THERE IS NO SECOND PLACE

This is why this war will take generations to win.

Iran Schoolbooks Teach Jihad, Martyrdom, Study Shows
By Fred Lucas
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
March 12, 2008

Washington (CNSNews.com) - When third grade school children in Iran turn to page 113 of their textbook "Let's Read," they find a passage that says, "At that time, the Israeli officer pounded (three-year-old) Muhammad's head with the rifle's stock and his warm blood sprinkled upon his (six-year-old brother) Khaled's hands."

The Iranian textbook was published in 2004, before the controversial Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president of Iran in 2005. In another third-grade text, "Gifts of Heavan," an illustration of a monster wearing the Star of David is seen going through a tidy Muslim town leaving garbage everywhere.

While those examples could seem shocking to some, it gets worse, said Arnon Groiss, director of research at the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, who recently completed a study of 115 Iranian school textbooks. (Most of the books reviewed in the study had been published in 2004.)

"Indoctrination is less felt in the lower grades and increases in the higher grades," Groiss said, speaking at a forum Monday on the topic at the conservative Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.

The books are part of an overall indoctrination effort aimed at school children. This effort includes rewritten Iranian history and the inclusion of Jihadist political views in science and geography texts, he said.

The seventh grade text "Islamic Culture and Religious Instruction," which refers to the West and Israel as the "Arrogant Ones," tells students that war is unavoidable and victory is guaranteed "in order to continue with all our power our revolution against the Arrogant Ones and the oppressors."

An eighth grade text says the "army of Islam would make the Arrogant Ones fall in holy Jihad and heavy attack."

"This is a form of child abuse rejected by all civilized countries," said Groiss, who for 30 years was an Arab-language journalist and is currently deputy director at Israel Broadcasting Authorities Arabic Radio. "This pictures a regime bent on global war to the point of self-destruction."

On page 20 of the high school textbook "Humanities," the United States is described as an "imperialist country" that "does not refrain from massacring people, from burying alive soldiers of the opposite side and from using mass-destruction weapons. It makes use of atomic bombs. ... It creates the greatest dictatorships and the violent and torturous security-oriented regimes, and defends them."

The good news could be that most Iranian families dismiss the teachings in the books, telling their children to simply memorize the material for the test, but nothing else, said the Iranian-born Shayan Arya at the forum.

"To the Iranian youth, America is the most popular country," said Arya, a member of the Constitutionalist Party of Iran - an international group of one-time Iranian citizens pushing for the establishment of a liberal democracy in that country. However, even a small number influenced by the books could be damaging, he said.

"The Islamist regime does not need to be 100 percent successful, only a small portion," Arya said. "If 10 percent are exposed, that's 5 million. If 1 percent is exposed, that's 500,000. If it's a half of a percent, that's 250,000. That's more troops than we have in Iraq."

Vouchers for schools is the solution

It was only a matter of time until even the Dems figured out that choice in education is the only way to go .  The education unions are over.  We can no longer protect bad teachers at the expense of our kids.  This is a matter of national security. 

Source: TownHall.com

   

                        

Inner City Kids Benefiting From School Choice
By Dr. Matthew Ladner
Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Democratic activist Steve Barr, founder of the Rock the Vote campaign, has dived into school reform in Los Angeles. Predictably, this has run him straight into the teeth of opposition from the education union. Barr has been busily kicking out those teeth.

   

       
                    
        A girl touches the hand of U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) during a visit to an elementary school in New Orleans February 7, 2008. REUTERS/Carlos Barria (UNITED STATES) US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN 2008 (USA)

   

       

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Barr’s Green Dot is a group of charter schools with a strong record of accomplishment with very disadvantaged students. Public school teachers in Watts have been using a California law to secede from the dysfunctional Los Angeles district to join Green Dot as charter schools. The education establishment in the city, led by the education unions, has fought Barr every step of the way. But so far, Green Dot is winning.

Barr is no union buster; his schools have school-level associations. Barr’s take-no-prisoners style, however, includes no patience for urban schools that systematically fail kids. Barr will not tolerate tenure or other impediments to quality learning.

Barr makes it clear, in sometimes colorful language, that the purpose of state education spending is to educate children, not to provide job security to underperforming adults. He told LA Weekly, “Where are these … (expletive) teachers going to go? Where are these lifetime benefits going to go? What will happen to all of these groups protecting their interests and their jobs and their construction contracts? The political puzzle of this is really fascinating. But I have no doubt that within five years, you’re going to see our impact. And it’s going to be huge.”

Green Dot Schools in the toughest neighborhoods in Los Angeles have an average high school graduation rate of 80 percent. The first two Green Dot schools also had high percentages of graduates attending four-year accredited colleges and universities. The school model focuses on getting resources away from bureaucracy and into the classroom and an unflinching commitment to academic achievement.

Susan Estrich, manager of the 1988 Dukakis presidential campaign, blasted the Los Angeles school board for trying to stop Green Dot. Estrich describes the dire need:

The graduation rate at the local high school, one of the absolute worst in Los Angeles, is 3 percent…Green Dot was ready to go in Watts. It had the money to open the schools. It had the support of the community. It met all of the legal requirements for its charters to be approved. Indeed, the School Board staff advised the members that their only legal option was to approve the charters... But who cares about the rule of law when the teachers’ union is saying no?

TV personality Drew Carey recently filmed an internet program on Green Dot’s takeover of Locke High School in Watts for the Reason Foundation. Approximately 75 percent of 9th graders entering Locke do not graduate in four years, and less than five percent of Locke students go on to four-year colleges. In the 2003-2004 school year, there were three sex offenses, 17 robberies, 25 batteries, and 11 assaults with a deadly weapon at Locke. In the “no good deed goes unpunished” world of dysfunctional public school districts, the principal who tried to turn the school around was hounded by the unions.

Barr is not alone as a Democrat defying the prerogatives of the education unions. Democrats for Education Reform is a new group that is making a big splash. In 2007, the group held an event in which U.S. Representative James Clyburn (D-SC) stressed the importance of parental choice and innovation in education. Clyburn, the House Majority Whip and the highest-ranking African-American in Congress, supports both charter schools and private school tuition tax credits for middle-class families.

At an earlier event held by the group, Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. discussed “alarming dropout rates” and the dangers of a “monopoly” filled with failing schools. “We must explore options,” he said. “Every option for every American child so that every child might have the high-quality education they deserve in their lifetime…We need more competition in the system.”

Jackson Jr. mentioned that his parents sent him to the elite St. Albans Episcopal School in D.C. when he was a child. He said he plans to push the envelope to make Democrats approach education with a more open mind.

The big tent of education reform keeps getting bigger. The relationship between liberals and education reactionaries is under obvious strain. As Churchill once said, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

To many people in prison - legalize drugs and you solve half of this problem

I've said for years we need to legalize drugs.  This does a number of good things.  Start with national security.  It takes the profits out of the drug trade and out of the hands of terrorist and gangsters.  By legalizing drugs and regulating drugs the crime related to the drug trade would be eliminated because the prices will come down.  By releasing people in jail for non violet drug related crimes you let 1 million people out of prison.  This stops the need to build more prisons and makes room for serious criminals.  The courts will be freed up from all the drug cases and treatment centers can be set up.  The enforcement dollars used by the DEA and local law enforcement can be used to track dangerous criminals and terrorist.  The risk of overdose will be reduced because the drugs will be pure and doses would be known.  It creates a new tax base.  There will be a certain amount of derelicts in society no matter what we do.  This is a shame but if drugs were legalized these people can be identified and helped.

This article makes a point but it misses the real point.

      David               A. Keene              

   

Rule-Breakers, Inside and Out
      The Hill
      March 3,   2008

America’s jails and prisons are bursting at the seams and new ones are being built at an amazing pace to house violent, non-violent, white collar and miscellaneous miscreants being shuttled through our courts at an ever-increasing rate. Governors in state after state are wondering just how to pay for the prisons they’re being forced to build and those who run our prisons and jails are hard-pressed to find qualified correctional officers to guard the growing army of inmates under their control.

Just last week, figures released by the government revealed that more than one in a hundred adults in this country are serving time in jail or prison. That’s the highest percentage of citizens of any nation in the world and it’s growing.

People are incarcerated for breaking society’s rules or laws both to punish them and to protect the public from them, and to let others know that those who break the law will pay for doing so. When they leave the courtroom for prison, victims and prosecutors often breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that at the very least they won’t be preying on the innocent while they’re locked up. Everyone hopes that by the end of their incarceration, miscreants “will have learned their lesson” and return to society determined not to repeat their mistakes.

