Blogs For Victory

The tone which was supposed to be set tonight:

A 9-year-old girl killed in last weekend’s mass shooting in Arizona will be buried in a hand-crafted casket donated by a group of Roman Catholic monks in Iowa.

Trappist Caskets , which is owned and operated by monks of the New Melleray Abbey near Dubuque, was contacted by the Bring Funeral Home in Tucson, Ariz., on behalf of Christina Taylor Green’s family.

It’s a comfort to the family “to know that it was made by monks and blessed by the monks,” said Belinda Motzkin Brauer, a representative for the funeral home…

Today was supposed to be about mourning for loss. I’m still trying to digest what really happened at the memorial, but the more I consider it the less I like what I saw and heard. But some people know what to do when others have suffered loss…

Is it just me, or is this event starting to look more and more like a political rally?

Do the people there know they are supposed to be gathered in solemn remembrance of the dead – not cheering like yahoos at a football game?

UPDATE: Ok, its not just me…there’s a Twitter feed on this and I’m not the only person nauseated by the cheering.

UPDATE II: Open thread comments at Hot Air…until now, I didn’t know that they kept the concession stands open and had t-shirts for the event. Sorry, but that tears it – Obama’s people must have set this up as a rally; you just don’t do things like that when the President is coming to town without his ok.

Sarah Palin: “America’s Enduring Strength” from Sarah Palin on Vimeo.

I have to say that I can’t agree with Sarah Palin’s contention that only the individual is responsible for such horrors as we’ve witnessed – while the man who pulled the trigger must pay the price for that action, all the events which led up to the trigger pulling played a roll. And in 2011 America the events which lead up to this and other massacres are varied, and all the result of societal breakdown. It is absurd to think that Sarah Palin’s targets on a map caused this lunatic to go off, but it is obvious that our popular culture’s glorification of violence has gone a long way towards making it more likely that someone will pick up a gun and shoot in to random crowds of Americans.

And as for our coming together and shaking hands after the political battles – that is the usual thing to do after an election. But I doubt that much hand shaking will happen after the next few elections. As I noted earlier, we are a house divided and we have to work out what sort of nation we wish to be. While we’re doing that, rhetoric will remain heated and the ties which bind will grow weak.

Things will get better. This, too, shall pass – but there’s no sense, in my view, of trying to pretend that things are other than as they are. We’re a society in crisis and the crisis must be resolved before we can get together in amity.

From Mail Online:

From the air they form a neat patchwork of grey and blue, nestling between rundown factories and crumbling slums.

But on the ground these sprawling tent cities are a fetid mass of humanity where cholera and crime run rife.

A year since a cataclysmic earthquake levelled much of Haiti, little has changed for the 1.2million residents still scraping an existence in these squalid refugee camps.

Survivors have been further blighted by an outbreak of the deadly water-borne disease cholera. The illness has struck 155,000 since October, killing 3,651…

Crime is rampant and while charitable organizations labor with incredible dedication, things simply aren’t getting much better. Back on January 15th, 2010, I had this to say:

…We have to let go of a false morality which says that a nation, as such, has a right to complete self-determination. Most nations do – but most nations can also ensure that buildings are constructed with at least minimal safety in mind. It is also false morality to state that we dare not judge the society of Haiti by our own standards – that is just a cowardly dodge by which we pretend we don’t have an obligation, when we actually do. We must embrace the truth – and the truth is that millions of our brothers and sisters in Haiti are suffering, quite needlessly, simply because of the failure of good people to act in time…

I said we had to step in and set up a protectorate in Haiti back then, and I’ll say it again, now: the people of Haiti have, for a variety of reasons, been unable to secure for themselves a government capable of providing even such basic things as an enforced building code, or a water supply which will prevent things like the cholera epidemic. Haitians, themselves, are wonderful – this is demonstrated, daily, by the hard work and glowing success of Haitians who live in the United States. Given reasonably decent government, Haitians thrive – but for whatever reason, they can’t get that in Haiti. And, so, we should impose it upon them.

As I noted last year, this does contravene two modern lies – that any nation has absolute sovereignty no matter how badly it is misgoverned; that no society is any better than any other. Well, gross misgovernment does, in my view, justify better government to intervene, and some societies do things better than others. A good society can exist in Haiti, but not under its current morass of corruption, mismanagement and violent animosities. Make Haiti a UN Trust Territory, place an American governor over it with an advisory body of Haitians and start to rebuild Haiti – with a mind towards Haitian independence in 2061.

