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.