"O, how wretched is that poor man that hangs on princes' favours!"

"Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition:
By that sin fell the angels; how can man, then,
The image of his Maker, hope to win by it?
Love thyself last: cherish those hearts that hate thee;
Corruption wins not more than honesty.
Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace,
To silence envious tongues. Be just, and fear not:
Let all the ends thou aim'st at be thy country's,
Thy God's, and truth's; then if thou fall'st,
O Cromwell,
Thou fall'st a blessed martyr!"

- William Shakespeare, Henry VIII, Act 3, Scene 2

I saw a wonderful production of the rarely-staged Henry VIII tonight at the Folger Library in Washington D.C. In the third act, Cardinal Wolsey, the speaker above, is destroyed by Henry when it is discovered that he has been working for his own interests rather than for those of his king. In the face of his disgrace, Wolsey realizes that he has been in error: he ought to have been serving his country, his God and truth, not himself. In this realization, Wolsey finds peace.

The speech I transcribed above reached out into the audience at the theatre and grabbed me by the throat. These lines were written in the 17th century, and yet they speak eloquently to me today. How wretched are politicians who hang on Obama's favor? Let all the ends they aim at be GOD'S, COUNTRY'S and TRUTH'S.

And if they fall in their justice, then they ought not to fear: they fall as blessed martyrs for liberty.

"Hey teabaggers, you're racist and bigoted and I'm better than you are. Vote for me!"

It's just about a month until the midterm elections. The Democrats are running ads bragging about how they haven't been in line with Nancy Pelosi's agenda (whether it's true or not), Republicans are expected to take 50+ seats in the House of Representatives, and Tea Party candidates have rousted RINOs in many races around the country.

Meanwhile, the Democratic establishment think that the way to put their train back on track is to insult and demean the voters. John Kerry thinks that we're stupid and have a short attention span. Joe Biden tells his base to "stop whining." Bill Maher thinks that "almost all" of the opposition to President Obama's policies is racially motivated.

Look. Insulting everyone is not the way to go about this, but it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that Kerry and Biden are so royally out of touch that they think it's the way to go. I'm not surprised by Bill Maher's line of crap, either, but it's disgusting for him to paint MOST OF THE COUNTRY with a racist brush.

Listen up, you self-important blowhard: Obama's race is LITERALLY the only thing I like about him. I think it's great for the country to have a black man as president. I, personally, wish heartily that it had been Alan Keyes. Here's the thing, though: his race was not a good enough reason for anyone to vote for him. Many admit that they did (I can't find a clip of Charles Payne admitting on Glenn Beck's show that he fell for the dream of a black man in the white house, and came to regret it almost immediately), and no one reviles those people for failing to vote in a colorblind manner. The resistance to Obama's agenda -- which is pretty much exclusively the redistribution of wealth -- is because it runs counter to America's values.

Keep it up, Dems. Keep telling the American people to their faces that they're stupid, racist bigots. You just see how many votes that gets you.

Annoying, but not unexpected.

Yesterday marked the decisive victory of a Tea Party candidate over the establishment Republican candidate in the Republican primary in the state of Delaware. Christine O'Donnell handed Mike Castle his rear end on a platter, in fact.

I freely admit that I don't know much about O'Donnell as a candidate. In fact, mostly what I know about her is that she has expressed anti-masturbation sentiments, which has apparently created some sort of vortex causing an inability by the media to hear anything else. I haven't been making a Herculean effort to keep up on the primary race in a state in which I do not live, so like I said: I don't know anything else about her.

What I do know, now that the primary is over and O'Donnell has won: the GOP is letting us down, AGAIN.

Not just because they were incapable of raising a better establishment candidate, i.e. one whom the Tea Party, small-government conservatives could get behind. Rather, I'm annoyed this time because they have announced, essentially, that they are taking their ball and going home. Which is to say that Christine O'Donnell will be receiving no national fundraising support from the Republican party.

