Musings Of An Indie WriterTuesday, June 30, 2009
When in the Course of Human Events…
It seems like only yesterday we were treated by the leftists to the refrain that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism”. Actually that was during the administration of “chimpy bushitler mc halliburton” which concluded a mere 5+ months ago.
Now that the political left is in the catbird seat, it seems that the refrain has gone down the memory hole along with the hoola hoop and the Studebaker. The current terms used to characterize the left’s political opponents are: “terrorists, right wing extremists and those guilty of “treason” (against the planet?).
In the following question posed to Speaker Karen Bass (D LA) of the California Assembly she stated:
Q. How do you think conservative talk radio has affected the Legislature’s work? A. The Republicans were essentially threatened and terrorized against voting for revenue [tax increases]. Now [some] are facing recalls. They operate under a terrorist threat: “You vote for revenue [tax increases] and your career is over.” I don’t know why we allow that kind of terrorism to exist. I guess it’s about free speech, but it’s extremely unfair.Free speech exercised by opponents objecting to collectivist agenda items is ALWAYS “unfair”.
Recent characterizations of conservative and libertarian protesters of far left policy positions as “right wing and potential low level terrorists ” continue almost unremarked except in the alternative media (internet and talk radio) which are in turn attacked as “terrorist”)
In just the last few days the scam of the erstwhile religion of the global warmistas was used as a cover for the passage in the US House of Representatives of the most draconian tax and power legislation in recorded history. The occasion of the debate on this outrage elicited the assertion of one leftist “economist” on the payroll of the New York Times (Paul Krugman) that opponents of this abomination “are guilty of treason against the earth” Could the time be approaching when it is appropriate to take down the musket above the mantle in order that it should be cleaned and oiled? ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
cross posted at: Fighting in the Shade™
Yeah, I’m Still Alive
JUST A LITTLE busy’s all. Spent the weekend putting a floor in the downstairs bathroom. Discovered that what we thought was the cats’ water dish spilling was actually a slow leak from the shower. Don’t ask.
Life’s tough and those fardlers you lot elected to Washington over the last couple of years are bound and determined to make it worse. So easily led and credulous you are. The captive state-run media whines and moans about the evil George Bush and you fall for it like the suckers Mencken said you are. So—just for the change—you vote in the media’s party of choice to become your new lords and masters. And, now they’re going to enslave not only you, but all your unborn descendants and there’s nothing you can do—that you’re willing to—to stop it.
Their latest round of programs—thrown up like so many bomb-craters in your life’s road, more and faster than you can comprehend, let alone act to prevent or obviate—will reduce this once great nation to a shadow of its former glory.
No, they’re not stupid. They know what they’re doing. The incentives reward them for enhancing their own entrenched power. So they do.
Don’t try to tell yourself that they surely can’t be that evil. Don’t delude yourself that they’ll never get away with it. They’ve been getting away with it for over a hundred years. The Constitution won’t stay their hands. They rely on your sheeplike acceptance, on your desire to play the game according to rules they scorn, spurn, and spit upon.
You can’t vote them out, because there’s no change on offer. The opposition candidate is cut of the same cloth and the media has persuaded you that the third party is composed of loons and nutters. Your choice is between violent revolution, and you shrink from that, or slavery, and that’s too much to be borne. Sorry, Charlie. Those are your options. Choose now. The clock is running.
You’d better act before such sentiments as these bring the dark knock on your door at 3AM. Because by the time it does, it’ll be too late, and the butcher’s bill will be ten times what it would be today.
Have a good one.
Cross-posted at BabyTrollBlog.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Politically Driven Socioeconomic Suicide
While the wall to wall 24-7 Michael Jackson death freak show has occupied the attention of the MSM circus attendees, truly catastrophic events have transpired. On Friday June 26th by a vote of 218 to 212 the US House of Representatives passed Waxman-Markey, the largest tax bill in the history of organized crime government.
