The Liberal God Delusion

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As Washington staggers into a new year, one side of the political spectrum polarizes and paralyzes all ongoing debates due to its irrational reliance on a higher power.

The problem isn’t religious conservatives and their abiding faith in God; it’s mainstream liberals and their blind confidence in government.

Consider the current dispute over the right response to gun violence. At its core, this argument comes down to a visceral disagreement between relying on self-defense or on government protection. Gun-rights enthusiasts insist that the best security for law-abiding citizens comes from placing formidable firearms into their hands; gun-control advocates believe we can protect the public far more effectively by taking guns away from as many Americans as possible. In other words, conservatives want to address the threat of gun violence by giving individuals more power while liberals seek to improve the situation by concentrating more power in the hands of the government. The right preaches self-reliance while the left places its trust in the higher power of government.

The same dynamic characterizes most of today’s foreign-policy and defense debates. Right-wingers passionately proclaim the ideal of “peace through strength,” arguing that a powerful, self-confident America with dominant military resources remains the only guarantee of national security. Progressives, on the other hand, dream of multilateral consensus, comprehensive treaties, disarmament, grand peace deals, and vastly enhanced authority for the United Nations. Once again, liberals place a touching and naive faith in the ideal of a higher power—potential world government—while conservatives insist that the United States, like any nation, must ultimately rely only on itself.

Regarding the great tax-and-spend battles presently pushing the nation ever closer toward the dreaded fiscal cliff, the right argues that the economy will perform better if money is controlled by those who earn it while the left wants to government to make better, more generous decisions on how to invest that money. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary from the failed welfare states of Western Europe, liberals maintain unwavering devotion to the notion that taking funds out of the private sector will miraculously generate more private-sector economic growth. Republicans trust the private decisions of prosperous people to make the best use of the money that those citizens have generated; Democrats rely on the superior wisdom and broader perspective of a larger, more activist government to distribute rewards and plan for the future in a complex economy.

Read more from this story HERE.

Desperate Screams of the Press Clowns

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By Erick Erickson. If you ever needed a reminder of how pathetic the cast of clowns who make up the reporters and journalists in the media is, look no further than the David Gregory story and the reaction to it from the press corps. It is a non-story to them [see story below].

Glenn Thrush, debating this with me on twitter notes, “The more [you] talk about the fake Gregory story the less [you] talk about Newtown. Classic play fake.”

But isn’t it directly related? We’ve moved on to begin discussing policy to prevent acts like Newtown happening. David Gregory was engaged in that discussion — the very discussion the press says we must now have.

The press has chosen to ignore that Connecticut’s law worked. Adam Lanza could not buy a gun himself. He had to murder his mother and take her guns. Read more from this article HERE.

NBC’s David Gregory Violated DC Gun Laws By Brandishing Hi-Cap Magazine?

By Katie Glueck. Some political and media types weren’t impressed by headlines this week reporting that D.C. police are investigating the alleged display of a gun magazine on NBC’s Meet the Press. They took to the Internet with their disdain for the story.

“Excellent use of DC police resources, investigating ‘Meet the Press’ for committing an act of journalism,” snarked the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.

“When guns are outlawed, only David Gregory will have guns,” Slate’s Matt Yglesias offered.

The Twitter sarcasm came a day after police said they were “investigating” after “Meet the Press” host David Gregory brandished what appeared to be a 30-round gun magazine on the Sunday show while interviewing National Rifle Association head Wayne LaPierre. Police said use of a magazine in that context could have violated D.C. laws.

The story picked up Wednesday as conflicting reports emerged concerning what NBC knew about the legality of displaying the magazine. Read more from this story HERE.

Steyn: Laws Are for Little People, Not David Gregory

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A week ago on NBC’s Meet the Press, David Gregory brandished on screen a high-capacity magazine. To most media experts, a “high-capacity magazine” means an ad-stuffed double issue of Vanity Fair with the triple-page perfume-scented pullouts. But apparently in America’s gun-nut gun culture of gun-crazed gun kooks, it’s something else entirely, and it was this latter kind that Mr. Gregory produced in order to taunt Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. As the poster child for America’s gun-crazed gun-kook gun culture, Mr. LaPierre would probably have been more scared by the host waving around a headily perfumed Vanity Fair. But that was merely NBC’s first miscalculation. It seems a high-capacity magazine is illegal in the District of Columbia, and the flagrant breach of D.C. gun laws is now under investigation by the police.

