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A World Turned Right Side Up
June 1, 2013 | 0 comments
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Boys and Girls
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American Rand Stand
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Sounds of Silence
March 2, 2013 | 0 comments
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Clearing the Air
February 2, 2013 | 0 comments
About This Month
On the Eve
In the culture of political correctness, rank cynicism can pass as the most moral of acts.
By their standards it’s a moment that will live in infamy. I’m referring to debate night, October 3, 2012, when, at least for one to two hours, the mass media that has been marching in lockstep with the Obama campaign declared their guy had been trounced by the reborn likes of Mitt Romney. It was disorienting, needless to say. Could it be that these so-called journalists were actually performing real journalism, making an honest effort to say, “And that’s the way it is…”?
If so, chalk it up to momentary weakness, a spasm of discredited thinking, a dereliction of duty. By the next day, corrective measures were applied, excuses for Mr. Obama concocted, Mr. Romney’s brilliant performance dismissed as a litany of lies. By day two, magical unemployment numbers were greeted as proof of economic boom, and Imperator Obama was once again declared to be wearing clothes, most stylish ones at that. Safely reunited with his teleprompter, he would now enjoy clear sailing to his re-coronation.
Well, you can believe that, and come November 6 we’ll see if you were right. We’ll know above all whether the Democratic president will have been re-elected, and perhaps for the most patronizing—and thus insulting to all concerned—of reasons. George Will put it as delicately as he could, when he wrote on October 1 that our nation “seems especially reluctant to give up on the first African American president,” regardless of his record. This came shortly before the Daily Caller and Sean Hannity resurrected portions of a 2007 speech Obama delivered at a black college in Virginia which the media had ignored.
On the videotape excerpts, candidate Obama sounds as incendiary as any black power demagogue of the 1960s, determined to keep an important bloc of voters as resentful and hate-filled as can be imagined. The media dismissed the newly unearthed ugliness as politically motivated “old news.” This same media the next day singled out Obama’s “moving” comments about his grandmother as one of the few highlights of his debate performance. No one was gauche enough to recall that this was the same grandmother Obama “threw under the bus” as a white racist in his famous “race speech” four years ago. In the culture of political correctness, rank cynicism can pass as the most moral of acts. That’s how far we’ve come.
We can think of it in two ways. James Bowman, our long-suffering movie and culture critic who has chronicled America’s moral and intellectual decline for more than two decades in these pages, understands as no one else the disappearance of meaning from postmodern life, including its politics (see p. 66). At the rate we’re going, post-nihilism as a universal value is just around the corner.
Our book essayist, John Coyne, also knows the depths of the nation’s depravity, and in reviewing the great Tom Wolfe’s latest blockbuster (p. 68), he’s come to the right subject and author. But he knows something else as well—that many an American reader craves a moral narrative that is timeless and binding. America’s in a terrible mess, yes. We’ll learn this month whether a return to decency might be possible.
About the Author
Wlady Pleszczynski is editorial director of The American Spectator and the editor of AmSpec Online.
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Alan Brooks | 11.7.12 @ 7:53PM
Look at how Vic Davis Hanson got it wrong:
"...The problem with diagnosis (3) is that there were plenty of good minority kingpins in the party –Condoleezza Rice, Marco Rubio, and an entire new generation of Hispanic and Asian governors and senators."
Condi Rice is a heavyweight?
And what of Hispanics? you really think they are for adequately controlling the border with Mexico ?
Vance P. Frickey| 11.25.12 @ 5:41AM
Why should Hispanics be for adequately controlling the border with Mexico? Three successive Presidents, none of them Hispanic, have enforced ineffectual border controls - the current President, having failed to get passage of the DREAM Act, is implementing it by Executive Order and by ordering Federal Border Patrolmen not to do their jobs.
Hispanics see a massive cognitive dissonance in the Federal government - the Executive Branch is flagrantly violating Federal law and usurping Congress' right to make law in the United States.
Meanwhile, Americans are wondering if the thing separating our nation from others in the hemisphere - our traditional preference of governments of laws, not of men - still exists.
Only a few lawmakers are objecting out loud to Obama's walking all over their turf. Senator Dianne Feinstein committed a cardinal error for Democratic lawmakers, criticizing the President, in the wake of the Petraeus scandal, after the Obama White House and the Holder Justice Department failed to tell her (the chairperson of the Senate Intelligence Committee) that the Director of Central Intelligence had committed security breaches including sharing his password for access to classified information with his lover, and the extramarital affair itself.
When the senior American lawmaker with responsibility for intelligence matters has to learn about things like this from the press, it shows that Congress is increasingly out of the loop.
Vance P. Frickey| 11.25.12 @ 5:53AM
The last four years will live in infamy. A man who promised us "unprecedented transparency in government" proceeded to, on being sworn in, hold closed-door meeting in which billions were disbursed, and had the largest pork-barrel spending act in American history passed to dead silence by the same media which subjected every act of the Bush administration to intense scrutiny for its Constitutionality in the preceding eight years. Obama kept the PATRIOT Act alive, he imposed five ruinous new taxes on the middle class masquerading as a healthcare reform, then exempted Big Labor from having to pay those taxes by participating in it - without a squeak of protest by the media.
America's been sold out by the people we trust to tell us what's going on. The last time something like this happened, it was in the 1930s, in Germany. Only, this time the tyrant in charge didn't have to knock media heads. The editorial boards are cheerleading for the worst thug to hold the Presidency.
Historians will shake their heads in wonder at a press that spent twenty years congratulating themselves for "speaking truth to power" after Watergate that voluntarily abdicated their duty to question and denounce abuses of the Constitution dwarfing anything Nixon ever tried to do.