Maggie's Farm

Mine has not gone so well. As our Editor Bird Dog also says, it's usually the high point of my year with God, but this year it has not gelled the way it has in the past, and I have been continually distracted - or, more accurately, permitted myself to be distracted.

This leaves me feeling disappointed with myself, and thus more in need of Lent and of God's grace, and thus the thing snowballs in the wrong direction down the wrong hill. I know that I have only so many Lents, and so many Easters, in my life. Still, I cannot get in the groove this year and fear that Easter will therefore be a hollow celebration followed by just one more unnecessary high-calorie brunch, followed by an undeserved nap. 

Something is in my way, but I do not know what it is. It's nothing obvious, or I would be able to identify it.

As contrast, our friend The Anchoress says:

Lent has been for me a daily movement through shadows and light; so many to pray for, so much to pray about and the comprehension of all of my limitations and deficiencies. I begin to know all I do not know and have never felt so little. Sometimes, as the psalmist says, “my sin is ever before me,” and the shadows feel very heavy; other times the silence and contemplation thrust me into dizzying light, where there is warmth but then I know even less. I realize I am almost wholly unschooled in love, unacquainted with decency. What I have learned most whole-heartedly this Lent is that my instinct throughout my life have been pretty-much right on: that I am an uncultured, untutored, self-concerned and barely conscious rough beast, and I have been slouching unaware through humanity for almost 5 decades; I am only finally evolving just a little - a very little - for the better.

I do not need much more self-flagellation, but there is something maybe short of that...

We have written several times about the destructive effect of the FDR presidency, most recently here, so there is no need to repeat ourselves.

However, it is good to see that Burt Prelutsky has come around. He begins:

Growing up, as I did, in the home of Russian Jewish immigrants, it figures that I’d start out thinking that, by all rights, Franklin D. Roosevelt belonged on Mount Rushmore. But, all these years later, I have concluded that most of America’s woes can be traced back to his presidency, and that the best reason for him being up there along with Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington and Teddy Roosevelt, is that his head was already made of stone.

Although FDR is often, mistakenly, credited with bringing the Great Depression to an end, as Amity Shlaes made clear in her book, The Forgotten Man, his policies, which can best be described as socialistic and anti-business, in reality prolonged America’s misery. The mere fact that he and his economic advisors thought it made perfect sense to keep raising taxes during the 1930s suggests that their primary motive wasn’t to lift the country out of its economic morass, but to take advantage of the situation to inflate the power of the federal government.

The end result of his 12 years in the White House is a hodge-podge of Washington bureaucracies and an economy that finds the federal government being far and away the single largest employer in the U.S. Couple that with his personal fondness for Joseph Stalin, his filling his administration and the State Department with like-minded people, and you have a perfect blueprint for disaster. For as Thomas Jefferson recognized, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have.”

Burt sounds like a Maggie's Farm contributor. Read the whole thing.

Photo: FDR around 1917.

Jeffrey Bell at Weekly Standard wonders how the Repubs might deal with the aftermath of a "failed presidency."

It's a worthwhile piece, but I am far from sure that Bush has been a failure - unless the measure of failure is the popularity poll of the week. Few presidents remain popular towards the end of 8 years, because everything they have done annoyed somebody.

Recessions are the times when wealth returns to its proper owners.

Anonymous

I am most of the way through Tim Blanning's The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815.

It's the most enjoyable history book I've read in years, packed with color, remarkable details, and insights into the recent route to the modern world. A page-turner, in fact.

I was not surprised how much I had forgotten about Frederick the Great.

As Publisher's Weekly says:

Blanning, professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge, has performed the miracle of balancing and blending traditional political and diplomatic accounts with the newer fields of social, economic and intellectual history. A prime example of this is the author's treatment of the impact of the new "public sphere." As people discoursed through coffeehouses, Masonic organizations or periodicals, "a new source of authority emerged to challenge the opinion-makers of the old regime: public opinion."

EU to Ireland: Drop dead. Ireland and the EU. (h/t, Gates)

The passivity of Europe in the face of the EU's power grab is utterly beyond my comprehension. It must be the same people who were "Better Red than dead," because they have been subjected to an imperial conquest without a shot being fired.