You unbelievable whiny brats! I get that O'Donnell is not your favored candidate. That is abundantly clear. However: is she worse than the Democrat she's running against?

(On the other hand, support from the NRSC is something like support from Obama: more hindrance than help. So I guess they're doing her a favor.)

UPDATED:

Turns out that negative publicity has consequences, and the NRSC realizes that "vindictive baby" looks good on no one.

Someone ask the Pope what he thinks about Marxism

I just wanted to save this quote for myself, even if I don't get around to talking about it until much, much later:

"Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it promises too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God it becomes, not divine, but demonic."

Pope Benedict XVI

Truth and Tolerance, p. 116

Social justice through government intervention? Collective salvation by acts of extreme and unequal taxation?

Hardly.

An Open Letter to Mexico

Dear Mexico,

Hi. We've never met, mostly because you're dirty and overrun with drug lords and kidnappers. There are probably parts of you that are absolutely gorgeous, but I never intend to find out because I'd rather visit almost anywhere else in the world with my vacation dollars.

Anyway, I'm writing to you today to ask you if, perhaps, some reality-altering drugs might have found their way into the water supply down there? I only ask because whoever decided that you have the legal standing to sue the state of Arizona in a United States federal court over the state's much-ballyhooed immigration law was clearly high.

Let's put aside, for the time being, the fact that your national immigration policy is much, much more stringent than the new law in Arizona.

We already know that your president, Felipe Calderón, has spoken out against the Arizona law. What I don't understand is what that has to do with you. Shouldn't you be more concerned that your citizens are facing such undesirable conditions at home that they flee illegally to the U.S., and not that they might be discriminated against when they get here? Shouldn't your leaders, perhaps, read the law and thus discover that Calderón's concern over racial profiling is specifically prohibited by said law?

Shouldn't you, once again, focus on making yourself better so that your people aren't tempted to climb, crawl, tunnel and float here? I'm just saying, it seems dumb. Not to mention hypocritical in the extreme. I'm embarrassed for you.

Love,

Me

Those Evil, Ineffectual Republicans

I don't Tweet. I don't follow anyone's Twitter. I think the whole thing is unbearably stupid and dangerously egotistical. No one needs to know your every thought over the course of a day.

Nonetheless, despite my self-imposed isolation from the entire phenomenon of Twitter, I managed to catch a glimpse of a photo Tweeted by Margaret Cho of the comedienne meeting Our Glorious Savior, Barack Obama.

I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.

The top comment on the photo, at the time when I saw it, was -- and no, I won't link it, because ew -- and I quote, "I support Obama 100% because he's doing the best he can against the evil Republicans."

First of all, O Dear Follower of Margaret Cho's Twitter and Commenter Thereupon, your comment is completely irrelevant to a picture of Cho and Obama -- Chobama? -- to the point that I wonder if you just created a macro for that statement and paste it whenever Obama appears anywhere with a comment box. And second of all, ODFoMCTaCT, I'm going to make this point again, and probably not for the last time (and in all caps, for emphasis): THE REPUBLICANS HAVE NOT BEEN MATHEMATICALLY CAPABLE OF STOPPING OBAMA'S AGENDA. I mean, technically, since the addition of Scott Brown to the Senate's roster, the Republicans have broken the filibuster-proof majority that was a spectacular failure. However, given that the Republicans' numbers contain Scott Brown, Olympia Snowe and Lindsey Graham, to name three stunningly disappointing RINOs (Republicans in Name Only), the Republicans have not been able to gain any traction in protecting our country.

So, is it evil to block the majority party from rushing to cloture five seconds after introducing a new bill that will fundamentally transform our financial system? Is it evil to just make sure that important pieces of legislation are at least debated? Is it evil to listen to the will of the American people and try to slow the steamroller of Marxism from flattening every single liberty that we, as the American people, have come to expect from our American citizenship? Is it evil to ask that before the President sends out his minions to denounce the Arizona immigration law, they might stop a minute to read it?

No, it isn't.

Bipartisanship? Hardly.