This is, declared NYU professor Jay Rosen, “the dumbest media story of 2012.” Why? Because, as CNN’s Howard Kurtz breezily put it, everybody knows David Gregory wasn’t “planning to commit any crimes.”

So what? Neither are the overwhelming majority of his fellow high-capacity-magazine-owning Americans. Yet they’re expected to know, as they drive around visiting friends and family over Christmas, the various and contradictory gun laws in different jurisdictions. Ignorantia juris non excusat is one of the oldest concepts in civilized society: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Back when there was a modest and proportionate number of laws, that was just about doable. But in today’s America there are laws against everything, and any one of us at any time is unknowingly in breach of dozens of them. And in this case NBC were informed by the D.C. police that it would be illegal to show the thing on TV, and they went ahead and did it anyway: You’ll never take me alive, copper! You’ll have to pry my high-capacity magazine from my cold dead fingers! When the D.C. SWAT team, the FBI, and the ATF take out NBC News and the whole building goes up in one almighty fireball, David Gregory will be the crazed loon up on the roof like Jimmy Cagney in White Heat: “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” At last, some actual must-see TV on that lousy network.

But, even if we’re denied that pleasure, the “dumbest media story of 2012” is actually rather instructive. David Gregory intended to demonstrate what he regards as the absurdity of America’s lax gun laws. Instead, he’s demonstrating the ever greater absurdity of America’s non-lax laws. His investigation, prosecution, and a sentence of 20–30 years with eligibility for parole after ten (assuming Mothers Against High-Capacity Magazines don’t object) would teach a far more useful lesson than whatever he thought he was doing by waving that clip under LaPierre’s nose.

To Howard Kurtz & Co., it’s “obvious” that Gregory didn’t intend to commit a crime. But, in a land choked with laws, “obviousness” is one of the first casualties — and “obviously” innocent citizens have their “obviously” well-intentioned actions criminalized every minute of the day. Not far away from David Gregory, across the Virginia border, eleven-year-old Skylar Capo made the mistake of rescuing a woodpecker from the jaws of a cat and nursing him back to health for a couple of days. For her pains, a federal Fish & Wildlife gauleiter accompanied by state troopers descended on her house, charged her with illegal transportation of a protected species, issued her a $535 fine, and made her cry. Why is it so “obvious” that David Gregory deserves to be treated more leniently than a sixth grader? Because he’s got a TV show and she hasn’t?

Read more from this article HERE.

Get Rid of the Republican Establishment

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Here’s a New Year’s wish I would love to see come true.

However it is defined or however many people are part of it, it is time to send the giant never-ending “GOP Establishment” made up of some professional politicians, some moneyed nouveaux riche who — by virtue of their contributions and the faux friendships it buys with politicians — consider themselves political landed gentry, and the endless scam artist consultants they support packing.

As previously stated, I thought Mitt Romney to be a better candidate than did many observers. That said, the recent revelations in news articles that claim to chronicle the Romney campaign reinforce the idea that the “silk underwear” branch of the GOP just doesn’t get it.

The emerging story of a candidate who really didn’t want to run in the first place and consultants who never listened to pleas from his own family to humanize the man so that everyday people could “feel like he understands them” just makes conservatives and the GOP faithful sick.

They once again spent their hard-earned money and endless time backing another Republican nominee who had no prayer of connecting with the average voter. Never mind that he was, at closer examination, a young man of privilege who outgrew his silver spoon to create his own hard-earned fortune, his case was never properly made.

Read more from this story HERE.

Grant DC Statehood? Then Move Capitol to Louisville

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The Huffington Post reports that a bill to move the District of Colombia toward statehood has been introduced in the Senate. Buzzfeed says “the 51st state would be called New Columbia” and be granted full voting representation in the Senate and House. A group called DC Vote has launched a White House petition to call on President Obama to support. It is indeed time that DC voters become fully enfranchised as the 51st state. But it is also high time that the nation’s capital be moved from its quaint antiquarian, eastern enclave to the center of our country. Louisville would be the perfect spot for a “new District of Columbia.”