The evidence suggests otherwise. While incarcerating dangerous and career criminals reduces crime just by keeping them off the street, prisons don’t do a very good job of rehabilitation. This should be of greater and greater concern these days because in the next few years literally hundreds of thousands of prisoners will be released and the fear is that a very high percentage of them will end up terrorizing someone before being rearrested and sent back.

Our prisons house more than a few men and women who cannot be saved, but many can. In failing them, our prisons are failing the society building these human warehouses.

A few weeks ago, I joined a number of others testifying before the House Judiciary Committee supporting changes in a law known as the Prison Litigation Reform Act or PLRA. The PLRA was passed in 1996 to deal with a flood of frivolous lawsuits filed by prisoners complaining about just about everything. The new law made it far more difficult to file such suits by requiring, a) that prisoners exhaust all administrative remedies available to them before going to court and b) denying prisoners access to the courts under any circumstances unless they could demonstrate actual physical injury as a result of the alleged mistreatment.

The law worked in the sense that it cut down on prisoner’s lawsuits, but it had the unintended consequence of virtually insulating prison officials from external oversight and denied prisoners access to the courts for all but the most grievous mistreatment. Even prisoners raped by rogue guards have been denied access to the courts because they couldn’t demonstrate real physical injury resulting from the rape.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Bobby Scott (D-Va.) held the hearing to see how the law is working and what might be done to eliminate the unintended consequences without once again opening the courts to thousands of frivolous or even malicious lawsuits.

The witnesses testifying urged a number of reforms. The most important were eliminating the physical injury requirement, which allows guards and prison officials to ignore a prisoner’s rights and their own rules because they know they can do anything they want short of inflicting observable physical injury; softening the requirement that a prisoner “exhaust” an administrative review procedure that is often run not to remedy abuses but to keep prisoners “in their place.”

Any other governmental agency that promulgates rules governing its own behavior must follow those rules, but it is well documented that prison officials can and often do ignore their own regulations because  prisoners have no recourse and no one on the outside can do anything with the knowledge either. Prisoners who ask that the rules be followed are simply told the written or official rules don’t matter.

Most prisoners may not be rocket scientists, but they learn a lesson from all this. They realize that while they are in prison for breaking society’s rules, those with real power can and do act exactly as they please in flagrant violation of the very rules they are paid to enforce and observe.

That’s a lesson we shouldn’t be teaching.

Liberalism in our institutions

Source: TownHall.com

   

                Unacceptable
By John McCaslin
Monday, March 3, 2008

"Made in China."

Or so reads the tag on the navy blue "Pentagon United States — Dept. of Defense" cap purchased for this columnist on the main concourse of the Pentagon at the Fort America concession.

   

       
                    
        A policeman patrols Tiananmen Square in Beijing March 2, 2008, in front of the Great Hall of the People, the venue of the National People's Congress or parliament. Some 3,000 delegates to the annual meeting of China's parliament, the National People's Congress, will meet in Beijing's Great Hall of the People on March 5 for about two weeks. REUTERS/Jason Lee (CHINA)

   

       

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Bring back Murrow

Turned off by TV news? You're not alone.

We've just finished reading a scathing critique of network news by Jeffrey M. McCall, professor of communication at Indiana's DePauw University and author of "Viewer Discretion Advised: Taking Control of Mass Media Influences."

It was this time last year, the professor notes, that Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Michael Copps criticized the television news industry for giving the public "too much baloney passed off as news."

"Sadly, the evidence since that speech indicates that Copps' critique remains quite valid," Mr. McCall writes. "From superficial coverage of elections to hyped-up coverage of celebrity scandals, the broadcast news industry continues to give the citizenry a news agenda that degrades the conversation of democracy."

And how have the news networks reacted?

"NBC is countering the decline in journalistic effort with an increase in razzle-dazzle," he finds. "Evening anchor Brian Williams was a guest host last fall on 'Saturday Night Live.' NBC executives were delighted with the stunt, one of them saying, 'It showed a side of his personality that some viewers may have warmed to.' "

(Perhaps we will warm up to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton now that she appeared on the same comedy show over the weekend).

"The most recent NBC novelty is the new voice that introduces Williams' 'Nightly News.' It is none other than Hollywood actor Michael Douglas, recruited by Williams himself to open the show," Mr. McCall adds in his Op-Ed column, which first appeared in the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune.

It's so pitiful, he points out, that on a certain "day last June when oil prices dropped $2 a barrel, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs stepped down, the space shuttle launched, and former national security adviser Sandy Berger surrendered his law license for stealing government documents, the story that dominated cable news was Paris Hilton's release from jail."

Still, he says, there's hope:

"Former NBC journalist Maria Shriver recently told NBC she wouldn't return to the network from her current hiatus. She cited the media excesses in covering the death of Anna Nicole Smith last year as the major factor, saying 'It was then that I knew the TV news business had changed.' "

Reagan reruns

Feeling left out for missing the Reagan Revolution? Not to worry, the Gipper is back.

Ronald Reagan's voice "will soon be heard across the land again," says Duke Blackwood, executive director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Foundation. He says a series of 30 nonpolitical segments of Mr. Reagan's many radio commentaries, in which he clarifies his vision for America, will begin airing around the country on April 28.

"Ronald Reagan Speaks for Himself" is aimed at the several generations of Americans who never heard him speak on issues such as the economy, immigration, abortion, terrorism and taxes.

Consider this

Percentage of Democrats who rate their mental health as "excellent": 38

Percentage of Republicans who do: 58

— Harper's Index, March 2008

Tough being Israel

King Abdullah II of Jordan, who has arrived in the United States for meetings with President Bush, made this eye-opening observation during a speech to the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University:

"Fifty-seven countries are not at peace with Israel today. Fifty-seven countries out of 193 countries in the world. Fifty-seven countries with a total population greater than Europe and the United States combined.

"Fifty-seven countries, representing one-third of the members of the United Nations."

Illegal Immigration hurts us all in many ways

Source: Town Hall .com

   

                Judges Getting the Message About Illegal Immigrants
By Phyllis Schlafly
Monday, March 3, 2008

Four children including two brothers were killed, and 12 others were hospitalized with injuries, in Minnesota last week when a van reportedly ignored a stop sign and barreled into a school bus. The driver of the van, who did not speak English or have a valid drivers license, was charged with homicide.

   

       
                    
        A Pakistani immigrant, right, who didn't want to give his name, talks to the media on Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2008, in Barcelona, Spain, about how the police broke into his apartment on Jan. 19, arresting Rafqat Ali, background right. Rafqat Ali, who was one of two men arrested by Spanish police on Jan. 19 as terrorist's suspects and later released, but Ali has accused police of beating him and holding him in a darkened cell for hours. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

   

       

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Authorities described the driver as an illegal immigrant using a phony name. She had pled guilty in 2006 for driving without a license.

For years, courts and lawyers have intimidated towns from protecting themselves against the invasion of illegal immigrants. In 2006, Escondido, Calif., backed away from its housing ordinance to curtail leases to illegal immigrants and even agreed to pay $90,000 in legal fees to plaintiffs challenging the law.

Last summer, a federal court slapped down an attempt by Hazleton, Pa., to penalize employers and landlords who hire and lease to illegal immigrants. Hazleton had been hit by an influx of illegal immigrants and victimized by some of their shocking crimes.

But in August, Newark, N.J., no stranger to violence, was shaken by the brutal murder of several college-bound teenagers who were harmlessly enjoying music at a playground. The victims were black, and the perpetrator was an illegal immigrant from Peru who had been previously charged with raping a 5-year-old girl but had been released despite his obvious illegal presence in this country.

Another imported crime is driving the wrong way on highways, with headlights turned off, in order to escape detection while smuggling drugs or people. Several deadly crashes resulting from this practice have been reported.

The American people's outrage at violations of the law by illegal immigrants was heard loud and clear by the U.S. Senate when it defeated the amnesty bill last year. Now, even judges may be getting the message.

In December, a federal judge in Oklahoma upheld an Oklahoma law requiring state contractors to determine and verify the immigration status of new hires. U.S. District Judge James H. Payne threw out a legal challenge to the law.

In January, U.S. District Judge E. Richard Webber emphatically ruled against illegal immigrants who had sued to overturn a similar ordinance enacted by Valley Park, Mo., a town near St. Louis. The court upheld the ordinance, which was directed at employers who were hiring illegal immigrants.

