A Festival of Excellent Essays
1. Star Parker takes issue with Bush's blaming racial discrimination for black poverty, here. One sentence:
The truth about black poverty today, as Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute has aptly put it, is that it is "intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city."
2. Leftist Taboos - What we are not allowed to say (except on blogs), where we say what we think. And the Presumption of Incompetence, coming from our betters. Chantrill at American Thinker:
The taboos of the welfare state mount a bodyguard of silence to protect this sacred totem, the Presumption of Helplessness. When Barbara Bush incautiously observes that the helpless refugees of New Orleans are doing fine in Houston, she is suggesting they might be able to shift for themselves. When John Roberts equivocates on Roe v. Wade he is genuflecting before the power of the sisters. When candidate Angela Merkel proposes a flat tax, she disturbs the tangled system that guides the German people in making life choices approved by their betters. As long as the liberal taboos on race and abortion still have the power to shame, then liberals are still ahead in the culture war.
Read entire.
3. Ben Stein wrote about the Katrina media riot. VDH does it, without humor:
For all the media's efforts to turn the natural disaster of New Orleans into either a racist nightmare, a death knell for one or the other political parties or an indictment of American culture at large, it was none of that at all. What we did endure instead were slick but poorly educated journalists, worried not about truth but about preempting their rivals with an ever more hysterical story, all in a fuzzy context of political correctness about race, the environment and the war.
Read entire.
4. Powerline's Mirengoff and Johnson take on the influence of Hegel, via Wilson, on the Supreme Court and the Fed Govt in general:
How did the metaphysical speculation of a 19th century German historicist, whose teachings were congenial to Marxists but are anathema to modern analytic and positivist philosophers--as well as proponents of the Constitution as originally understood--come to influence our constitutional law? The answer lies in the concept of the "living constitution"--and in the influence of Woodrow Wilson.
Worth reading.