In earliest days Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. were correctly viewed as the centers of America; benign centers of countervailing regions, nominally North and South, with dividing overviews; industrialization and manufacturing in Hamilton’s NY, provincial agrarianism in Jefferson’s South. So Victoria balanced Canada and Washington the Colonies. It was the perfect marriage of “harmony and tension” with these organic opposites held together by a benign center; a center intended to be free of the anxieties and warring oppositions of either and providing a holistic connection to both. But once it was filled with its own warring forces, the center had been passed through.

And that was not today with Joe Lieberman’s bill, cosponsored by Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). I couldn’t help notice that these lions of the Senate are all liberals. Obviously, they seek new liberal Senators by colonizing DC, much as the Southern secessionists in the 1800s hoped to bring new states in from South America to counter the North. The center had already been compromised by then. It is obliterated today. The armies of journalists today who gather in D.C. are fully partisanized; a “nerd prom” in Sarah Palin’s phrase, and Mark Steyn, who speaks passionately for mainstream conservatives, claims that there is not but one worth listening to.

Our states have lost their center and that is because the western states have risen to relevance since post-war and we are no longer a North/South country. But truly today we are an East/West country. We no longer look exclusively across the Atlantic to the rest of the world and not a day goes by when the Pacific doesn’t rise to greater relevance. It is elementary that America come into rebalance and greet face to face the rising century, coined the “Pacific Century” by Ambassador Mike Mansfield. The western states and regions must be met as equals in a new balance of east and west. Already there are grumblings in the heartland and the west, which clearly suggest those of the Jackson period and beyond.

My suggestion, a Supercommittee of Governors and former governors to discuss from those who have already brought the issues of western relevance and state sovereignty to the public forum: Arnold Schwarzenegger of California who compared California to Athens and Sparta in his inaugural address, Rick Perry of Texas who questions why a state with a surplus must support those in deep and growing debt, Sarah Palin, who singularly rose Tea Party issues of heartland America to relevance, Butch Otter of Idaho, Jodi Rell of Connecticut who with Arnold challenged the feds on auto emissions and Nikki Haley of South Carolina. Three men, three women, to meet to discuss in Louisville on the great, historic Ohio River, the center of America and the world surrounding: East, West, South and the Great White North.
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Bernie Quigley is a prize-winning magazine writer and has worked more than 30 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and book, movie, music and art reviewer. His essays on politics and world affairs have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Daily News and other newspapers and magazines. He has published poetry in Painted Bride Quarterly and has written dozens of magazine articles. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He has written hundreds of columns for “Pundits Blog” in “The Hill” a political journal in Washington, D.C. He lives in the White Mountains with his wife and four children.

Predicting the Biggest Stories of 2013, Part 2

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Each December I gaze into my crystal ball and predict what I believe will be the top 10 stories of the coming year. I almost never get these right but they’re fun to speculate about nevertheless. A year from now we’ll take a look back and see how well I did, unless I didn’t do well at all. In that case we will pretend this never happened for the sake of preserving my fragile self esteem. In case you missed part one, make sure to check out last week’s column for numbers 10 through six.

5. Green Bay Packers win Super Bowl
Look for the Packers to get healthy and hot down the stretch, and carry that momentum into the postseason—just as they did when they defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl two years ago. This time the Packers will beat the Denver Broncos, 28-24, in a dream matchup of future Hall of Famer quarterbacks featuring Aaron Rodgers versus Peyton Manning.

4. Israel Finally Strikes Iran
It’s been rumored and expected for years since the world first became aware of Iran’s desire to join the list of nuclear-armed nations. With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party poised to win big in January’s Israeli elections, and no friend to Israel Barack Obama back in the White House, Netanyahu will finally have the political clout and sense of urgency to preemptively strike the terrorist regime by year’s end. What happens next is anybody’s guess.

3. Rand Paul Goes Mainstream
In contrast to likely 2016 GOP presidential rivals Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan polishing their establishment credentials (see last week’s piece for more), I predict the Kentucky Senator will spend the year building his street cred within the mainstream of the conservative movement. He already endorsed Mitt Romney for president after he secured the nomination when his father did not, and Rand will lead off the New Year by going to Israel with influential evangelical activist and organizer David Lane. Remember that one of the largest obstacles in the way of his father extending his coalition of young conservatives and libertarians into conventional social conservatives was his foreign policy views. While others run and hide from the social issues, look for Rand to continue to be one of the most outspoken personhood voices in Washington, D.C. as well. With an eye towards 2016, Rand will continue building relationships within the conservative movement his father never bothered to while maintaining much of his father’s domestic agenda.