We are duped into believing that we, or the planet, will benefit by the micro-regulation and macro-taxation of our behaviors. Prostituted scientists and “climatologists” in black robes had christened natural, life-sustaining carbon dioxide a “poisonous pollutant.” The over-reaching Environmental Protection Agency teamed with the pathetic Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to steamroller legislation before their gig was up. (Way too many inquiring minds had been exposing the AGW urgency, as presented, to be fraud. The Australian Senate is rejecting its own version of Cap-and-Trade. The EPA has been caught red-handed censoring a global-warming study that was inconvenient. New EU Parliament Group includes climate skeptics. The Polish Academy of Science is challenging man-made global warming. The earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of CO2. Green jobs are found to be a cost not a benefit to our national economy.)
Only in a society dumbed down for two plus generations by forced immersion in the government indoctrination centers skools could the nonsense that a colorless odorless gas (CO2) necessary for sustaining life itself be accepted as a poisonous pollutant needing to be taxed and regulated using political duress by a substantial portion of the population.
Economic train wreck. Coming soon to a theater near you.
The Dems, ignoring 90 years of experience with ineffectual and destructive government interference in economic matters, charge ahead with more ineffectual and destructive government interference in economic matters:
An economic train wreck is coming. Its cause is simple and straightforward: the breathtakingly bad monetary and fiscal policy during the past six to nine months - in other words, too much money and too much federal spending.
The first thing policymakers need to do is to stop doing harm. The Fed needs to immediately raise the federal funds target interest rate and slow money growth to normal levels. Congress needs to return federal spending to a more normal 19 percent to 23 percent of gross domestic product. It should reduce the U.S. corporate tax rate, currently the second-highest rate among industrialized nations, and, if possible, reform the tax system to promote work, savings and investment. Finally, it needs to control rather than exacerbate federal entitlement spending.
Instead, the Obama administration seems bent on doubling down and making a bad situation even worse . . . .
“Why stagflation is coming. That certain aroma means it’s baked in the cake.” By David R. Burton and Cesar Conda, Washington Times, 6/28/09 (emphasis added).
Is the fix in?
Reading the following by Karl Denninger, I got to thinking about my reaction to seeing Bernie Madoff hounded by reporters on the street and his being escorted in and out of the court house. I am always struck by the curious equanimity he displays, an almost Alfred E. Neumann-like “What, me worry?” affect. For someone who’s royally taken a large number of people for astronomical sums of money and faces, so we’re told, a possible life sentence, this is a man who is remarkably calm about his prospects.
Moreover, I don’t recall that his troubles suddenly manifested themselves over a 12-hour period catching him flatfooted. With, I presume, no small amount of cash at his disposal, did he not consult in the distant past with competent legal counsel on the issue of possible extradition free havens? Did he not have a contingency plan that involved something more sophisticated and effective than trying to transfer some of his assets to his wife (and relatives, if my memory serves me)?
I’m not one for conspiracy theories and do not know how prescient Mr. Denninger is. But in my view Madoff is one cool customer, strangely so, and if he is indeed as cool in fact as he seems, it could be that he knows very well that he has little to fear for the reason that Denninger sets out.
His sentencing is today and we will get an initial read on this from the outward severity of the sentence. If the sentence is lengthy, then it will be interesting to see where Madoff is sent and what conditions he will face when he gets there. Parole is also a possible exit from his predicament.
That said, here’s Mr. Denninger’s view that Madoff operated with the explicit assistance and cooperation of the U.S. government:
At best Madoff is a 20+ year scam that occurred with not only the intentional blindness of our government but its explicit assistance and cooperation. It is simply not possible for one man to run a Ponzi Scheme of this size, sending out statements every month to hundreds if not thousands of clients and employing a group of people, moving this amount of money around, and have the entire thing be a scam without the cooperation of literally hundreds of accomplices including accomplices inside regulatory agencies and the government itself, along with regulated entities including the banks that lost money. You cannot place that sort of capital as a bank or other regulated entity on nothing more than “trust” - no matter who its being placed with. There is much, much more to this scandal and you can bet the people involved will do their level-best damndest to keep the truth from coming out.