Further radio silence following the singular disaster of the healthcare bill being signed into law. I apologize, but I got fed up. A lot has happened since: Bart Stupak has announced his intention not to run for reelection (no kidding, Benedict Arnold, why even spend the money campaigning?), Justice John Paul Stevens has announced his impending retirement from the Supreme Court, discussions of a value-added tax have begun, blah de blah blah blah. I am not ready or willing to talk about any of that yet.

I want to talk about the two-party system in this country. If I hear one more person talking about partisanship and how it is injuring this country, I might vomit. Now, don't get me wrong: blindly towing the party line IS dangerous -- and, let's be honest, kind of indicative of legitimate stupidity -- but there's a major difference between voting with the party no matter what and standing by the principals you claimed to espouse when you campaigned.

In fact, our government was specifically set up with a two-party system in order to encourage partisanship. James Madison, one of the major architects of our political system, explained in the Federalist Papers* that political parties, or as he called them, "factions," were necessary for defining and ultimately refining ideas. This system encouraged people to get informed and make solid decisions, because each side's stance was defined clearly without any shading towards the middle ground. In a sharply-defined two-party system, there is absolutely no room for the apathetic voter who is easily swayed by smear campaigns or an abundance of charisma that isn't backed up with substance.

Madison's clear intention was for voters to take sides, which in turn provided a layer of checks and balances to the governance of this nation, and not for voters and politicians to live in a murky no-man's-land of bipartisanship and toxic compromise.

The other problem with the continuing calls for bipartisanship is the stunning lack of integrity in Washington. If we could trust that our politicians were compromising with the republic's best interests at heart, things would be a lot different. But in these days of political patronage and outright bribery in both houses of Congress, it seems to be impossible for a politician to do anything that isn't motivated by his own selfish self-interest.

Get informed. Take a stand. And for God's sake, stop bleating about bipartisanship until something other than crooks and liars populates the House and the Senate. And, for that matter, the White House.

*Clinton Rossiter, ed., The Federalist Papers (New York: Signet, 1961).

Healthcare Passes.

Ugh.

Shame on you, Bart Stupak. Shame on all of you, Congress. And good luck to you, now that you've woken the sleeping giant of conservatism in the United States.

Social Programs vs. Charitable Giving

Well, Glenn Beck is in hot water again. This time, it's evangelical Christians who are angry. Oh, sorry, correction: it's evangelical Christians who aren't paying attention who are angry.

Last week on his show, Beck described the differences between himself and Fr. Charles Coughlin, who was a Roman Catholic priest and a wildly popular radio commentator during the Great Depression. Apparently Beck is called a modern-day Fr. Coughlin by detractors (I have never heard this until Beck said so himself; but then, I don't keep up on the rantings of the left. If you listen to liars, you're going to be lied to).

Fr. Coughlin was a well-documented fascist-sympathizer and anti-Semitic. He was an early supporter of FDR's, until he became involved himself with the National Union for Social Justice (NUSJ). Proponents of social justice thought that FDR's policies were a waste of time (true) and they didn't do enough to bring about redistribution of wealth to the nation's poor (false).

Beck went on to exhort people who belong to churches who teach social justice to find new churches, which has prompted a firestorm of controversy.

But I'll say it again: the people who are up in arms are NOT PAYING ATTENTION.

Glenn Beck was not denouncing charity. He wasn't advocating the foreclosure of widows and orphans. He was merely making the point that charity should be voluntary, never compulsory. Social justice churches which get involved in the political giving of charity and social programs were Beck's target.

Don't let yourselves be fooled: if your church campaigns for government-subsidized social programs (i.e. welfare programs that actively incentivize unwed mothers to have more and more children, subsidized abortions for underprivileged women who can't afford another child and can't afford to murder the one inside them without financial help from the government, etc., etc., etc.) then you should find a new church. Find a church that provides an emphasis on charity rather than higher taxes for federal programs that are easily scammed and promote waste.

