporary and interchangeable caretakers, who have no proprietary interest in the country. Their ability to exploit the country to their advantage is limited to their uncertain term of office. The results are shortsighted or present-oriented policies, which benefit the officeholder at the long-term expense of the country.
The longer democracy exists, the more damage will be done to law, property, culture, family and moral values by the musical-chair system of rotating rulers guided by short-term interest. As redistribution expands, the incentive for businessmen, judges and consumers to take a long-term view is systematically reduced.
Business time horizons shrink to three months, saving rates fall, and debt levels rise as shortsighted rule reduces government to income and wealth confiscation. The prevailing incentive for citizens becomes to overconsume income and to be a net debtor, as wealth is targeted for exploitation both by government and lawyers.
Not a cheerful analysis. Before dismissing it, sit back and make your list of government policies that take a long-term view to actually promote "the general welfare." In the past 102 years, only two come readily to mind: President Reagan's supply-side policy, which cured "stagflation" by overthrowing Keynesian short-term demand management, and President Reagan's decision to abandon "containment" and actively work to hasten the fall of the Soviet Union.
An honest look at democracy's "great victories" shows them to be unmitigated disasters. The Civil Rights Act destroyed freedom of conscience, voluntary association and equality in law, replacing it with status-based privileges from the feudal past. Busing and federal aid destroyed public education. The Great Society spending programs eroded family and encouraged public dependency.
The New Deal destroyed accountable law by forcing Congress to delegate lawmaking power to unelected federal bureaucrats. The Social Security Act substituted an intergenerational Ponzi scheme, which is entirely dependent on favorable demographics, for individual saving. The Federal Reserve Act gave us the Great Depression. American entry into World War I, which was to make the world "safe for democracy," resulted in Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao.
Yet all these disastrous policies greatly benefited the politicians who inflicted them.
When democracy is mixed with racial and cultural diversity, the combination of short time horizons with internal conflict maximizes weakness, regardless of accumulated scientific and technological skills. In another important recent book, "Conflicts Explained by Ethnic Nepotism," Scandinavian scholar Tatu Vanhanen argues that group conflict is biologically or racially based.
Vanhanen constructs an Index of Ethnic Heterogeneity, a measure of ethnic, tribal, racial, linguistic and religious diversity, for every country in the world with a population larger than 1 million. He then constructs an Index of Ethnic Conflict and finds a strong correlation between the scores of the two indexes.
In our world of politically correct scholarship, it is almost obligatory for sociologists to assume that the source of conflict is "oppression" or "injustice." Vahnanen dismisses these "explanations" as worn-out Marxist propaganda.
Conflict, he concludes, comes from "ethnic nepotism." It is natural to the human species to favor relatives over people who are unrelated to us. Extending this principle, people care more for those genetically related to them than for others. Of all chasms that separate people, race is the hardest to bridge.
Multiracial or multi-tribal states break up, because assimilation across racial boundaries is rare. The only solution to the conflict is secession and separation.
Vanhanen notes that the belief that racial diversity is a strength is limited to Western European countries, the United States and Canada. The belief is so obviously at odds with the experience of the rest of the world that only people brainwashed by political correctness can believe it. By infusing themselves with massive racial diversity, the countries of the West are ceasing to be nation-states and are planting seeds of future conflict without precedent in world history.
Non-thinking civilizations are doomed. The weakness of Western intellectual thought is apparent when the entire edifice can be challenged by two books. Is the West too politically correct to free itself from the black hole of no-think?