The third strike against illegal immigrants came in February when U.S. District Judge Neil V. Wake rejected each and every argument challenging a new Arizona law that imposes penalties on businesses that knowingly hire illegal immigrants. He dismissed the claim that federal law somehow ties the hands of state and local governments seeking to protect their own citizens.

These three decisions in three different parts of the country included both Republican- and Democratic-appointed judges. In the term loved by the mainstream media, there is now bipartisan judicial support for state and local legislation against illegal immigrants.

University of Missouri at Kansas City Law professor Kris Kobach says these decisions give "a green light to other communities" seeking to pass similar ordinances.

Hazleton, Pa., Mayor Lou Barletta vigorously supported his city's ordinance cracking down on illegal immigrants. Despite being vilified by liberal Pennsylvania newspapers, he won nearly 95 percent of the vote in his Republican primary for re-election last year.

But that wasn't all. In the same election, Barletta also won the Democratic nomination on a write-in vote, defeating the leading candidate in the Democratic primary by a stunning 2-to-1 margin.

In the Arizona case, the court noted the research of George Borjas, an economist at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, who concluded that hiring illegal immigrants depresses wages for legal workers because illegals accept lower pay without benefits. Those hardest hit are uneducated legal workers, who in Arizona alone lost $1.4 billion in 2006 in the form of lower wages.

The nine months between now and the November election give states, cities and towns ample time to do what Congress has failed to do: protect U.S. citizens against the lawless entry of illegal immigrants. That means penalizing employers who hire illegal immigrants and landlords who lease to them.

It is long overdue for public officials to rid the United States of imported crimes and to stand up for legal workers, especially the poorly educated ones who need an entry-level job to start building their lives. Now that a green light has been provided by the courts, states and cities should proceed full steam ahead to protect their citizens from illegal immigrants.

Government Control of anything is not good.

Source : TownHall.com

   

                        

Beware Democrats' Centralized Energy Control Scheme
By Johnnie B. Byrd
Monday, March 3, 2008

Are you one of those people thinking there may be a positive “strategery” in enduring four years of President Barack Obama? It will be such a disaster that it will inevitably lead to a Carter-to-Reagan renaissance, right? Think again. We don’t have the luxury. If you aren’t listening to what Obama and the Democrats are saying about “Anthropogenic Global Warming” it may be time for you to wake up.

My blood ran cold while reading the recently released “Climate Change Legislation Design White Paper” prepared by the Democratically controlled U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Ostensibly a discussion of the appropriate role of each level of government in addressing climate change, the paper leaves no doubt that the Democrats are committed to “a mandatory, economy-wide climate change program” that mandates “the efficient use of government and societal resources.” We’re not just talking curly fluorescent light bulbs here folks.

   

       
                    
        An enormous iceberg (R) breaks off the Knox Coast in the Australian Antarctic Territory, January 11, 2008. Australia's CSIRO's atmospheric research unit has found the world is warming faster than predicted by the United Nations' top climate change body, with harmful emissions exceeding worst-case estimates. Picture taken January 11, 2008. REUTERS/Torsten Blackwood/Pool (ANTARCTICA)

   

       

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This troubling paper finds that, “State, Tribal, and local programs could significantly improve the efficiency of societal resources used to achieve the necessary greenhouse gas reductions.” In other words, all of us advocates for protection of “societal resources” (group-think for “private property”) should get our best grip because more government “help” is on the way.

One regulatory idea that excites the Democratic staff is that, “Transportation emissions are highly correlated with vehicle miles traveled (VMT), a parameter that state and local governments are particularly well-positioned to affect.” Suggesting that mandatory reduction of per-capita VMT would be an excellent experiment for local government. Holy Cow!

Thankfully, Rep. Joe Barton, R-TX, the ranking member of the Committee, gets it. He has been a voice of reason, even taking Speaker Pelosi to task for spending taxpayer dollars to buy so-called carbon credits from the Chicago Climate Exchange supposedly to offset carbon use at the Capitol. Even the Washington Post eventually revealed the dubious nature of such programs. Barton continues to point out the folly of crafting solutions before we know the cause of climate change.

If you think these ideas are only the exuberance of a handful of liberal Democratic staffers, think again. Respected think tanks have weighed in on this issue. The Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force of Energy and U.S. Foreign Policy, chaired by John Deutch and James R. Schlesinger, reports that energy independence is unachievable without more government intervention. As a result, the Task Force concludes that we must embrace a “substantial federal excise tax on gasoline” to encourage less driving, stricter CAFE standards, and cap gasoline consumption adopting a system of tradable vouchers which would “redistribute income among consumers.” That sounds like rationing, or worse.

The report also notes that mandated shifts to mass transit could reduce oil dependence. In my minds eye, I am seeing the first video out of North Korea with masses of North Koreans walking in sub-freezing temperatures on sidewalks along roadways with no automobiles!

At any rate, the report only acknowledges in passing that current higher energy prices are “…unleashing remarkable forces for innovation in this country. Entrepreneurs are seeking new ideas for products and services, such as batteries, fuel cells and biofuels. Private equity capital is seeking opportunities to invest in new energy technologies….” Good God, is it “remarkable” to these folks that the free market that has made America the greatest economy on earth is actually capable of dealing with this issue if simply allowed to work?

The Brookings Institution has joined in with “The Geopolitics of Energy: From Security to Survival” heralding that we must “radically change” how we use and conserve energy, stating that, “Avoiding destruction of the planet through the emission of greenhouse gases is one of the most complex challenges … we have ever created for ourselves. Our very survival is at stake.”

Even though some conservatives may groan, McCain’s support for a reasonable “cap and trade” solution to limiting CO² emissions is based on a free market approach. As McCain puts it, “The debate is between the carbon tax and cap and trade.”

Obama’s support of a scheme that requires all industrial CO² emitters to purchase a permit to do so, in essence a carbon tax, signals his support for a more all-encompassing foray into centralized energy control. The key issue is energy control. Dr. Arthur Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, a well respected anthropogenic global warming skeptic, wisely observes that, say what you may about global warming consensus, “The power to tax and ration energy is the power to control the world—to have life and death control over every human being on the planet. No government should ever have this power.”  

So, to those (Bill Cunningham and Ann Coulter included) who think a little “dance with the devil” is not all bad, the prospect of very bad climate change “solutions” over the next four years should bring them back to reality.

INDIVIDUALISM

     

If you have liberty you will have all the growth you want.  America is about protecting our rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness (property).  It's an individualist concept that makes Americans greatness.  The idea that you can pursue your own life and values.  The concept that life is important, that happiness is important.

If you want to make a moral argument, if you want to have a moral discussion, you have to give reasons.  We need to have discussions based on reason and fact.  Everyone needs to put on the table what their standards are.  State why this is your standard and defend it.  And if you can't, we're not having an intelligent discussion.

I'll tell you my standard.  Human life and the needs of human beings, not just for survival but for flourishing and happiness.  Humans are basically producers, creators and not depending on other people fundamentally.    My goal is for human life on Earth.  Life is a process of self generating and self sustaining action.  Human being need values in order to keep living.    Life is seeking your purpose.  Most importantly life is an individual process a personal process.  Morally this means we are all morally equal.  We are all beings with our own lives and our lives are our own.  We all have an equal need to gain values, we are all equally entitled to do what our lives require.  But we must take responsibility for our lives we must all make choices.  To be human is to be physical.  To have needs like food, shelter, clothing and medicine.  It is also to be spiritual.  With needs of conscienceness, like the need for inspiration, meaning and knowledge.  Life is to have social needs that derive from the values we can get from others.  Needs like friendship, information and trade.

Bush believes in big government, in collectivism.  He has funded religious organizations, taken over education and moved away from individualism.  Bush doesn't talk about the proper role of government in society.  He has taken liberty out of the discussion and replaced it with growth.  The neo-conservatives and the left have the same philosophy.  The neo-conservatives are nothing but big government advocates.

Business is based on the pursuit of self interest and personal happiness.  The mind is a source of well being and the mind must be free in order to invent new products and services.  When you have government intervention it discourages innovation, risk taking and obstruct the process of wealth creation.

Business and politics create the intellectual roots of statism. There is risk in an increasingly mixed economy. The risk that politics can corrupt and threaten business.  Free individuals create wealth, wealth, makes possible the creation of a middle class.  The middle class means people don't have to work from sun up to sun down.  Some will become entrepreneurs and that creates an even larger middle class for the next generation.  Entrepreneurs don't work hard for the money. They work hard because they love what they are doing.