And if you're one of those people who heard, secondhand, that Glenn Beck is opposed to your church's agenda of socialist giving and are offended, you go right ahead and boycott Mr. Beck. Your boycott will do exactly no damage to Mr. Beck's show, because you were clearly not listening to him in the first place.

Conservatism: The Hard Sell

The problem with being a conservative is that it's hard to sell. Liberals and progressives have a distinct rhetorical advantage: free stuff for everyone and no need for personal responsibility because the government will take care of you with someone else's money!

The conservative message is extremely difficult to swallow to someone who's inclined to think the government nanny state sounds utopian. Conservatism says "pick yourself up, dust yourself off and try again." It says that living in this country doesn't guarantee you riches; it guarantees you the opportunities you can't find in any other nation on earth. It recognizes that the federal government does you no favors by infantilizing you and deeming you incapable of caring for yourself and your family; it argues that welfare incentivizes a victim mentality and penalizes innovation and success. It insists that charity happens at home and that there's no such thing as a free lunch. And it points out that robbing Peter to pay Paul makes absolutely no logical sense; a culture of borrowing a ton of money and spending even more is unsustainable and leaves future generation impoverished before they've even been born.

On second thought, maybe it's not a hard sell.

The Unmasking

Last night, I watched the hour-long interview that Glenn Beck held on Tuesday evening with former Congressman Eric Massa. It made me feel like I needed to clarify my previous post on Massa.

After I wrote my last post, I started hearing conservative pundits (who had previously seemed to be defending Massa) suddenly turn tail and go on the attack; for instance, noting that Massa's objection to the healthcare bill was due to the absence of a public option. There was also a clip of Massa (somewhat obnoxiously) declaring that he didn't care what his constituents wanted: he was going to vote the way he pleased.

So, okay, Massa's a pretty liberal guy. He holds some beliefs that would seem to be impossible contradictions (in particular he told Beck that he's in favor of a single-payer system, and that he wants to cover the uninsured without changing the world for everyone else. How can you implement a single-payer system and not change my health-insurance world? You can't.) That doesn't change his allegations that he was ushered out of office on the back of intimidation and overblown "scandal."

Here's my opinion on Massa: I believe every negative thing he has to say about Rahm Emanuel and his tactics; I believe that, while in poor judgment, his behavior at that wedding was exactly what he said it was, because if there were more we would have heard it by now; I believe that his bad luck in this situation is directly related to his opposition to the healthcare bill (whether because it's too liberal or not liberal enough, his reasons for voting "no" are irrelevant in this case); I believe that Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party leadership let him twist in the wind because he's not valuable to them right now; and I believe that he is an awful coward.

He's a coward for resigning his office; he's a coward for bleating about corruption and yet refusing to name names. His answer on this subject to Beck was: "We need campaign finance reform, or else nothing's going to change." This prompted Beck to apologize to his viewing audience for wasting their time; Beck felt that Massa had nothing new to say and Massa's evasion on Beck's request for Massa to put a face on his charges of corruption made Beck frustrated and annoyed.

I, however, do not feel in the slightest that my time was wasted. This interview cleared everything up for me: Massa will never be a hero because he doesn't have the courage and the strength of his convictions, and yet part of the mask has been torn off the White House and the rest of the progressive political machine.

Too bad no one's paying attention.

The Massa Mauler

Back in 2006, Nancy Pelosi, not yet Speaker of the House, promised that if Democrats were put into power during the election, she would "drain the swamp" that is Washington D.C.

Look, politicians? They're all corrupt. You can't get all the way to a seat in Washington D.C. without having auctioned off bits and pieces of your soul along the way. There are varying degrees of corruption, certainly. This is the crux of the "swamp-draining" that Pelosi promised.

For example: make an off-color remark to a male staffer while off the clock and get chased out of Washington with torches and pitchforks. Fail to pay your taxes, over and over again, take Caribbean trips paid for by special-interest groups and rack up a pile of additional ethics concerns, and you'll get to gracefully request a "temporary leave of absence" from your highly prestigious chairmanship, but keep your job, and Nancy Pelosi will publicly support you to boot.

