Maggie's Farm

The Republicans, with the exception of Ronald Reagan, failed to lead when they controlled the power. They failed at politics. They proved they are an opposition party, not a leadership party.

A Maggie's Farm reader and a disheartened Conservative, in comments here

Dr. Seuss was a political cartoonist before he wrote kid's books. From a Dr. Seuss/Harry Reid piece at Gateway:

It's not that some people need more sleep than others - it's that some people sleep faster than others.

Peter DeVries

Quoted in this piece at Protein Wisdom by his reader Tomas:

This SCHIP argument is not about who does or doesn’t care about children. Christ. It’s about the proper role of government. That’s why the retorts from the Olbermanns of the world are so clueless at best, downright dishonest at worst.

If the left would at least acknowledge when its proposed programs do not fit in the intended government framework — that they go above and beyond, but are necessary because of such-and-such — the ensuing debates would be a lot less infuriating. But the left reliably skips that part every time. They proceed from the get-go as if everyone is operating in the same terrain, and pretend it’s thus merely a debate about the actual merits of various proposals.

It’s a rhetorical approach that has gummed up the gears of our political discourse for more than four decades now. It has caused us all to waste a depressing amount of breath, time and energy, sitting here constantly arguing past each other, all because the left is sloppy/dishonest with the debate’s most basic premise.

If only from the perspective of efficiency, it’s maddening.

Read the whole piece. Link above.

From an excellent, pleasantly rambling essay by Fjordman which begins with a discussion of Diana West's The Death of the Grown Up. A quote: 

She (West) believes that "Where womanhood stands today is deeply affected by the death of grown-up. I would say the sexualized female is part of the phenomenon I'm talking about, so I don't think they're immune to the death of the grown-up. Women are still emulating young fashion. Where sex is more available, there are no longer the same incentives building toward married life, which once was a big motivation toward the maturing process."

Is she right? Have we become a civilization of Peter Pans refusing to grow up? Have we been cut off from the past by disparaging everything old as outmoded? I know blogger Conservative Swede, who likes Friedrich Nietzsche, thinks we suffer from "slave morality," but I sometimes wonder whether we suffer from child morality rather than slave morality. However, there are other forces at work here as well.

The welfare state encourages an infantilization of society where people return to childhood by being provided for by others. This creates not just a culture obsessed with youth but with adolescent irresponsibility. Many people live in a constant state of rebellion against not just their parents but their nation, their culture and their civilization.

These are themes which have been frequently discussed at Maggie's. Read the whole thing at Brussels Journal.

Exactly right. A quote:

The Democrats just don’t get it. They didn’t get it when questions arose about the Frosts. They don’t get it now. And it is likely they will never get it because they refuse to ask the right questions.

It’s not about income. It’s about choices. It’s about the kind of government we should have. It’s about freedom versus dependence, liberty versus slavery, self-reliance versus serfdom.

And it’s about fairness. In the Frost's case, the consequences of one family’s choices being foisted upon their fellow Americans who may be less well off but are nevertheless asked to pony up to support them.

No one should begrudge the Wilkerson’s their participation in S-CHIP. They are barely above the poverty level and have little in the way of assets. But the Wilkersons and those like them are not the problem and the Democrats know it. Borderline cases like the Wilkerson’s who regularly fall through the cracks of coverage in other government programs are not part of the central criticism against the expansion of S-CHIP. It is subsidizing coverage for those up to 400% above the poverty level that is the basis of conservative opposition to the Democrat’s bill.

A quote:

The engine driving the utopian dream is indeed, fueled by nostalgia, and at the wheel are the wordsmith intellectuals. From philosophers like Rousseau, to Hegel, Marx, Lacan, Derrida, and Herbert Marcuse, intellectuals continue to yearn for a world of perfection—as defined, naturally, by wordsmith themselves. In the sphere of imaginative writing, novels and plays, from H.G. Wells to Norman Mailer, from Arthur Miller to Harold Pinter, these spinners of fantasies cater to the universal human longing for utopia, a prelapsarian time of bliss. They share contempt for the world of capitalist democracy, and scorn for the workers who make it run. Men of letters are of course the preeminent arbiters of the good and true in their own, self-created ideal world.

Read the whole thing at Horsefeathers. The saints are what really bother me the most.

There is little in this piece in American Thinker about Soros that we have not mentioned here before, except we did not know that he was born Gyorgy Schwartz before he changed his name. Why would he do that?

And how pleasant it must be to be guilt-free. I wish I knew that trick. 

God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World, by Walter Russell Mead. Quotes from Mead about the book at Dino or Powerline. Sample:

The conventional wisdom says that the history of the last 300 years is the story of the rise and fall of Europe. I think that is wrong. The main trend in world history has been the development and continuing growth of a global system of power, finance, culture, ideology and trade based first on the power of Britain and then on that of the United States. Since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Britain has only been defeated in one major great power war – the war of the American Revolution. To put that another way, since the seventeenth century, either Britain or the United States or both together have been on the winning side in every great power war in which they have participated.

God and Gold is a book about this Anglo-American world system. Why have the British and the Americans established the most powerful and influential international power system in the history of the world? What does history teach us about the dangers we now face from the conflicts in the Middle East and from other challenges of the 21st century such as the rise of Asia? Are the best days of Anglo-American power already behind us, or do we still have an important role to play in world history?

Chris took this photo in Connecticut on Saturday, and sent it over with an email which said drily "I have some reason to believe this might be the Nantucket Lightship."

Coast Guard Lightships marked the dangerous Nantucket Shoals since 1854. The Shoals are located on the heavily-trafficked transatlantic route to New York, 50 miles off the Nantucket coast. This lightship, "Nantucket 2," was decommisioned in 1983.

She has been refurbished as an elegant charter and events ship. The photos of the interior would surely not be recognizable to the guys who manned her.

You can tour the Ambrose Lightship, familiar to all sea travellers due to its old ocean station outside New York Harbor, in its original condition at New York's South Street Seaport.