Filed under: Foreign Policy, Humor, Immigration, Media Bias, Middle East, News, Syria, Terrorism | Tags: Chris Matthews, Democrat Hypocrisy, MSNBC
More jottings from my notebook:
No date, but the conversation makes the time element fairly clear. This is Chris Matthews at MSNBC explaining partisanship to the uninitiated.
Before I get started today I want to express how grateful I am for the awe-inspiring leadership of my president. Syria is a bloodbath, Iraq is in the hands of terrorists, Israel is on the verge of war with the Palestinians, and Russian troops are in Ukraine. On top of that we’ve got the Benghazi, IRS, NSA, and VA scandals and our Southern border is rife with diseased children, gang members and Middle Eastern terrorists donning sombreros. All these problems that were created by the Bush administration would have crippled the most stoic of leaders. Yet, last night I saw a news video of President Obama laughing and enjoying himself in Denver as he ate Pizza, drank beer and played billiards. Our president is carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, but you’d never know it by looking at him. Today he’s headed to the golf course before attending three different fundraisers. Tomorrow he’s shooting a game of hoops with LeBron James and Barbara Streisand before hosting a $45,000 a seat fundraiser at Steven Spielberg’s East Hampton. Calm, cool and self-assured folks. Those are the characteristics of a leader.
You can probably guess why I copied this down. It was hard writing because I couldn’t stop giggling. It’s all so innocent.
Filed under: Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Free Markets, Freedom, History, Politics, Progressivism, Socialism, The Constitution, The United States | Tags: Eliminate the Constitution, Fixing Human Nature, The Left's Ambitions
I ran across my notes from a panel discussion on where the Left is going, back in the fall of 2014, and it’s still of interest.
“The left is intellectually dead, and where it is headed toward is authoritarianism.”That was Kevin Williamson, roving correspondent for National Review.
William Voegeli of the Claremont Review of Books argued that “The fundamental assumption of the left is the innate goodness of each person. This assumption means that they are seeking to undermine the Constitution, which is based on a very different view of human nature. The Constitution pits the different branches of government against each other so that each will keep the others in check.”
As James Madison put it in the Federalist, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” and the Constitution supplies the “defect of better motives” through such balancing.
The Constitution, in other words, expects selfish ambition, and by expecting ambition, Voegeli noted, it legitimizes it—which is precisely what the left does not want to do. The left wants to supply not the “defect of better motives” but rather just “better motives,” Voegeli said. Liberals want to set up a system that allows our latent goodness to “flourish,” and the checks of our constitutional system can be discarded in favor of technocratic, centralized disinterestedness that allows each individual to live an authentic life of his choosing.
“The object is not to have one’s own way so much as to have a way that is one’s own,”
American Elephants 