2. U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Prop 8
There are a lot of nervous values voters and Christian organizations concerned about the news the U.S. Supreme Court is going to take on the challenge to Proposition 8, which defended marriage in California (there’s only one kind of marriage, so I don’t call anything else but “marriage” marriage). Even some anti-marriage Republicans like former Bush Solicitor General Theodore Olsen have been trying to engineer a Roe v. Wade for marriage for years now.

Considering the makeup of the court, where there are really only three judges on the court who actually have respect for the original intent of the Constitution when considering their opinions, they have good reason to be. However, after knee-capping the Constitution in last summer’s Arizona immigration and Obamacare rulings, I predict the politically-motivated Chief Justice John Roberts will engineer an outcome in this case to avoid a potential Constitutional crisis. For the Supreme Court to assume it has the authority to nullify a duly enacted law from the United States Congress (signed by President Clinton) and enshrined in 31 state constitutions would be an unprecedented abuse of power and arrogance, even by the contemporary court’s standard.

Several of those states would challenge that breathtaking over-reach immediately either in court or their own legislatures, because if the court can tell a majority of the states it can’t determine its own policy on this matter than essentially any attempt at state sovereignty on any issue is null and void from the outset (Second Amendment, anyone?). It would also touch off a movement to protect religious freedom in each of those states as well (and thus another Constitutional fight).

That’s why when it’s all said and done I suspect the majority will write an opinion very sympathetic to homosexuality in general – perhaps even urging for federal legislation like ENDA to be passed – but in favor of upholding Prop 8 nonetheless. Look for the court to say such emotional issues should be decided by the political process so the people’s voice can be heard and not imposed outside of it by judges, similar to what a federal court in Hawaii recently said. I also predict it will be none other than Roberts himself, who will author that majority opinion.

1. John Boehner will be ousted as House Speaker
I don’t think there’s enough courage within the Republican caucus to find 16 members willing to vote “present” in January, thus denying Boehner the Speaker’s gavel right away. But by the end of the year the frustration with his lackluster leadership will be overwhelming, and Republicans concerned about another 2014 bloody primary season, similar to 2010 and 2012, will respond to the demands of conservative leaders who have grown tired of being sold out by the GOP.

Read Part 1 of Steve Deace’s predictions HERE.
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You can friend “Steve Deace” on Facebook or follow him on Twitter @SteveDeaceShow.

The Cost of Living in a Free Society

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We often hear the phrase “Freedom isn’t Free”, and we generally attribute that cost to the sacrifice our fighting men and woman make to preserve our republic. But we should all realize that we also must pay the price at times for the privilege of living in a free society. In the wake of the devastatingly crushing news of the school shootings in Newtown Connecticut on December 14, we are left pondering what we can do as a free society to prevent this type of tragedy from ever occurring again. Perhaps we should first ask ourselves, What price are we willing to pay?

Of course the first remedy after an event like this spouted by the simpleminded media and politicians with a larger agenda is to assault the Second Amendment. We are so accustomed to this attack on our freedom that many of us immediately begin to fret about the battle to come over gun rights instead of mourning the loss of the victims of the massacre. But we never have long to wait before a “gun grabbing” senator or even a president begin to capitalize on the tragedy to promote the idea that “El número dos” from our Bill of Rights is an outdated concept that needs to be ignored, altered, or abolished outright. But would a move to remove guns from legal firearms owner’s hands ensure a safe environment for us and our children forevermore? Of course not. The worst school massacre in U.S. history occurred in Bath Township, Michigan in 1927. The deranged individual used a makeshift bomb made from commercial explosives to kill thirty eight elementary school children, two teachers and four other adults. In China, on the same day as the events in Newtown, a deranged man slashed twenty two school children with a knife. Crazy will always find a way to be crazy, and the world is full of tools that can be used to carry out such attacks. So are you willing to give up your freedom and security in the form of your firearms to provide an inadequate, destined to fail guarantee of safety as a result?