There is a need for recognition of individual human self interest. The United States was founded on the idea that you had the right to pursue life liberty and the pursuit of happiness (property).  However, there has grown the idea that if you do succeed shouldn't you be helping others.   Or even worse that the idea of individualism means do what ever you want, reckless behavior, indulgence and not being ethical.  This translates to human beings as nothing but  impulsive and self indulgence.

What Americans do is use there minds to figure out how to use nature and resources to transform our environment for our own good.  We need to look out for our own self interest, without using force against others, doing what we love in life guided by reason.  Think of what the world would be like if everyone called on the best within them.  This would be a world in which we could all be enriched, entertained and inspired by each other.

The founders and the Constitution

America is all about human liberty.  The founders established for the first time in the history of the world a society whose government was founded on recognition of the inherent natural inalienable right of the individual.  They established a constitution founded on the consent of the governed containing various constitutional checks on the power of government to prevent it from being abused.  The founders understood, paradoxically, it was government which was created to protect or to secure individual rights which poses the greatest danger to them.  The reason is the unique nature of political power.  The government alone among all institutions in society may legitimately use force to achieve its ends.  A good society would have few laws.  Laws that were clear and respected by the people.  Accordingly they sought to create a new science of politics that not only checked the power of government through the constitution but minimize the role of government to a few essential and legitimate functions.

The problem with the founders was they didn't know where to draw the line between the individual liberty and coercive power of law in the realm of economics.  They didn't yet have a coherent theory of individual rights.

The political revolution was not accompanied by a revolution in moral philosophy.  In the 1800's it was considered immoral to pursue one own self interest.  Even if he did so in such a way as to not interfere with the equal freedom of others to do the same.  To be moral one needs to sacrifice his own self interest to the needs of others.

At the same time civic virtue as consisting of the subordination of self interest to the public interest or common good, persisted in American political thought and American law.

These visions are hardly compatible with American capitalism, a free robust society of energetic enterprising individuals mutually profiting from each others pursuit of their own rational self interest,   in fact they foster a hostile attitude towards commerce and commercial activity.

This mixed ideology in American political thought made possible the mixed economy of the 20th Century.

We need to reaffirm the commitment  to individual rights and ground that commitment in a coherent theory of individual rights. The Constitutional protections of life, liberty and property have been insufficient to guard individuals from the tyranny of the so called " common Good" or "the public interest".

We need an ideal to struggle for like the morality of capitalism.  The only moral system is capitalism because it protects mans mind, his only means of survival. 

It's time to gather together people of like minds.  Who believe in a core of truths to face the major problems that confront us.  We are at an intersection of time with opportunity when we can make epoch change.

America is a unique and special nation.  America was the first Republic with a Constitution that acknowledges that its citizens have rights. To be an American gives you a duty to preserve these rights for the next generation.  I believe America stands for freedom that is why people have come here for two hundred years.

Each party has a coalition, each coalition has an agenda, and regardless of an individuals personal views, if a person is going to be a member in good standing of one party or another, he is by and large going to support that parties coalition and that parties agenda.  Since having a majority in a state legislator or the federal legislator gives you control of the committees and subcommittees it's vital that your party be the majority party.  With room for some descent among members of the party while still recognizing that the parties agenda will be supported and reinforced. 

For the benefit of those that prefer the Republican agenda I urge you to vote the straight party ticket so that we can have a majority in the legislative bodies.  Also vote for republicans in state wide offices like Governor since that Republican will be appointing like minded people to various cabinet post and commissions. This person will be more responsive to his coalition once in office.  So vote straight party line in November.

There are some issues which must be addressed and I believe that the new media, the blogs, the Internet and talk radio can bring forth solutions to these critical problems.

America is all about human liberty.  The founders established for the first time in the history of the world a society whose government was founded on recognition of the inherent natural inalienable right of the individual.  They established a constitution founded on the consent of the governed containing various constitutional checks on the power of government to prevent it from being abused.  The founders understood, paradoxically, it was government which was created to protect or to secure individual rights which poses the greatest danger to them.  The reason is the unique nature of political power.  The government alone among all institutions in society may legitimately use force to achieve its ends.  A good society would have few laws.  Laws that were clear and respected by the people.  Accordingly they sought to create a new science of politics that not only checked the power of government through the constitution but minimize the role of government to a few essential and legitimate functions.

The problem with the founders was they didn't know where to draw the line between the individual liberty and coercive power of law in the realm of economics.  They didn't yet have a coherent theory of individual rights.

The political revolution was not accompanied by a revolution in moral philosophy.  In the 1800's it was considered immoral to pursue one own self interest.  Even if he did so in such a way as to not interfere with the equal freedom of others to do the same.  To be moral one needs to sacrifice his own self interest to the needs of others.

At the same time civic virtue as consisting of the subordination of self interest to the public interest or common good, persisted in American political thought and American law.

These visions are hardly compatible with American capitalism, a free robust society of energetic enterprising individuals mutually profiting from each others pursuit of their own rational self interest,   in fact they foster a hostile attitude towards commerce and commercial activity.

This mixed ideology in American political thought made possible the mixed economy of the 20th Century.

We need to reaffirm the commitment  to individual rights and ground that commitment in a coherent theory of individual rights. The Constitutional protections of life, liberty and property have been insufficient to guard individuals from the tyranny of the so called " common Good" or "the public interest".

We need an ideal to struggle for like the morality of capitalism.  The only moral system is capitalism because it protects mans mind, his only means of survival. 

Liberalism or populist - also known as progressives - or as I like to call it "progress on the road to socialism"

When you hear the word progressive today it means liberal, although the left has varied away from the word liberal because it has received bad press.  When you get right down to it progressive means progress on the road to socialism.  Populism is often refereed to as the unfiltered opinions and passions of the masses and they should take precedence over the formal and informal republican institutions.  You see so many politicians play to this anger and resentment, which is easily directed at superficial solutions in the name of let's help the people at the expense of the rich and powerful.  In 2000 when Al Gore ran for President he had a populist theme to his campaign.  He said " I'm for the people, they're for the powerful"  They being the Republicans.  It is this anthem of class war fare that has been used by populist and socialist since the French revolution.

Lou Dobbs has his definition of populism "support of the rights and the power of the people."  He describes his brand of protectionism as economic nationalism.  He resonates with peoples unfocused anger at simplistic bad guys with simplistic solutions.  The political calculus of populism is very simple demonize the top 10% of the population as to rich and to powerful, those would be families that make over $100,000 per year, and pander to the votes of the other 90%.  Attack over paid CEO's, because there are fewer of those than workers.  Workers who are usually blue collar or union members.  As if other people that work very hard and put in more hours each week, like a lot of people in management positions, are not workers.  They are not owners they are employees.  Workers has a more romantic ring to collectives, leftist and socialist.  Rally against oil companies and HMO's, it's a sure fired political winner since everyone would like to pay less for gas and health care.

In order to sell this you have to convince the gullible and resentful that power is only exercised by the other side, which spends its money for only evil purposes.  When Dems take money from the Hollywood left that is good money.  Just like contributions from Bill Gates competitors lobbing for a justice department judgment against Microsoft.  We saw that during the Clinton administration.  When labor unions spend tens of millions of dollars in soft money to run TV ads attacking Republicans, that's good money.  When George Soros spends millions to get Dems elected, as if he is not a fat cat and elitist,  that is good money.  That's money being spent in the public interest.

When Republicans and their supporters defend themselves that becomes a special interest.  If corporate interest are so powerful why are corporate taxes the highest in the world in this country at 35%?  Why have these all powerful corporations allowed price controls and so many regulations over the years?   If the rich rule why do they pay an inordinate amount of income tax?  While the bottom 50% pay almost nothing.  Why are there death taxes?  The rich can not rule.  Money doesn't vote, people do.  The rich are divided some are Dems and some are Republicans.  It is only because there are enough non rich voters that want to become rich that socialism hasn't taken over.

The power of the poor and middle class can be measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars spent each year on public assistance and entitlement programs.

Businesses represent the producers interest in society, that is where all of our wealth comes from.  Government does not create wealth, it only consumes and reallocate wealth.  It would be preposterous if business didn't have a place at the public policy table since they represent the producer interest in society.  Of course business interest have lobbies.  So does the AARP, the teachers unions, the AFL CIO, trial lawyers, environmentalist, the ACLU, government employees union, mothers against drunk driving, NAACP, NOW, and gays just to mention a few.  James Madison called this "the off setting multiplicity of factions" and they will always be with us.  To hear the left you would think that business lobbies are the only lobbies that exist.  That is preposterous.  Very often businesses lobby for things that conservatives oppose.  Like Agra business lobbing for price supports or more E-85 and ethanol.

