Don't Want To Think About It

Apparently, the Democratic Presidential candidates had a debate last night. As reported by Jim Geraghty at the Campaign Spot:

Look, I try hard to see where the other side of the aisle is coming from, but this debate was painful - an egregious can-you top-this panderfest, in which nothing surprising, intriguing, thought-provoking or original was said.

The candidates knew what their audience liked and didn’t like, and served up soundbites accordingly.

More importantly, from my viewpoint:

No mention of the war on terror.

And demonstrating why I'll be pushing the button for the Republican candidate in November 2008. The Democrats have had six years now to come up with some positions on the War on Terror - but instead pretend it doesn't exist.*

This is not to say that the Republicans have all the right answers. But they do acknowledge the problem, which is more than any of the Democrats can muster. They are still stuck on the "it's Bush's war" mantra.

As recent events have shown, the jihad that the self-annointed saviors of Islam have embarked upon against the West will not end when President Bush leaves the scene. it will continue regardless of who assumes the Presidency in January 2009.

And one half of our political establishment doesn't even want to think about it.


*This doesn't even cover all the usual socialist junk - as Geraghty mentions, there's not a social program any of the candidates doesn't like. If you thought government growth was too much under Bush - wait until one of them gets there. Canada, here we come...

Star Chambers with a Smiley Face

"It is time people realized that “human rights codes” are a weapon employed by the state to suppress disapproved behaviour by the individual. They cannot be wielded by the individual against the state, as independent civil and criminal courts could be. They are star chambers used, and designed to be used, to mount show trials, in which persons who fail to snap to attention when commissar issues the latest political corrections may be publicly demonized. By removing all of their victims’ established legal protections -- presumption of innocence, the right to know one’s accuser, to be tried by a jury of one’s peers, et cetera -- they put a jackboot directly in the teeth of the tradition of human liberty descending from Magna Charta."

David Warren

A War Upon the Weak

One does not, as I have said, need to deny heredity in order to resist legislation, any more than one needs to deny the spiritual world in order to resist an epidemic of witch-burning. I admit there may be such a thing as hereditary feeble-mindedness; I believe there is such a thing as witchcraft. Believing that there are spirits, I am bound in mere reason to suppose that there are probably evil spirits; believing that there are evil spirits, I am bound in mere reason to suppose that some men grow evil by dealing with them. All that is mere rationalism; the superstition (that is the unreasoning repugnance and terror) is in the person who admits there can be angels but denies there can be devils. The superstition is in the person who admits there can be devils but denies there can be diabolists. Yet I should certainly resist any effort to search for witches, for a perfectly simple reason, which is the key of the whole of this controversy. The reason is that it is one thing to believe in witches and quite another to believe in witch smellers. I have more respect for the old witch-finders than for the Eugenists, who go about persecuting the fool of the family; because the witch-finders, according to their own conviction, ran a risk. Witches were not the feeble-minded, but the strong-minded —- the evil mesmerists, the rulers of the elements. Many a raid on a witch, right or wrong, seemed to the villagers who did it a righteous popular rising against a vast spiritual tyranny, a papacy of sin. Yet we know that the thing degenerated into a rabid and despicable persecution of the feeble or the old. It ended by being a war upon the weak. It ended by being what Eugenics begins by being.

G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils
(Found by Jonah Goldberg at The Corner.)

The More Convincing Proof

"I have lived, Sir, a long time; and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this Truth, that God governs in
the Affairs of Men. And if a Sparrow cannot fall to the Ground without his Notice, is it probable that an Empire can rise without
his Aid?"

-- Benjamin Franklin (Motion for Prayers in the Constitutional Convention, 28 June 1787)

Reference: Franklin: Collected Works, Lemay, ed. (1138)



"The belief in a God All Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the world and to the happiness of man,
that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources nor adapted with too much solicitude to the different
characters and capacities impressed with it."

-- James Madison (letter to Frederick Beasley, 20 November 1825)

Reference: Writings of Madison, Hunt, ed., vol. 9 (230)



"A State, I cheerfully admit, is the noblest work of Man: But Man, himself, free and honest, is, I speak as to this world,
the noblest work of God...."

-- James Wilson (Chisholm v. Georgia, 18 February 1793)

Reference: 2 U.S. 419 (1793)


Source: The Patriot Post

History and Custom

"I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid."

G. K. Chesterton