“A Separate Peace”
Peggy Noonan writes a somber column today. An excerpt:
I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with "right track" and "wrong track" but missing the number of people who think the answer to "How are things going in America?" is "Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination."
I'm not talking about "Plamegate." As I write no indictments have come up. I'm not talking about "Miers." I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there's no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we're leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma's house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding--the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them. Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn't think so.
But this recounting doesn't quite get me to what I mean. I mean I believe there's a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.
She uses the rest of the column to note that the "elites" who ought to be leading us out of this have instead made "a separate peace" and, rather than lead, have resigned themselves to doing what they want to do and just letting the thing derail.
It's worth reading the piece just for its thought-provoking capacity. But then step back, take a deep breath, and give thanks for a Heavenly Father who is soveriegn over all these events.
“A Separate Peace”
Peggy Noonan writes a somber column today. An excerpt:
I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with "right track" and "wrong track" but missing the number of people who think the answer to "How are things going in America?" is "Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination."
I'm not talking about "Plamegate." As I write no indictments have come up. I'm not talking about "Miers." I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there's no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we're leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma's house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding--the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them. Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn't think so.
But this recounting doesn't quite get me to what I mean. I mean I believe there's a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.
She uses the rest of the column to note that the "elites" who ought to be leading us out of this have instead made "a separate peace" and, rather than lead, have resigned themselves to doing what they want to do and just letting the thing derail.
It's worth reading the piece just for its thought-provoking capacity. But then step back, take a deep breath, and give thanks for a Heavenly Father who is soveriegn over all these events.
thoughts on Miers
I've not written anything about the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court yet. I think it's mostly because I'm not sure where my opinion is on this nomination.
Ms. Miers, on a personal level, sounds like a terrific woman who I would be happy to know, would be happy to have teach my children in Sunday School, etc. It sounds like she's a pretty decent lawyer and a great human being. It sounds like she is genuinely an evangelical Christian, which tells me quite a bit about her beliefs.... but not much of anything about her views of the Constitution. As David Frum notes on National Review Online today: (emphasis in original)
Anthony Kennedy is personally pro-life too. That has not stopped him from reaffirming the Roe v. Wade. [sic]
The much-embattled, sometime controversial, but unquestionably brilliant Judge Robert Bork weighs in on OpinionJournal this morning, and he gives a devastating critique of both Miers and President Bush. An excerpt:
With a single stroke--the nomination of Harriet Miers--the president has damaged the prospects for reform of a left-leaning and imperialistic Supreme Court, taken the heart out of a rising generation of constitutional scholars, and widened the fissures within the conservative movement. That's not a bad day's work--for liberals.
There is, to say the least, a heavy presumption that Ms. Miers, though undoubtedly possessed of many sterling qualities, is not qualified to be on the Supreme Court. It is not just that she has no known experience with constitutional law and no known opinions on judicial philosophy. It is worse than that. As president of the Texas Bar Association, she wrote columns for the association's journal. David Brooks of the New York Times examined those columns. He reports, with supporting examples, that the quality of her thought and writing demonstrates absolutely no "ability to write clearly and argue incisively."
Yikes.
I am beginning to think that we will see an odd sight at the confirmation hearings - a bunch of Democrats who will support her confirmation, because they know that they could have done a lot worse - and then Republicans who will oppose her nomination because she doesn't have any record of judicial philosophy to stand on.
My preference would be that she either withdraw her name or that the President withdraw her name from the proceedings. They can find her another job; some have suggested a nice Federal appeals court position where she can get some judicial experience. Then let's get a nominee with real conservative, originalist credentials... and then let's have a confirmation battle.
Tribes
This post titled "Tribes" is long, has R-rated language, but expresses very well some thoughts on the cries of racism and federal mismanagement in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Worth reading if you have a few minutes.
Zoomed out in Crawford
I don't usually post much in the way of political stuff here on the blog, but this is one of those things that just makes me go grrrrr about the way things are getting reported re: Cindy Sheehan. Check out the "released" press photo and the "zoomed-out" version of the photo.
Thanks to Newsbusters.
Jonah Goldberg on Polls on National Review Online
This is well worth a read. Mr. Goldberg nails it on how useless and flimsy polls are.
Victor Davis Hanson on War on National Review Online
Hanson hits it on the head again. Another insightful piece.
Victor Davis Hanson on War on National Review Online
First the terrorists of the Middle East went after the Israelis. From 1967 we witnessed 40 years of bombers, child murdering, airline hijacking, suicide murdering, and gratuitous shooting. We in the West usually cried crocodile tears, and then came up with all sorts of reasons to allow such Middle Eastern killers a pass....
the tenets of the liberal anti-war crowd
Victor Davis Hanson has a great piece in today's NRO, in which he identifies the three principles that drive the liberal anti-war crowd. As usual, he states it as clearly and succinctly as anybody. He identifies them as:
1) moral equivalence. For the hard Left there is no absolute right and wrong since amorality is defined arbitrarily and only by those in power.
2) utopian pacifism — ‘war never solved anything’ and ‘violence only begets violence.’ Thus it makes no sense to resort to violence, since reason and conflict resolution can convince even a bin Laden to come to the table. That most evil has ended tragically and most good has resumed through armed struggle — whether in Germany, Japan, and Italy or Panama, Belgrade, and Kabul — is irrelevant. Apparently on some past day, sophisticated Westerners, in their infinite wisdom and morality, transcended age-old human nature, and as a reward were given a pass from the smelly, dirty old world of the past six millennia.
3) multiculturalism, or the idea that all social practices are of equal merit. Who are we to generalize that the regimes and fundamentalist sects of the Middle East result in economic backwardness, intolerance of religious and ethnic minorities, gender apartheid, racism, homophobia, and patriarchy? Being different from the West is never being worse.'
Good stuff.
a leftist gets it right on terrorism
Bin Laden's whole game plan is to turn the people of the democratic world against their governments. He thinks democracies are weak because their people, who are more easily frightened than their governments, can bring those governments down. He doesn't understand that this flexibility—and this trust—are why democracies will live, while he will die. Many of us didn't vote for Bush's government or Blair's. But we're loyal to them, in part because we were given a voice in choosing them. And if we don't like our governments, we can vote them out. We can't vote out terrorists. We can only kill them.
This guy gets it.
[HT: James Taranto at OpinionJournal]
“energy dependence”
Another day, another NRO column to comment on. Today it's Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren arguing on the "myths" of energy independence. They have some interesting views on the subject, noting that:
1) it's a global marketplace, so the amount of oil we import vs the amount of oil we produce doesn't affect the price - only the global quantity on the market affects the price
and,
2) it wouldn't be wise to totally cut ourselves off from the foriegn oil market, because a limited domestic production is easier for terrorists to strike than a distributed (global) production.
Now, they're good libertarians from the Cato Institute, so their answer is to quit subsidizing the fuel situation, and just let the free market play itself out. I'm not so sure I agree with this; part of me would like to see a "Manhattan Project"-style effort to develop a usable alternative fuel system. But their comments about the global oil market make the article worth a read.