Power takes many forms, influence is power.  Leftist put down private interest in a market economy, while they relish power their side welds in controlling the major sources of public influence in our society.  One of the major sources of public influence the left preside over and its agenda prevails in is public education, in higher education and in the culture of the liberal dominated major media.  The culture of the dominate liberal mass media is just that liberal.  While there is some conservatives, they are mostly on the opinion side. They identify that what they do is give opinions.  The lefts domination is mostly on the so called news side.   When you talk about ABC, NBC, ABC, NPR, or the New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune this is the liberal mass media that writes editorials thinly disguised as news stories.. The left also dominate philanthropic foundations underwriting all kinds of collectivist causes.  This is power

A brief History of Liberalism

It's been a while since I posted thanks for hanging in there.  McCain is the man and he is no conservative, but he could hold the Presidency for us.

I think it is time  to really define conservatism and compare it to liberalism.

I want to start with excerpt's from conversations with Jonah Goldberg Los Angeles Times columnist, longtime contributing editor to the National Review, who has written Liberal Fascism: The Secret History Of The American Left From Mussolini To The Politics Of Meaning.

The conversation is with Hugh Hewitt.

HH: Now obviously, this is a book of intellectual history, but it’s also a romp through American and European history. And let’s begin with fascism itself. It’s a particular style and structure of government, and it’s got a history in the United States. And despite those sloppy references to Bush-Hitler and the fascists of the right, et cetera, I think the key to your argument is that the fascist tendencies have overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, been on the left in America, and that they were within the 20^th Century Democratic Party, and that those tendencies are alive and well today. Is that a fair statement of sort of the arching theme of Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg?

JG: It certainly…I think it’s entirely fair for the arguments of the book after, say, the first two chapters and the introduction, where there, I try to place Nazism and fascism, in their classical expressions in Europe, as left wing phenomenon. And then when I move to America, I think you’ve pretty much gotten it right. 

HH: “American liberalism is a totalitarian, political religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying, but it is definitely totalitarian, or holistic, if you prefer, and that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and your outer appearances all have political salience for liberal fascists.” Now Jonah, you probably have taken a lot of bricks already, but that line, as well as the line about the white men being the Jews of liberal fascism, are probably the two that got you the most heat. Am I correct about that?

JG: I would guess. I mean, it’s sort of, it’s kind of like picking out which pieces of flak that caused the most damage when they hit me. 

HH: Well, let’s dive in so that people get a sense of this. This is way…we’re going to spend two hours on Liberal Fascism, America, and you’re still going to have to go and get the book and read deeply in it. But it’s also wonderfully written and funny and witty, and full of a lot of substantive arguments that you haven’t seen before, and a lot of history you need to know. Starting with, I think, one of the revelations I’m going to make sure that my law students know going forward, and this audience knows, is that fascism does not necessarily include anti-Semitism. It has, but Spain and Italy, before Hitler, were fascist, and they were not anti-Semitic, and I think this clears up a lot of misunderstanding of what you mean when you talk about fascism, Jonah Goldberg.

JG: That’s right. I mean, fascism comes of age much like nationalism, and the two were intertwined. And nationalism brings out the characteristics of a given people at a given time. And so when I say there’s an American fascism around the time of World War I, it’s bringing out American qualities. It’s not going to look like German fascism or Italian fascism, because America is different than these places. And similarly, that’s one of the reasons why I go through Italy, and I point out that the Italians simply weren’t an anti-Semitic people, and Jews were in fact overrepresented in the Italian Fascist Party from its founding until 1938, when basically, the Nazis forced the Italians to kick their Jews out. And the story of Italian heroism, even after 1938, in trying to save Jewish lives, has been totally airbrushed from the popular understanding of the history of fascism and of World War II. Not a single Jew of any nationality was sent from Italy, or from anywhere under Italian control, to the concentration camps until 1943, when the Germans, in effect, invade Italy and take it over. And that’s when the bad stuff happens to Jews in Italy, and Italian-occupied areas. And in fascist Spain, nothing bad happened to the Jews. The safest direction to walk in Europe when the Germans start coming after the Jews is south, not north.

G: Well, there are a bunch of different arguments. I mean, basically, the fundamental argument is I argue that in Western civilization, there was what I call a fascist moment. And you know, if people don’t like the word fascist, we can put it aside for a second and call it a collectivist moment. But there was this moment where the idea of laissez-faire capitalism seemed to have died. The idea of liberal democracy and individualism seemed to have been discredited. George Bernard Shaw, Mussolini, all these guys, they referred to, they kept using the phrase ‘a putrifying corpse’, that the classical liberalism of the 19^th Century was over, done with, and what was needed was a new era of statism. And this was the motivating passion of intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic. And deeply aiding this idea was the birth of philosophical pragmatism coming from William James. William James basically tries to marry…

HH: You’ve got to explain to people who William James is. 

JG: Sure. William James is technically the founder of American pragmatism, hugely important American philosopher. And pragmatism, basically, all it tried to do was say that all the old rules, all the old dogmas of classical liberalism, of Newtonian physics, all that, they could all be thrown by the wayside, and that truth was now relative, and that we could define truth by what James called cash value. And we now lived in a universe with the lid off, is what James liked to say. And what James and Nietzsche in Europe, and others, what they basically did was they were overturning the settled authority of philosophy, and basically saying that men could will any reality they wanted. And in many ways, what fascism is, is a marriage of James’ will to believe with Nietzsche’s will to power. And it’s not a coincidence that Mussolini often cited William James as one of the three most important philosophers in his life. 

HH: Jonah, at the risk of doing something that will have program directors across the United States screaming at me, I want to talk about Rousseau. This may in fact be the first time…

JG: (laughing)

HH: …ever on talk radio that Rousseau has been brought up. But I don’t know how you get to fascism unless you cover Rousseau to the French Revolution, and then on to the branches in Europe and America. And basically, it’s Rousseau’s radicalism which unleashed the whirlwind on the West. 

JG: Right, I mean, and there are two ways to talk about this. There’s the intellectual history, which I think is what you’re getting at, where basically it goes French Revolution…the French Revolution, I argue, is the first fascist revolution. It merges nationalism with populism. It tries to replace God with the state. You have these intellectual revolutionaries who use terror and violence to remake society and start over at year zero. They create a secular religion out of politics, where they change the traditional Christian holidays to state holidays. And all of this gets replayed in Nazi Germany, and fascist Italy, and in the Soviet Union. But I think there’s an important point to be made, which is that this, it’s not necessarily that the fascists of Nazi Germany were inspired by Rousseau, it’s that the same thing was happening again, that they were following the same sort of Rousseauian path. And Rousseau, as a philosopher, he basically gives word to a desire that beats in every human heart, to create a tribe out of society, to create, to impose this notion of the general will, where anybody who deviates from what the collective thinks he should do is a heretic or a traitor, to sanctify politics. And that’s what inspired the French revolutionaries. That’s what they took from Rousseau. And in many ways, that’s what people like Mussolini and Hitler took from the French Revolution, is this same sort of burning desire to create a religion of the state. And we see the same thing that happened in the French Revolution replay itself in Germany, and to a lesser extent, replay itself in fascist Italy. 

HH: And you know, it’s the same temptation over and over again, and it’s one abroad in the land right now, which is why I want to pause on this, which is Rousseau believed that man was good, you know, that the state came along, or that society came along and screwed things up, but that actually, that men were innately good. And that’s simply not a conservative view, Jonah Goldberg. It’s anti-conservative. It’s also anti-theology in most senses.

JG: Right. I mean, I think the fundamental difference, the difference that defines the difference between American, Anglo-American conservatives and European welfare states, leftists or liberals, is Locke versus Rousseau. Every philosophical argument boils down to John Locke versus Jacques Rousseau. 

HH: Yup.

JG: Rousseau says the government is there, that our rights come from the government, that come from the collective. Locke says our rights come from God, and that we only create a government to protect our interests. The Rousseauian says you can make a religion out of society and politics, and the Lockean says no, religion is a separate sphere from politics. And that is the defining distinction between the two, and I think that distinction also runs through the human heart, that we all have a Rousseauian temptation in us. And it’s the job of conservatives to remind people that the Lockean in us needs to win.