True. I may be reading too much into what I perceive in Madoff. Maybe he’s just not that bright, not that foresighted, and just resigned to his fate and Denninger is making something out of nothing.
Perhaps. But I doubt that Madoff is stupid.
“Where We Are, Where We’re Heading (2009).” By Karl Denninger, The Market Ticker, 12/31/08.
UPDATE: Well, scratch that theory. Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison today. It looks like he was just resigned to his fate after his fraud became unsustainable. Denninger’s point is still on the table, though. How could fraud on such an immense scale have gone on for so many years without the complicity of a great many people? Maybe “the fix” will be evident in the small circle of people who are made to pay a criminal penalty and eventual revelation of a very limited version of the facts.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
AGW—collapse of the “consensus.”
The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N.—13 times the number who authored the U.N.‘s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)
The collapse of the “consensus” has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans.
“The Climate Change Climate Change. The number of skeptics is swelling everywhere.” By Kimberley A. Strassel, Wall Street Journal, 6/29/09.
Sunday Reader’s Corner: Kierkegaard’s Works of Love
Eternity Road readers may have picked up on the fact that I am generally more perky about the political climate these days - it looks like Obama’s “blitzkrieg” strategy is going to backfire rather than produce a quick and massive transition to socialism. Grasping for everything at once, it seems Obama will find that most of it has slipped through his fingers. It’s not necessarily over yet, but I for one am breathing a big sigh of relief.
My optimism about the political situation is not, however, matched by optimism about most of life’s other material realities. I may be gainfully employed for now, but the position of a recruiting firm is particularly perilous in a recession and I foresee major turbulence hitting the economy in the next 6-9 months. I’ve laid out some reasons why I think so, and this post at the Market Ticker is an even more concise distillation (and the source for many of my thoughts).
On the other hand, my reading life has gotten a lot richer since I graduated, and I do have to credit a lot of that to my lapse in internet service during my recent move. Now that I’m getting back online, I can only hope I have the discipline to continue.
To help me along the way, I’m going to funnel my reading activities to Eternity Road where appropriate. Book reviews are one thing I want to do, but I’m also hoping for something more collaborative. That’s the point of the “Reader’s Corner” tag in the title to this post. I wouldn’t consider these posts to imply a reading assignment or anything similar - the choice of our commenters to follow along with their own copy of the book is completely voluntary. Still, I would relish the chance to bounce ideas off those reading the same works simultaneously.
Anyway, I went to the bookstore a couple weeks ago and picked this one after it caught my eye:
I’d heard of Kierkegaard in some of the classes I’ve taken, but I had never read anything by him nor knew his general outlook on life. It turns out that he is a theologian of some renown, and that this book is a distillation of his views on Christian (as opposed to pagan, or “poetic” as he styles it) love. In form, the work is presented as musings and discourses on the two Great Commandments from the Gospel of Matthew in the first part, and on 1 Corinthians 13, the “love chapter” from Paul in the second.
I’m a few chapters into the book right now, but I’m going to refrain from comment this Sunday in case anyone has a hole burning up their reading schedules and might like to pick this up. For those who do, I have read chapter 1 (“Love’s hidden life”), chapter 2a (“You shall love,” chapter 2b (“You shall love your neighbor”), and am beginning in chapter 2c (”You shall love your neighbor”). It’s a difficult book and I expect to be working my way through it slowly, reading a bit each night. I’ll post some thoughts and reflections on those four sections next Sunday.
I hope that everyone is enjoying a restful Sabbath!
If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels
Foreign language studies are an unjustly neglected part of American education these days, a fact that I think every American ought to feel a bit embarrassed and then more than a little concerned about. The study of foreign languages, like the study of history, expands the mind and slows the creeping provincialism of time and place that is all too often a defining characteristic of American civilization. It seems odd that in a society as relentlessly empirical as that of this our Great Republic there is no voice supporting the study of foreign languages as a tool for personal and professional advancement, but facts remain facts: Americans are notoriously bad at learning foreign languages. Indeed, one could make an excellent case that the troubles Americans have in learning foreign languages are dwarfed only by their struggles to learn English, an obscure West Germanic dialect whose speakers are largely found on large islands and pool halls.