One course of action that some have promoted is increased vigilance by the state in the monitoring and control of those in our midst with mental health issues. Of course the state would first have to identify those individuals that are deemed (by them) to be a possible threat, no doubt predominantly at the public school level. And then take over their care, medication and or incarcerate them through commission to a mental health facility if they are evaluated to be a risk. While we do need to pay more attention to the folks in our society that are afflicted with mental issues that may affect that same society as a whole, forgive me if I doubt the government’s ability to address the issue while protecting constitutional and parental rights in the process. As they have already shown, they have a dismal record of addressing behavioral and developmental problems (real or make believe) among our children so far. So the question is, are you willing to give up your rights as a parent or your own personal liberty to insure that anyone with the perceived potential to go postal at some point in the future as determined by some governmental bureaucrat are contained through mandatory medication or incarceration?

Read more from this article HERE.

Christmas In An Anti-Christian Age

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photo credit: nhvictory

For two millennia, the birth of Christ has been seen as the greatest event in world history. The moment Jesus was born in a stable in Bethlehem, God became man, and eternal salvation became possible.

This date has been the separation point of mankind’s time on earth, with B.C. designating the era before Christ, and A.D., Anno Domini, in the Year of the Lord, the years after. And how stands Christianity today?

“Christianity is in danger of being wiped out in its biblical heartlands,” says the British think tank Civitas.

In Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Ethiopia and Nigeria, Christians face persecution and pogroms. In Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, conversion is a capital offense. In a century, two-thirds of all the Christians have vanished from the Islamic world.

In China, Christianity is seen as a subversive ideology of the West to undermine the regime.

Read more from this article HERE.

A Yeshiva Boy and Christmas

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photo credit: lon r fong

When I was 20, I spent my junior year in college in England. When classes let out for the last two weeks of December, I traveled to Morocco, where something life-changing occurred.

What happened was that I felt a longing, even an emptiness, I had never before experienced. Something was missing from my life, but I could not at first identify it. I knew it was not about being without friends or family — after all, I hadn’t been with family or friends for the previous three months. And it wasn’t about being alone — I had gotten used to traveling alone.

This sense of missing something kept gnawing at me, until one day I realized what it was: I missed the Christmas season. I missed that time of year in America.

At first I denied it. Growing up in an Orthodox Jewish home and in yeshivas (Orthodox religious schools where half the day was devoted to religious, and half the day to secular, studies), I had, of course, never celebrated Christmas. How, then, could I miss something that I never had? How could I, raised in an Orthodox Jewish world, miss the quintessential Christian holiday?

But I could not conjure up any other explanation: I was in a non-Christian country, and therefore I heard no Christmas songs, saw no Christmas decorations, and Dec. 25 was just another day.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Christmas Conspiracy

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photo credit: patsw

Sometimes Christmas can seem a long way off, even when it’s close. So it was for me when I went to a funeral last Saturday at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue. The music was beautiful—a requiem setting by Gabriel Fauré. And the church was warmly populated. That happens when you die in your fifties, a season of life when the living still outnumber the dead.

Midway through the service I felt an interior ache grow. Susan had suffered a long illness. News of her death had not surprised me, or anyone else who knew her. But death is death: vacancy, emptiness, negation. The exquisite singing of the boys’ choir doesn’t sweep away the ugly cancer of death. The youthful purity of their voices seemed to draw attention to it by way of contrast.

Death. I think of the twenty children killed in Newtown, Connecticut. In my mind’s eye their caskets are processing down Fifth Avenue to join us. I remember the final days of my mother’s life before she put on the mask of death. “O Rust,” she said to me, “it’s so hard.” Gaping, hungry mouths of freshly dug graves open up in my imagination.

Underneath, or perhaps overtop or within this collage of dark thoughts I’m returning to a summer afternoon in rural Iowa when, at the turning point of an eight-day silent retreat, I walked down a hot, dusty gravel road beside sun-beaten corn fields contemplating the crucifixion of Christ. I saw him hanging on the cross. I heard Christ say in despair, “It is finished.” Then I saw him being swallowed by Satan, and felt Satan’s hot, foul breath.

Death. It’s hateful. It’s fearful. And in that moment at Susan’s funeral, as the floor collapses underneath my feet and I feel as though I was about to be dropped into a dark abyss, death seems all-powerful, the final word. Christmas is just ahead, but the promise of good tidings and joy appears empty, impossible, false.

Read more from this story HERE.