HH: You also write on Page 55, “What Hitler got from Italian fascism was the importance of an idea that would arouse the masses.” And you go on to just chart, he was a man of the left again and again and again, and he was also an anti-capitalist at crucial moments. 

JG: That’s right. I mean, at some point, it seems entirely fair to take 50% of the name that makes up Nazi seriously. The national socialists were socialists. They believed in socialism. The speech that converts, that woos Adolf Hitler to the German Workers’ Socialist Party was titled “By What Means Shall Capitalism Be Eliminated?” Hitler talks about it in Mein Kampf. He explains the Nazi Party flag, which we’ve all seen in the movies as this giant red flag with a white disc in the middle…

HH: Next hour, we’re going to focus more on American history and the current situation of the Democratic Party and the left wing of the United States. But we’re getting there this hour. And we started with one of the reasons so much anger at Jonah is the fact that he’s replacing Hitler where Hitler needs to be on the ideological spectrum, not as a right wing dictator, but as a left wing dictator. Quoting now, “For decades, the left has cherry picked the facts to form a caricature of what the Third Reich was about.  The very large and substantial leftist and socialist aspects of Nazism were shrunk to the status of trivia, the obsession of cranks and Hitler apologists. The Nazis,” Jonah writes, “rose to power, exploiting anti-capitalist rhetoric they indisputably believed. And for these reasons, Hitler deserves to be placed firmly on the left, because first and foremost, he was a revolutionary. Broadly speaking, the left is the party of change, the right is the party of the status quo. On this score, Hitler was in so sense, way, shape or form, a man of the right.” Now Jonah, this particular assertion on your part, how much of the opposition to your book has come out of this assertion?

JG: You know, a lot. I mean, there’s this real reluctance from people…the left loves having Hitler as a cudgel to use against the right. And so, you know, a lot of the response has been Goldberg can’t be true, because everyone knows that we get to use Hitler. And we get to use Hitler against our enemies, and it’s outrageous to sort of upset that apple cart. But I want to add one quick point about that, is that it’s not just…I mean, I think the socialism part alone should settle the argument in a lot of ways, but it’s important to point out it’s not just socialism. American conservatism, as you know, or Anglo-American conservatism, rests on essentially two points. On the one hand is the free market, limited government, anti-socialism belief in entrepreneurialism and all the rest. And the second part of it is an affinity for tradition, for traditional religion, orthodox religion, Christianity and the rest. And Hitler despised all of those things. He despised not only sort of the Manchester liberalism of free markets, but he also hated orthodox Christianity. He hated, he thought Christianity was a foreign import, that it ruined Germany, which had a more pure, pagan, Earth-bound faith. He hated…the one thing he liked the social Democrats for was that they got rid of the monarchy. He hated the aristocracy. He hated the established institutions at universities. He hated the experts, all of that. In every way, he was a radical that we would say, just as a Martian visiting Planet Earth, it would be obvious that this guy was on the left. 

HH: You also write, he’s a nationalist, but not a patriot, which are very important, a very important distinction here. 

JG: That’s right, and it’s an incredibly important distinction, particularly from an American context. Americans tend not to be nationalists. They’re patriots. You know, they’re attached to creeds and to ideas. Hitler was a blood and soil romantic. And he deified the race, he deified the land. But he had no sympathies for democracy, for the constitution, for the Weimer Republic, for any of that good stuff. He was, in the Nietzschean sense, a lover of German will and German power, and the sort of romance of conquest. But he had no attraction for any of the sort of redeeming things about German culture and German life. 

HH: Now…so when we get to the end of the Third Reich, we’ve got an obvious split in America. People hate Hitler, they’re still not on to hating the Soviets yet, and they have to define Hitler. Is it because the Soviets, which we understood, everyone understood to be left, were at war with the Nazis, that they became right wing, Jonah Goldberg?

JG: That’s a big part of it. I mean, you’re right. There is this weird notion that we get when…when I say oh, well, the Nazis were on the left, they say that’s ridiculous. They were fighting the Soviets, that the Soviets hated them. Well, you know, first of all, the Brown Shirts versus the red shirts was an example of sort of Coke versus Pepsi. It wasn’t an example of opposites. The Nazis appealed directly to the communists in Berlin, in Germany, and won them over almost wholesale to the Brown Shirt cause. And one of the reasons why we get this idea that fascism and Nazism are right wing is because Marxist prophecy said well, there’s going to be a force that’s going to get in the way of a proletarian revolution, and it’s going to be defending the ruling classes. And so when they saw Nazism and fascism come along, they said a-ha, this must be it. And the propagandists declared that, the Soviet propagandists realized that the national socialists were just simply eating the lunch of the international socialists, that people wanted to be nationalists, they wanted to love their country, they wanted to be part of their own culture, but they still wanted to be socialists. And that was a much more appealing pitch. And so what Stalin declared was that basically, any group that wasn’t loyal to Moscow was fascist, and objectively right wing. And so during this period, from 1928 until about 1932, FDR, according to Stalin, was a fascist. Norman Thomas, the head of the American Socialist Party, was a fascist. And this notion of sort of objectively right wing comes out from this analysis of national socialism as right wing socialism, which I think is a perfectly fine way to describe it. It was right wing socialism, but it was still socialism.

HH: And generally, we’ve got just two minutes in this segment. What did the progressives want to accomplish? Obviously, it was a lot, and they were willing to use the state to do so.

JG: Right. The progressives were essentially Christian, Siegelian millennialists, which sounds very complicated, but basically, what they wanted to do is they wanted to use the state to create a kingdom of Heaven on Earth.  They believed in crushing laissez-faire capitalism, crushing individualism, expounding on a new, nationalistic collectivism. Woodrow Wilson, in many ways, becomes the sort of apotheosis of all of this, where he is the first president to openly disparage the U.S. Constitution, saying we no longer need it, and we need a new living Constitution. And the reason why so many of the progressives support World War I is because they see it, going back to the stuff about William James, as the perfect opportunity to find these moral equivalents of war, to form the American people into one cohesive whole, to get them into what John Dewey calls the social possibilities of war, organizing the masses to rally around the state. Woodrow Wilson defines progressivism as the need for the individual to marry his interests to the state. And that’s what the progressives believe. 

HH: And did anyone notice? The seachange, was there a conversation among intellectual elites that this was a radical departure from the framers’ approach to limited government and to the Lockean vision of the world, which is you keep the government small, and personal responsibility large? Or did it just happen because of the times?

JG: No, I think there was an expressed…they really saw that the new explosion of understanding that comes from Darwin, that came from Einstein’s theory of relativity…you know, Paul Johnson’s Modern Times has a great opening, where when Einstein’s theory of relativity is confirmed in 1905, everyone goes crazy, because they think it’s one more scientific proof that everything is relative. And that was a phrase that was being used a lot of the time, you know, that everything is relative, that all morals are relative, and that all of these old dogmas that are associated with the Constitution, with classical liberalism, just need to be thrown aside. They’re no longer relevant. 

HH: The brightest line difference, which it’s on my last page of notes from Liberal Fascism, is really on property rights. You can always tell a fascist when they don’t care about property rights. And that goes to our liberal fascist friends and to our left wing fascist friends and to our right wing fascist…they’re all dismissive of the absolute centrality of property rights.

JG: That’s right. I mean, I think there’s a reason why you should talk, why fascist scholars talk about the anatomy of fascism, you know, the sort of outside characteristics. And you can go down a whole long checklist of things. And property rights, individual rights, free speech rights, I mean, who are the people who getting censored? They’re conservative speakers on college campuses that get shouted down by mobs, and everyone says oh, well that’s just college kids being excited and happy. But they’re quintessentially fascist tactics that we see on those kinds of things.

HH: Let’s also go back to Woodrow Wilson, because Wilson’s got sort of an aesthetic hold on American political thought, not really understanding what he was or what he stood for. But as you point out in Liberal Fascism, the best estimate is that 175,000 people went to jail for some period of time during Wilson’s presidency, because they were not sufficiently patriotic. That, compared to Bush’s three, I think we’ve got Jose Padilla and a couple of other marginal cases…

JG: Right. And the issue there wasn’t that they weren’t patriotic.

HH: Right. So how does that get lost to history?