The slow death of foreign language studies in American schools is counterbalanced by the growing demand for self-instruction CDs, so that the average person who wants to learn a foreign language may pick up the rudiments while driving to and fro from work. I can personally attest to the benefits of this approach, as I have spent a goodly number of transport miles deep in the study of Gibberish. My knowledge of Gibberish, although shallow at the moment, has already stood me in good stead. On my occasional photographic forays to the Great Metropolis, where I do my best to capture the indigenous inhabitants in their native habitat, a few well chosen words of Gibberish are often all I need to fend off the hordes of overly aggressive street vendors trying to sell me everything from a small A-bomb (the better to eliminate your boy/girl/whatever friend with a minimum of physical evidence left over to send you to the slammer) to tap dancing zebus (don’t ask). Faced with such a situation I merely say,
“Ag’du na cha’u’ay no tritogashda angleskui.” Then I smile apologetically and say, “No spik Eeenglish.” I follow this blatant falsehood with a small bow and then walk away. The small bow is crucial, however; most Americans may not speak Gibberish with any degree of fluency, but everyone knows that Gibbers are an extremely polite people, almost as fastidious as the Japanese in their respect for the proper use of etiquette in any social situation.
Why, you might be asking yourself, would anyone choose to learn such an obscure language when there are so many other, more popular languages I could attempt to learn. There is Spanish, after all, which remains the most popular foreign language still taught in American schools, followed by French, Japanese, and Chinese. Latin is still extremely popular amongst dead people, as is classical Greek and Akkadian, and Akkadian, which is written on clay tablets with a wedge-shaped stick, also counts as a ceramics class credit in a good many universities nowadays. In the foreign language marketplace, Gibberish is a distinct nonstarter and yet this language has become wildly popular amongst the nation’s cultural and governing elites.
Why this is so is something of a mystery. The Gibbers are a small people, as ethnic groups go; most modern Gibbers and their country as well would fit comfortably inside a caravan of recreational vehicles heading up from Florida to see the grandkids over the summer holidays. But even with their demographic and geopolitical deficiencies, there is scarcely a capital city anywhere in the world where you will not find devotees of Gibberish. More than one modern politician has made a great name for him or her self for spouting nothing but the purest Gibberish in public, and the interested legal researcher can find whole passages in much of today’s proposed legislation written in Gibberish, usually without a convenient translation and usually found in the section where the pol whose bright idea this bit is explains just where the government is supposed to find the money to fund this idea. There’s nothing that will bring out the inner Gibber in any politician than an explanation of whose pocket the money is coming out of.
Gibberish has also become extremely popular in many other walks of life, such as the arts and the academy. One can seldom read a critical essay on modern art, for example, without finding long purplish patches of Gibberish explaining why the reader is too dumb to recognize a modern masterpiece when they see it, a phenomenon that occurred with great frequency as the latter half of the late and now unlamented twentieth century slid away towards a long overdue retirement. So much modern artistic criticism is written in Gibberish that it is difficult at times to tell the difference between a paean to the genius of Jackson Pollock or Andy Warhol and the New York City regulations regarding alternative side of the street parking during a prospective snow emergency.
What is odd in all of this is that the Gibbers themselves have little use for law, the arts, or the academy. Natural anarchists, the Gibbers’ own revolutionary period began and ended when they set fire to their country’s only opera house as a wandering troupe of Wagnerians rehearsed Die Gotterdammerung while listening to the Beatles’ White Album inside. No one is quite sure whether it was Wagner or the Beatles that the revolutionaries objected to, but the troupe did escape from the fire unscathed and with the record unscratched. The record player, on the other hand, was a total write off. When asked about the cause of this terroristic action, one revolutionary told the press that the music sounded too much like the death scream of the yellowfin tuna for your average Gibber to bear, an excellent answer until one realizes that Gibbers live nowhere near the sea and so have no idea what sounds a yellowfin tuna makes in extremis, but then no one ever said that the Gibbers were an especially bright group of people as people go.