Or, we can just pour in more money, allow things to drift, and be right back in Haiti helping out in the next disaster to come down the road.

The reaction of the political left to the events in Arizona has strained mightily any conception that we Americans, as a people, share a set of values. While the initial reaction to the liberal slanders on the right has been justifiable outrage, a more careful analysis indicates a much greater worry. Are we, once again, a house divided against itself?

There is no other way to put it than that there was a sense of satisfaction on the left over the massacre – that the massacre happened and had as its target a Democrat Congresswoman appeared providential. This was their long-awaited “we told you so” moment. To put it bluntly, the massacre in Arizona – which the left now and forever, and in spite of all evidence, will hold is the natural effect of having conservative rhetoric abroad in the republic – demonstrates conclusively that the left holds conservatism to be wicked.

Considering this, it becomes worthwhile to ask if there is anything left and right agree upon? It is important because a society, to put it in St. Augustine’s terms from the City of God, is a group of persons who share a common moral code. Naturally, there are always going to be divisions of opinion about how the code is to be applied, but a genuine society – a united civilization – presupposes that certain things are right and certain things are wrong and acts, in the main, according to these views. To the left, the wrong of Arizona was not so much the shooting, itself, but the alleged climate created by the admission in to society of ideas which are wrong – to the left, that is, the common moral code proscribes conservatism.

Think about it: what unites conservatives and liberals? Upon what things can the most dyed-in-the-wool liberal and his conservative counter part agree? Do they agree on what constitutes marriage? What constitutes family? What the role of government is? Ah, but both the liberal and the conservative hold that the murders in Arizona are wrong. Really? In what sense? A liberal would have been ok, 9 years ago, with that girl being killed via abortion, even up to the moment she emerged from the womb…and as for 79 year old Phyllis Schneck, a liberal would be ok with helping her to commit suicide a couple years from now, if things weren’t working out well for her health-wise. Conservatives, on the other hand, are horrified not just if a lunatic kills them at 9 and 79, but if a perfectly sane person kills them 8 months in to gestation, or 8 months before the natural end to life.

Can this chasm be bridged? Its not a matter of one person wanted to spend a billion dollars on education and another person wanting to spend half a billion and they compromise at 750 million – those people share the same basic idea of paying for education, but just disagree on the details. But when it becomes a matter of one person saying a certain thing must be, while the other person says it must not be – and both are asserting their views as matters of basic morality – there can be no real compromise. A conservative says that gay marriage must not be because it is morally wrong; a liberal says it must be because basic morality requires it. Where is the middle ground?

Do keep in mind that this isn’t a plea for uniformity of thought and action – as a conservative I’m in favor of amnesty for some of the illegals in country; I do think that firearms ownership should be licensed like automobile driving; I’d like to sink our banks beneath the sea…things which, on the face of it, some liberals might subscribe to. And yet I remain a conservative, and my fellow conservatives don’t read me out of the movement because we share the same understanding of what is right and what is wrong. And while some liberals could acknowledge some merit to my views, we’d swiftly fall out over the fact that, unlike liberals, I think that illegal border crossing must be stopped regardless of expense, that people must be allowed to own all the firearms they wish and that the free market is the only rational economic policy. That, at times, a liberal or conservative idea can be compatible with the other side doesn’t mean there is a shared sense of morality – just an ephemeral coincidence arrived at by different paths of reason. I and any liberal out there simply do not agree on what is right and what is wrong – and so, in practice, we can’t work with each other for the betterment of society because we disagree on what constitutes “better”.

Does this mean we’re heading for a violent civil war? Not at all, but it does mean that we will, once again, cease to be divided. We will become all one thing, or all the other. Once we were half free and half slave, now we are half conservative and half liberal; as we once upon a time became all free, so we will in the fullness of time become either all liberal or all conservative. Calls to tone down the rhetoric are just words shouted in to a void – the rhetoric doesn’t cause the problem; it is a symptom, not the illness. The illness is that we have parted ways and have utterly different views of what is right and what is wrong…eventually, one side or the other will so predominate that it will be able to re-make the entirely of society in its image, and then the conflict will end, and rhetoric will tone down, and we’ll argue from a shared world view…until the next time we part ways, and have to decide again what sort of nation we wish to be.

Hat tip to Zero Hedge on this report. From the BBC:

At least 35 people have died in violent unrest in Tunisia, according to a human rights group. The authorities say 21 people were killed.