JG: It is an amazing thing. I think some of it is transference. I kind of have this sort of belief that liberals, sort of somewhere in their DNA, or in the recesses of their brains, they know this and they imagine this, and they just sort of transfer it to, say, the McCarthy period, or someplace else. It’s interesting, I once wrote a column on this. If you Nexus it, you’ll find a lot of people keep saying we’re going back to 1984. And I’m like, when were we ever living in 1984? But there’s something in the cultural memory about it. The book, It Can’t Happen Again, you know, this famous book where Joe Conason came out with this book saying…or It Can’t Happen Here.

HH: It Can’t Happen Here, yeah.

JG: Joe Conason just wrote a book playing on that title. That was…you know, in the actual book, the argument for why it actually can happen here, they refer back to World War I. And what happened in World War I was astounding. You had, as you say, hundreds of thousands of people were arrested, you had the first propaganda ministry in Western civilization, the Committee For Public Information, which unleashed 75,000 plainclothes propaganda agents who would go around giving speeches, exhorting people to support the war, to support Woodrow Wilson. You had political prisoners thrown in jail. You had people getting shot for refusing to stand up for the National Anthem or the Star Spangled Banner, and judges not prosecuting, or letting them off. You had people put in jail for saying things about the president in their own homes. 

HH: Yup. We also had the dirty little rise of eugenics in American culture. 

JG: Right.

HH: And I teach Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the three generations of idiots are enough. But not a lot of people understand that from the left came the idea of a racial superiority that the Nazis didn’t invent. It was abroad in the land before the Nazis arose. 

JG: That’s right. The progressives, all of the progressives were eugenicists of one kind or another. There were some who were positive eugenicists, and some were negative eugenicists. Some wanted to use the state to actively cull out the weaker and darker and more inferior races. Other people just wanted to lift up. But it wasn’t either or. It’s not in the book, but one of my favorite editorials is by Herbert Croly, who was the founder of the New Republic.

HH: Huge feature in the book, though. We’re going to come to Croly.

JG: Right.

HH: He’s in the book.

JG: The founder of the New Republic, and he’s writing this editorial, and he says you know, there are people in the country who say well, if we can just improve the lot of the poor, that that would have this positive eugenic effect. And there are other people who say no, we have to weed out the unfit. And Croly says well, you know, it’s really both. We need to both lift up, and then anybody who’s left behind, well of course, everyone will agree that we’ve just got to get rid of those people. 

HH: Right. And the Croly…let’s talk a little bit about him, because he is sort of the godfather of the American intellectual left. He founds this magazine, and he, from the beginning, is all about centralizing power and destroying institutions, especially invading the home.

JG: Right.

HH: I thought that was very, very important, because it is repeating itself again in this era. We’ve got to get inside the home, we’ve got to get our hands on the kids. 

JG: Right, right. That is one of the things that links today’s progressives, yesteryear’s progressives, fascists, socialists, all of them want to crack the outer shell of the sovereign family and get inside. You know, Hitler has this saying where he says I don’t care what you think, because your children belong to me. Woodrow Wilson, when he’s the president of Princeton University, he says the chief job of an educator must be to make your children as unlike you as possible. Hillary Clinton, who we’ll get to, obviously, she says in 1996 that we have to move beyond the idea that there’s any such thing as someone else’s child. And so Croly, he represents all of these ideas. He represents the idea that we need to have public-private partnerships, where government and corporations work together. The idea that we need wars for a moral tonic at home, the idea that we need to have, to get rid of individuals and laissez-faire capitalism, all this kind of stuff, almost every single thing that defines a fascist, you can find in Herbert Croly. And he remains a hero of the American left, and it’s amazing. If you read the academic literature, you’ll have some people actually say things like well, Croly may seem like a fascist, but of course he’s not, but they never explain why he’s not a fascist. I spent months trying to figure out whey they thought he wasn’t a fascist.

HH: Now along comes the return to normalcy, and Harding arrives, and Coolidge behind him, and Hoover behind him. And they manage to turn back the explosion of statism, and of sort of totalitarian fascism that had been creeping in. But then arrives the Depression, and we turn, and this is the important part I want to get to, and again, I mentioned it in the last hour, the Blue Eagle, the eagle, is the same eagle that’s riding over Hitler’s Germany. It’s sort of the symbolism of soaring state power, and the NRA represents, and I think you depict it quite well in detail, the triumph of the state over individual capital enterprise. 

JG: That’s right. I mean, quick back story, the old right always used to say well, the New Dealers, they were just trying to do what the Soviets were doing, because they all…and there were a lot of Reds, and a lot of spies among the New Dealers, so it’s understandable that they would think that, but one of the novel arguments I make in the book is that no, while these New Dealers, they looked to Mussolini’s Italy, and they looked to the Soviet Union for confirmation of their ideas, and they really did look to those countries for confirmation of their ideas, what they were trying to do was re-establish what they had under Woodrow Wilson in his war socialism. And they said so explicitly. FDR grounds his entire New Deal in the legal foundations of the Alien And Sedition Acts, everything that Woodrow Wilson had done. And these New Dealers, their rallying cry in the 1920’s was we planned in war. So now we should be able to plan in peace for running the economy. So when the New Deal comes, they have this playbook that they’d had, and they just go back to it. And so for example, Hugh Johnson, who runs the signature program of the New Deal, which is the National Recovery Administration, he ran the draft for the War Industries Board under Woodrow Wilson. Remember, FDR had worked under Woodrow Wilson

HH: Right.

JG: They’re all Wilson retreads in the New Deal administration. And the first thing Hugh Johnson does is he sets up his office to run the NRA, and he hangs up a portrait of Benito Mussolini, and starts handing out tracts the Italian fascist tract, The Corporate State. And he gives it to Francis Perkins and other members of the Cabinet. During the Democratic convention of 1932, he distributed a memo saying that FDR needs to become like Mussolini, and ship all of every member of Congress and the entire Supreme Court to an island for 90 days, so we could really get things done. 

HH: But you know, I put down your book with a greater respect for FDR, because it was all at his feet. He could have taken a lot more than he took. He could have been not Mussolini, but close, because people were willing to do anything in those period of years.

JG: That’s right. Walter Lippmann, the hero of American liberal pundits to this day, begged FDR to become a dictator. 

HH: As did…and they didn’t think that was a bad thing.

JG: That’s right. 

HH: Like in Ancient Rome.

HH: And so the left goes into abeyance for a while during the Eisenhower years, and Truman would have nothing to do with this. But they nest in the universities, and what’s very interesting to me is when they break out in the SDS rise in the Weatherman and the Cornell incident.

JG: Well, I think part of it was, you know, there’s a reason why I have two chapters on the 60’s, because there were really two groups on the left. There were the radicals in the street, best epitomized really by the Black Panthers. I love people who say there was no fascism on the left, and here was a paramilitary organization that was dedicated to the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, and racial separatism, for a racially superior group, but just because they’re black, they can’t be fascist.

HH: Right.

JG: You know, and the SDS called them our Viet Cong. They loved the Black Panthers. Hillary Clinton volunteers to help work on a Black Panther murder trial. And that sort of gives you the sense of where they go. They realized that radicalism doesn’t work, and then they have, you know, what Gramsci called the long march through the institutions. And you have Hillary Clinton realizing that she’s got to work within the corridors of power. She says so pretty explicitly these days. She says I don’t really care about unity that much, I care about power and getting my things done and all the rest, and that’s not entirely truly, because she really, I think, does care about unity, but she wants it on her terms alone. And they work through the system. And I think it’s worth pointing out, though, that you can still tell where people come down about how they view the 1960’s. If you actually view what the SDS did, and what the Black Panthers did, or what they did at Cornell, I mean, it should tell you something when Walter Burns reads speeches by Benito Mussolini to his students at Cornell, and doesn’t tell them they’re by Mussolini, the kids are like right on, dig it, what a great thing, and then he says oh, well, this is by Mussolini.

HH: And Peter Berger...

JG: Yeah.

HH: Left wing socialist, I believe you quote him as saying that which happened in the 60’s reminded him of what happened to him in the 30’s in Europe.

JG: That’s right. It’s vital to remember that fascism, Italian fascism and German national socialism, were both explicitly and aggressively marketed as youth movements. They were youth movements. Italy, in the New York Times, had huge spreads about the youth movement in Italy. And it was seen as the sort of seizing of youth, overthrowing these old, decaying dogmas of liberal democracy and all of the rest. And it emphasized all of the…the youth movements emphasized all the same fascist themes again and again – action over talk. You know, the SDS broke into what they called action factions and all the rest.