To return to the subject, and yes, I think it’s about time too, nowhere is the relationship between Gibberish and its devotees more intense than in the case of the modern academy. Your average professor will write more Gibberish in a week than your average literate Gibber, assuming you could find such a rara avis, will write in twenty years. The Gibbers banned compulsory education after particularly acrimonious teachers’ strike in 1523 and now educate their children at home. Since most Gibber families are dumber than rocks, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the general level of educational achievement amongst Gibbers tends to be on the low side; they are, however, excellent at sharpening scissors, which is the national sport as well as their country’s leading export. Given this, it is something peculiar that academics find Gibberish so attractive. There are many explanations, but I think the most persuasive one is found in Gibberish’s ability to convey the most complex and subtly nuanced shades of meaning in more than a few words, something that plain English is incapable of.
Still, even with the language’s popularity amongst the elites, it is a shame that more people do not take the opportunity to learn the language. It is among the most beautiful of the unnecessarily polysyllabic tongues and it is among, or so I have heard, the easier foreign languages for an American to learn. I turn to it whenever my decades long pursuit of Spanish frustrates me to the breaking point. My attempts to learn Spanish have been an exercise in linguistic futility, leaving me with little more than the ability to order two beers and ask where the men’s room is. Important things to know, to be sure, but not something that will allow me to read Don Quixote in the original or impress a date with a well-chosen line from Garcia Lorca. Spanish, Polish, Danish, Swedish, Gibberish, Finnish already, they are all mysteries to me, I fear.
Weaknesses Of The Flesh: A Sunday Rumination
A remarkable 1976 novel, Michael Halberstam's The Wanting Of Levine, tells the story of A. L. Levine, a secular Jew, an orphan, a retired traveling salesman, and a multiple adulterer, who rises by a concatenation of moderately improbable events to contend, quite credibly, for the presidency of the United States. Levine's liberal politics are almost irrelevant to the tremendous appeal of this story. It's much more about his travels among Southern customers for the security systems he sells, his evolution as an independent businessman, his remarkable success as a campaigner, and his enjoyment of the favors of innumerable women throughout his travels.
Levine is no Lothario. He deceives no one. Indeed, his attachment to truth and candor seems too strong to be real, but then, this is a work of fiction. He never beds a woman without first disclosing that he's married and intends to remain that way. None of his past lovers have any but warm feelings for him. When his opponent's camp discovers his history of philandering and seeks comments from several of the women in his past, not one of them is willing to say a harsh word about him. A reader with even a shred of sympathy for one whose life is spent, willy-nilly, far from home can't help but wish Levine well, even to the point of excusing his dalliances.
One of the novel's major surprises comes when the opponent blares out the news about Levine's adulteries...and Levine's popularity rises and continues to rise. To Americans of our time, that's about as counter-intuitive as any political consequence could get...but once again, this is a work of fiction.
To judge from all the skimming I could bear to give this morning's New York Times, only two things happened last week: Michael Jackson died, and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford admitted to an affair. Funny, I distinctly remember an ongoing revolution in Iran and a certain cap-and-trade bill passing the House of Representatives. Well, even deceitful dying Old Media mouthpieces of the Establishment Left must be allowed their priorities.
Let's pass very quickly and in total silence over Jackson's demise. If your local news media haven't been all-Michael-Jackson-all-the-time since the announcement of his passing, you're a far luckier fellow than I. No, the Sanford affair is of far greater interest and ultimate importance, especially since Governor Sanford, an extremely popular and successful conservative, has been discussed as a possible candidate for the presidency.