Meanwhile, two people were killed in riots linked to food price increases and unemployment in Algeria…

While oppressive regimes and corruption are playing a role in these violent incidents, the thing which concerns me the most is the fact that it was a basic item like the price of food which triggered the violence. While the central banks are printing money like mad to support the global financial system (which may well be absolutely insolvent) and we watch our dollars decline in value and our debt skyrocket, we must remember that most of the world lives on a very thing margin. Around the world, outside our cozy enclaves, people struggle, day by day, just to have enough to eat. Me here in America paying 10% more for my steak is annoying – some poor guy raising 5 kids in Algiers is already paying 50% of his income for food…and now its to be 60%?

As always when financial systems teeter on the edge of collapse, the plight of the poor is ignored. We’re being told that if we don’t continue to bail out these banks, disaster will ensue. Well, with 1.5 million bankruptcies in the United States in 2010, I’d say disaster has already happened…and maybe its time that the bankers started to feel it, too? With food riots happening in foreign lands, I’d say we’ve got a bigger problem than whether or not Goldman Sachs will remain profitable.

It would, of course, help if the United States produced as much food as we used to. But, we don’t – and, in fact, a lot of our best farm land is lying fallow for various reasons…from government subsidies not to plant, to asinine environmental regulations which hold a guppy to be more important than farmers and their families. We’ve made one heck of a mess of this world and we’d better wise up right quick, or we’re eventually going to have to pay a very price for our folly.

Just disgusting – from The Weekly Standard:

This afternoon Sanders sent out a fundraising appeal, seeking to raise money to fight Republicans and other “right-wing reactionaries” responsible for the climate that led to the shooting.

He writes:

Given the recent tragedy in Arizona, as well as the start of the new Congress, I wanted to take this opportunity to share a few words with political friends in Vermont and throughout the country. I also want to thank the very many supporters who have begun contributing online to my 2012 reelection campaign at http://www.bernie.org. There is no question but that the Republican Party, big money corporate interests and right-wing organizations will vigorously oppose me. Your financial support now and in the future is much appreciated…

Sanders’ letter goes on to ask if Democrats are allowed to participate in Arizona politics given all the GOP violence going on there. It is a nauseating attempt to make political and fund raising hay off of a national tragedy. Sanders is up for re-election and while a socialist is hard to beat in Vermont, we should make every effort to target his seat for a GOP pick-up (yes, liberals, Sanders is a target; a political target; someone we want to take down, force out, beat in a political campaign…).

UPDATE: Yet another liberal Facebook page…I Hate it When I Wake Up and Sarah Palin is Still Alive. And 2,148 2,150 2,167 2,175 people like it

UPDATE II: The Other McCain finds an example of liberal love:

“Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.”

– Michael Feingold, Village Voice, Jan. 13 2004

Ed Morrissey notes a new CBS poll:

CBS polled almost 700 adults in the wake of the mass murder in Tucson committed by Jared Lee Loughner to determine whether the media spin that the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the murders of six others was a political act had resonated with the public. Perhaps surprisingly, the spin machine seems to have failed. A majority of 57% say that politics had nothing to do with the shooting, and even a plurality of 49% of Democrats agree…

As a poll of “adults” rather than “registered voters” or “likely voters”, you’ll have a much larger sampling of ignorant people…people who only get their knowledge from the MSM and are usually pretty easily suckered by whatever it is the MSM is saying. And even with poll containing a large sample of that part of the population, we still get a solid majority rejecting the DNC/MSM narrative. That is quite impressive – shows how weak the MSM is getting. And I’ll bet a poll of likely voters would show even stronger rejection of the slander about Arizona.

The full truth is beginning to emerge about Loughner:

…”This is just someone who is profoundly mentally disturbed,” said Brian Levin, the executive director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. “It wasn’t Sarah Palin who did this to him.”

Levin said his writings indicate that he may have borrowed some ideas from various hate websites, but that he didn’t appear to have any set philosophy.

“This guy is on a slippery slope of impairment, and he appears to be at the bottom of it,” Levin said…

You liberals out there have a chance to redeem yourself, at least as far as this blog goes – you can start posting your apologies for even so much as remotely suggesting that any thing the right did played a role in this terrible event. I’m not expecting any of you liberals to show such a sense of honor and decency, but I do hope that you rise above the level you’ve fallen and do the right thing.

From Zero Hedge:

…No government debt has ever been or can ever be repaid in full. This is especially the case when a government imposes a monopoly on what can be used as money by passing and enforcing “legal tender” laws. The US did this with the introduction of the Fed in 1913. Eventual default becomes an absolute certainty when government makes its own debt paper the ONLY “reserve” behind the “money” it alone can create. The US did this under President Nixon in 1971. The whole world went along with it because the US Dollar was the reserve currency and no government or people anywhere dared jettison it.