Does it seem to anyone else that she has this entirely backwards? The male staffer in question -- I'm referring, of course, to the case of New York Democrat and former congressman Eric Massa -- didn't even complain; a coworker did. Massa subsequently went on a tear in a radio address, making a compelling case that his ouster from Washington is less about his mistake (and he admits that the comment was a mistake) and more about his opposition to Obama's agenda. Massa told all-too-easy-to-believe stories about Rahm Emanuel's tactics of intimidation following Massa's no votes on cap and trade and healthcare (choice Massa quote: "Do you have any idea how awkward it is to have a political debate with a naked man?").

Does it seem ironic to ANYONE else that the only ones coming to the defense of this Democrat who has resigned his post amid scandal are ... Republicans and other conservatives?

The Advent of the Pro-Marxism Conservative, Apparently

You've heard this story, unless you've been living under a rock: A couple of weeks ago, a man named Joseph Stack wrote an angry tirade against the IRS (and George W. Bush, his wife, and the Catholic Church), climbed into an airplane, and dive-bombed a building housing IRS offices in Austin, TX.

You've also probably heard, unless you're still under the aforementioned rock, the mainstream media linking Mr. Stack to the political right, even going so far as to proclaim that Mr. Stack has become a "right-wing hero."

Um. What? How many conservatives do you know who espouse communism? One of the final lines of Stack's rant was: "The communist creed: from each according to his ability to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: from each according to his gullibility to each according to his greed." So he was an anti-capitalism, pro-Marxism right-winger? THOSE DON'T EXIST.

I'm not saying that Stack was a left-winger, either. His ranting against the IRS was more right-wing than left-, but the sum total of the arguments advanced by Stack leads to one conclusion only: Stack was CRAZY. He was mentally unstable. He had taken to blaming everyone but himself for his failures in life, and both sides of the political spectrum were fair game.

Look, I don't care what your views are. I really don't. I might disagree with you, possibly vehemently; I might not understand how someone as smart as you are can see take the same set of facts as I do and yet come up with a completely different conclusion (which begs for the rejoinder that it must be me who's stupid, and some days I would agree with you). But let's agree not to vilify each other this way. Let's not take the actions of a crazy person and assign the motivations behind them to entire swaths of the population. Let's not stoop to this childishness.

Massholes No More!

I think I can't continue to blame the holidays for my radio (bloggio?) silence. So: back to it!

Yesterday was the special election in Massachusetts to fill the seat vacated by Ted Kennedy following his death in August. (That's right ... Not Kennedy's seat, but the seat formerly held by Kennedy. Note the difference.) Around 8:45PM, the polls having closed at 8, I settled down in front of my laptop to track election results, using the website of Massachusetts' Secretary of State.

Wouldn't you know? The dead link on the webpage never became active. Oh, transparency. How the Era of Obama has COMPLETELY FAILED to usher you in.

Before I went to bed, I Googled "Massachusetts special election results" and discovered that Coakley had already called Scott Brown to concede the election. Oh, and predictably, my Facebook homepage had exploded with variations on "What is the matter with you, Massachusetts?"

Okay, people. I'm (relatively) young, and that means that most of the people I know are IDIOTS. But you know what, there's no excuse for this. How dare you all fault the people of Massachusetts for daring to think for themselves? When the bluest of the blue states (registered Dems outnumber registered GOP voters by THREE TO ONE) gives a seat that's been held by a Kennedy since the 1960s to a Republican, you should sit up and take notice, NOT whine on Facebook and make statements that suggest that you think they're just a bunch of morons who messed up.

The Democrats have failed. The super-majority has brought this country nothing but trouble, and the people of Massachusetts stepped up and fixed it. I salute you, people of Massachusetts.

(But I still hate the Red Sox, the Patriots and ESPECIALLY Bill Belichick. Sorry.)