On the Left and among our Old Media, it's an undisputed article of faith that all such possibilities have been foreclosed by Sanford's admission of adultery. Indeed, some have openly called for his resignation. Where these folks were when it was revealed that Bill Clinton had committed adultery with Gennifer Flowers and had sodomized Monica Lewinsky with a cigar in the White House itself, I'll leave to your imaginations. Suffice it to say that as ever, left-liberals hold conservatives and Republicans to infinitely higher standards, including one that excoriates them for incontrovertibly true statements the Left finds hurtful to its causes.
(Yes, this is a Sunday Rumination. Please bear with me.)
Christians are aware, as no other family of faith has ever been, that the flesh is weak. We are commanded to lifelong fidelity to our spouses, without allowances. The Sixth Commandment -- "Thou shalt not commit adultery" -- doesn't even make an exception for breach of contract on the part of one's spouse; the obligation of fidelity remains unabridged unless and until the Church should annul the marriage.
We are obliged to condemn the sin of adultery. God forbade it on Mount Sinai, and Jesus Himself repeated and reinforced the Commandment during His Ministry:
Then some Pharisees came to him in order to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful to divorce a wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and will be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command us to give a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her?” Jesus said to them, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because of your hard hearts, but from the beginning it was not this way. Now I say to you that whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality, and marries another commits adultery.” [The Gospel According To Matthew, 19:3-9]
We are obliged to condemn the sin...but not the sinner. Especially not a sinner who confesses his fault and entreats us for forgiveness.
Of course, opinions will vary. Islam commands the execution of adulterers by stoning...at least the female ones. Many bluenoses of more wholesome affiliations will refuse forgiveness for adultery, on the grounds that "he knew what he was doing was wrong when he did it." And of course, a left-liberal will only forgive adultery if the sinner is a left-liberal who supports abortion on demand and same-sex marriage.
(Apropos of which, the New York Times has several scrofulous cartoons and comments in its Week In Review and Editorial sections. I won't link to them or reproduce them here; I can barely stand to have the paper delivered to my home so the C.S.O. can read the Magazine and do the crossword puzzle. Look them up for yourself if you must.)
This is why I won't allow a liberal into my home. This is why I tried to keep them away from my stepdaughters while they were young. This is why the entire left-liberal enterprise, and those who support it, should be shunned by all decent persons until left-liberals learn and admit the error of their ways, repent and do penance. They repeatedly condemn conservatives and Christians for "hypocrisy" when we fail to meet our avowed standards, but not only do they disdain any standard for themselves, they act as the self-appointed judges of our sincerity simply because some of us, some of the time, fall prey to the weakness of the flesh.
Christians are commanded not just to forgive, but to remember always that no man's soul is damned unless he dies in mortal sin and unrepentant. The two prescriptions are more closely related than most people are aware. But left-liberals pronounce irrevocable damnation on anyone who transgresses his own standards...if he's not a left-liberal. Yet they claim theirs is a secular, objective creed. Go figure.
As for the "other woman," her doorman, who needs an agent because he should be writing romance novels, said:"She was never seen dating any men. She was always with her children. She always dresses really smart, and one often wondered why such an attractive woman was alone," he said."Now we are beginning to understand that she was carrying on this secret affair," he said. "That's why there was a certain sadness to her face, like she was suffering, probably because the man she loved couldn't be with her."
I just read their emails, which I wasn't going to do, but I did. They are beautiful. A lot of people never feel like this in their lives, ever, and it sounds like Sanford had never felt like that before. I found one detail very telling in one of his emails:
I have been specializing in staying focused on decisions and actions of the head for a long time now — and you have my heart. You have oh so many attributes that pulls it in this direction. Do you really comprehend how beautiful your smile is? Have you been told lately how warm your eyes are and how they softly glow with the special nature of your soul. I remember Jenny, or someone close to me, once commenting that while my mom was pleasant and warm it was sad she had never accomplished anything of significance. I replied that they were wrong because she had the ultimate of all gifts — and that was the ability to love unconditionally. The rarest of all commodities in this world is love. It is that thing that we all yearn for at some level — to be simply loved unconditionally for nothing more than who we are — not what we can get, give or become. . . . Since our first meeting there in a wind swept somewhat open air dance spot in Punta del Este, I felt that you had that same rare attribute. Above all else I love that inner beauty about you. . . . As I mentioned in our last visit, while I did not need love fifteen years ago — as the battle scars of life and aging and politics have worn on this has become a real need of mine. You have a particular grace and calm that I adore.So, his wife, or "someone," but he attributes it to his wife, told him his mother, who gave him unconditional love and whom it sounds like he deeply loved, had never accomplished anything of significance?