HH: One of the key insights you have, it’s on Page 199, the vital lie of the left, you call it, the lie of the left. “If we could only rekindle the hope and ambition of those early radicals, what might have been will turn into what still could be.” This is, by the way, the theme of Tom Brokaw’s Boom. I interviewed Brokaw for an entire show, and all of his, these nostalgic look-backs at the 60’s, that airbrush the deep, deep lust for power of these people…

JG: Right.

HH: …and their continuing campaign to centralize power in their hands, and it really is now, we’re up to it in two ways – the Obama boom and the Hillary boom on one hand. And you talk about green fascism. Expand a little bit on what green fascism is.

JG: Well, you know, first of all, it’s worth pointing out the Nazis were committed environmentalists. They had a very similar worldview to what we get from a lot of the green left today. And that worldview, what makes it fascistic, because I get a lot of criticism, I mean, a lot of criticism from people saying oh, well, you’re saying because Hitler was a vegetarian, that vegetarians are Nazis. I’m not saying anything remotely like that. What I am saying is that there was a worldview that comes with sort of eco-fascism. And there’s a lot of very high end academic writing on this, that is holistic, that sees that everything works together, that there are, there can be no islands of separateness. And in political science, to say a system that believes in no islands of separateness is called totalitarianism. And environmentalism, there’s a reason why the Brits call them watermelons. They’re greens on the outside, and Reds on the inside. They use environmentalism as a means by which to organize the entire warp and woof of society. 

HH: And they use a crisis, or the theory of crisis, to demand immediate action.

JG: The theory of crisis, that’s right. That’s right. You know, Al Gore constantly says the time for discussion is over. I’m sorry, in a democracy, the time for discussion really is almost never over, at least, and except not for war. But that’s what they want to do, is create the moral equivalent of war, going back to James. They want to create these artificial crises. You know, Hillary Clinton has dozens of crises – the health care crises, the day care crisis. You know, she goes through all of these things, and they’re all used as rationalizations to get people to drop their peacetime objections to what they want to do, and join with the program. And this fascist theme comes up across the American left. It’s part of their rhetoric. When they say, you know, Hillary Clinton always says we need to move beyond our ideological differences. We need to move beyond our partisan differences. Now I’ve been in this business for a while now. You’ve been doing this for a long time. I have never met anybody who’s ever said that we need to move beyond our ideological differences, we need to move beyond our partisan differences, unity is so important, I’m going to give up everything I believe and agree with you. 

HH: Now Jonah, the key is, though, and we’re going to come back to this after break, we now have two temptations. We’ve got the cool leftists, represented by Barack and Michelle Obama, and the old, boring, long-hair hippy leftists that are very uncool in this appeal. In your opinion, who wants more power?

JG: I think the Hillary old school guys want more power. It is their own self-rationalization for it. I think, I mean, one of the appealing things I think you’ll agree about Obama is his naivete. I mean, there’s this idea that really words have this power to transform us and pull us out of history. And so I don’t think they really appreciate how much of what they’re really talking about is just getting power. Well, Hillary knows what she wants. 

HH: Jonah, reading Liberal Fascism, I come across the recognition, I knew it, but I didn’t really confront it, that Saul Alinsky has two candidates for the Democratic nomination. And not just people who read his books, people who worked for him. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both Alinskyites.

JG: If you just read what he writes about power and of winning the institutions, of crushing your enemies, I mean, he just reads like a fascist. 

HH: Conflict all the time, conflict all the time.

JG: Right.

HH: Well, listen, here’s some rhetoric not from either of the two, but from Michelle Obama. I want to know if you hear in it any echoes. Cut number one.

MO: In 2008, we are still a nation that is too divided. We live in isolation, and because of that isolation, we fear one another. We don’t know our neighbors. We don’t talk. We believe that our pain is our own. We don’t realize that the struggles and challenges of all of us are the same. We are too isolated. And we are still a nation that is still too cynical. We look at it as them and they as opposed to us. We don’t engage, because we are still too cynical.

HH: Cut number two:

MO: Don’t get sick in this country, not here. Americans are in debt not because they live frivolously, but because someone got sick. And even with insurance, the deductibles and premiums are so high that people are still putting medication treatments on credit cards. And they can’t get out from under. I could go on and on and on, but this is how we’re living, people, in 2008. And things have gotten progressively worse throughout my lifetime, through Democratic and Republican administrations. It hasn’t gotten better for regular folks.

HH: We’ve got four more cuts, Jonah, but I want to get your opinion at this point. Things have gotten progressively worse for at least sixteen years. 

JG: Yeah, no it’s an amazing thing. And if we elect the right president, all of a sudden, I’m going to get to know my neighbor (laughing). What? 

HH: But the continuing crisis, right?

JG: Yeah, yeah. 

HH: Isn’t that part of the playbook?

JG: Right, that we’re on this incredible, inevitable slippery slope to evil, and the only thing we can do is we need a leader who personifies the people, personifies unity, who will unify and rally the nation in his spirit, and be our savior. And that’s how Obama is running, is he’s running as a secular savior.

HH: Cut number three:

MO: We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another, that we cannot measure our greatness in this society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure out greatness by the least of these, that we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I’m here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this race who understands that, that before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.

HH: Jonah Goldberg?

JG: Mother of pearl. My God. You know, it’s amazing what it reminded me of, is Hillary Clinton’s speech at Wellesley when she graduates. She says we’re not interested in social reconstruction, we’re…no, we’re interested in human reconstruction. She wants to create, recreate new men. The desire to create new men and fix souls, you know, that gets to the heart of this drumbeat over the 20^th Century. 

HH: The next Michelle Obama cut:

MO: If we can’t see ourselves in one another, we will never make those sacrifices. So I am here right now, because I am married to the only person in this race who has a chance of healing this nation.

HH: Jonah?

JG:  (sigh)

HH: Have you heard this before?

JG: No, I hadn’t. I hadn’t. She’s going to, you know, I mean, my husband will express the Volksgemeinschaft (laughing)

HH: Wait until Duane has to transcribe that one. One more…we’ve got to go to break, or do we have time for one more?  Oh, we’ll come back. Jonah Goldberg, when I heard these things after having read Liberal Fascism, I said this is exactly what you were talking about. 

JG: Yeah.

HH: These themes to power, to urgency, to crisis, to the one man, and to the mass nationalization…when we come back, can conservatives do anything to stop it? What’s your quick preview?

JG: Yes, but it’s going to be hard.

HH: How do they do it?

JG: It’s a door to door fight. It’s the same fight we had against communism. The idea that government can love you is the central myth that conservatives are always going to have to fight. 

- -    -   -   

HH: Cut number five for Jonah Goldberg: 

MO: Barack, as Oprah said, is one of the most brilliant men you will meet in our lifetime. Barack is more than ready. He’ll be ready today, he’ll be ready on Day One, he’ll be ready in a year from now, five years from now. He is ready. That is not the question. The question is what are we ready for? Wait, wait, wait, because we’re ready for change. We say we’re ready for change, but see, change is hard. Change will always be hard. And it doesn’t happen from the top down. We do not get universal health care, we don’t get better schools because somebody else is in the White House. We get change because folks from the grass roots up decide they are sick and tired of other people telling them how their lives will be, when they decide to roll up their sleeves and work.  And Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism, that you put down your division, that you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones, that you push yourselves to be better, and that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

HH: Jonah Goldberg, we’re looking at each other as we hear this, because this is the antithesis of limited government. 

JG: That’s right. It is, you know, it is the collective matters, it is this cult of unity. The central theme of the book, in many ways, is that all these isms of the left, socialism, fascism, communism, they’re all political religions. They’re all the misapplication of religious principles to politics. And you know, Obama has said on the stump that we can create a kingdom of Heaven on Earth. His advance people, when they go around, they’re told not to talk…this was in the New York Times yesterday, they’re told not to talk about issue. They’re supposed to testify about how they have “come to Obama”, you know, instead of come to Jesus. And it reminds me a bit of the 1912 Progressive Party convention. They changed the words of We Will Follow Jesus to We Will Follow Roosevelt. And it also, too, was like a religious revival. This has, you know, when you listen to Obama, when he talks about we are the change we have been waiting for, there is this incredible messianic feel to it. And he may be a decent and honorable man, I think he almost certainly is, but I don’t think he has any conception of the kind of emotional and political passions that he’s toying with when he tries to promise people that simply by rallying around a national leader who expresses their national will and their spirit and all the rest, that he can deliver us to someplace outside of history, to this new sunny upland, you know, utopia. That is dangerous stuff, and when you unleash that in politics, it almost never ends well.