The result is the global financial quagmire we see everywhere we look…

It was the Brits who invented “national debt”. From Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization:

…In January, 1693, Charles Montagu, first Earl of Halifax, as lord of the treasury, revolutionized governmental finance by persuading Parlaiment to float a public loan of 900,000 (pounds sterling), on which the government promised to to pay seven percent yearly. Toward the end of 1693, as expenditures were dangerously outrunning receipts, a group of bankers agreed to lend the government 1,200,000 (pounds sterling) at eight per cent, secured by an added duty on shipping. The idea of such incorporated lending had been suggested by William Patterson three years before. Montagu now gave it official support, and Parlaiment accepted the plan…The Age of Louis XIV, pg 304

Presto!, national debt was born. And if you go over to this site of the UK government, there is actually a chart of national debt running from 1692 until now – and the debt has never been paid off (as an aside, it was just about 25 years after national debt was created that government instituted the first bail out of “too big to fail” banks in the wake of the “South Seas” stock market bubble…a bubble created, in large part, by the easy money floating around due to government bonds and other financial chicanery).

At no time since the UK first figured out how to borrow and spend has Britain, as a State, been debt free. During all that time Britain rose from minor power off Europe’s coast to global empire and back to minor power off Europe’s coast…but the debt remains. And who benefits from this debt? The British people, or the banks able to make easy money and politicians able to buy votes?

I don’t think we’ll ever be able to get rid of government debt until we forbid our government from having debt. Debt is ruinous to nations no less than to people…and we can see from history that once a government is allowed to run up debt it will never stop doing so.

The United States government will take in about $2.2 trillion in fiscal year 2011. That should darn well be enough – whatever it is we want government to do should fit nicely in to that figure. And if there is something which doesn’t fit, then it shouldn’t be done. That is the budget – spend that much, and not a dollar more. Balance the budget and pay off the debt – for goodness sake, if we paid off our debt then that is $14 trillion which can be invested in other things…not just businesses, but all the stuff liberals are always yammering on about (its just a matter, liberals, of you investing your own money, instead of everyone else’s…).

Time for a change – time for a debt-free United States government.

There is a time for a President to get really deep in to an issue, and other times a President should adopt an “above it all, I’m America’s President” attitude. Obama may be about to go deep in to Arizona:

He’s handled it well thus far, actually, by keeping things low key. But alas, my friends, alas.

Mr. Obama was considering delivering a speech about the greater context surrounding the shooting, but advisers said it was premature to do so until Ms. Giffords’s condition stabilized and more became known about the gunman’s motives…

The subtext for the political discussion was the new balance of power in Washington, and how the shootings might play into Democratic efforts to regain initiative — and Republican efforts to keep it — after their losses in November. Both sides emerged from the weekend cognizant of the ways in which a politically charged act of violence, whatever the actual motives or mental state of the gunman, can recalibrate the national dialogue…

If Obama and his Democrats are seeing the Arizona tragedy as a means to revive their fortunes in the manner of Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing then they are going to be very badly mistaken. This time, it is different.

First off, the narrative post-OKC was still largely controlled by the MSM; while Rush was on the air back then, he was really the only major, national conservative voice and there was no conservative New Media to challenge the MSM narrative. Any attempt to twist Arizona to partisan advantage will not be able to gain as much traction as the post-OKC effort did.

Secondly, we on the right are in no mood to sit still for this. We, our views and our rhetoric had nothing to do with setting off a lunatic in Arizona. The man is crazy and, if you really want to assign a political alignment to him, he was of the left far more than of the right. Glenn Reynolds correctly identifies efforts to tie Arizona to the right as a blood libel – and if you think we were mad in 2010, just wait to see how mad we’ll be in 2012 if Democrats try to smear us with this.

Now, Obama can surprise me in this – maybe he will take the high road and just discuss in general terms the tragedy of the Arizona shootings and how we, the people, must remember the better angels of our nature. That would be fine – but I have grave doubts about Obama’s judgment and thus I am concerned that he’ll really step in it this time.

Now, liberals, is the time to drop this as a political issue. Right at this moment; stop it. We didn’t do this. We didn’t instigate it. We didn’t in any way, shape or form cause the event in Arizona. Leave it alone – you won’t like the result if you persist in this slander.