I doubt he really couldn't have been reached in Argentina, if he needed to be.
I want this guy in the Republican party. He's a human being. This is why I like no state interference in personal lives: they're grey areas, and everyone has a different opinion.
(Gentle Reader, if you haven't yet made Rosita's bloggy acquaintance, I hope you will soon, preferably at once. This lady is special.)
The old maxim is that "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." That's traditionally been interpreted to refer to our willingness to stray from our spouses under temptation, but there's a facet to it that's almost never mentioned: the temptations that arise because of a neglectful spouse, to whom the happiness and well-being of his avowed beloved have become, over time, less and less of a priority, until it's vanished completely. There's a weakness of the flesh for you.
I've read little about Governor Sanford's affaire de coeur beyond the bare details, but it strikes me as snortworthy that almost everyone who's commented on it other than Rosita has immediately condemned him and exculpated his wife. What about her? How has she treated him these past ten or twenty years? Are they still truly "one flesh," or has she taken to keeping him at arm's length? Are their lives intertwined, interdependent and harmonized, or have they become two strangers with the same progeny who just happen to share a roof? Does she support him in his endeavors, or does she treat them as trivialities, unworthy of her attention?
Governor Sanford has said nothing about any of this. Whatever the case may be, that's to his credit. But if any of my darker speculations is correct, what Sanford found in his lover's arms was a lot more than "the tickle in the pickle" -- and a lot more important to his emotional health.
God forgives; we have only to ask. We should learn to forgive as well, especially when a good man commits a sin of the flesh not because of the urgings of lust, but from a need for love. Perhaps, with the passage of time, Governor Sanford's constituents will find forgiveness for him in their own hearts, and will encourage him, like the fictional Levine, to share his candor, talent, and conservative principles with a national audience. The Republicans could certainly do a lot worse.
It embarrasses me somewhat to have been prompted by Rosita's piece to set these thoughts down, three days after the governor's admissions. I should have done so at the outset. You see, I know something about the subject myself.
May God bless and keep you all.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
That insistent, urgent, inner voice.
No reason to stop the wild spending, right? No reason at all:
Foreigners now hold nearly 50 percent of the federal government’s publicly held debt. . . .
At minus $3.47 trillion, America’s net debtor status with foreigners represents nearly 25 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, the highest level in history.
“Three decades of massive [trade] deficits have converted the United States from the world’s banker - able to ‘pay any price and bear any burden in the cause of freedom’ - to the world’s largest debtor, utterly dependent on China and other foreign interests,” said Charles McMillion, chief economist of Washington-based MBG Information Services.
* * * *
“We are so deeply in debt and this money is so liquid that it hamstrings our monetary, fiscal and trade policies,” Mr. McMillion said. “We’ve really mortgaged our financial future.”
Our financial position in the world has deteriorated dramatically. We should debate next steps on how to improve and reverse this deterioration. A debate lasting, oh, something a little longer than four days. I’m thinking that the words “cut” and “reduce” should figure prominently in any solution we devise.
Two things I’m sure won’t help at all are hugely expensive, burdensome, massive, and half-baked legislative initiatives to socialize our health care system and reduce CO2 emissions in the pursuit of questionable global warming reduction fantasies.
But that’s just me.
Do you hear that same voice inside . . . ? The one that axes:
“Where are the Nation’s guardians?”
“Why is it that we hand our government over to players from the T-ball league?”
“U.S.‘s debtor status worsens dramatically. Foreigners hold 50 percent.” By David M. Dickson, Washington Times, 6/27/09 (emphasis added).
