Best post title of the day:

Yes, the day is young, but try to top this:
If Wishes Were Horse's Asses, Liberals Would Elect Them

And he references Boethius, too!

(h/t Larwyn)


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Corporal Matt Sanchez

The obnoxious Max Blumenthal has his shorts tied in a bunch because the conservatives honored an Hispanic Marine hero Republican at CPAC.

And, aside from the conservatives honoring an Hispanic - because, as I have been told by a Liberal or two, "Hispanics have to be liberal" - why would that get Max upset? Because Corporal Matt Sanchez did gay p_rn and worked as a male escort sometime in his past, and conservatives, at least in Max's homophobic mind, have "psycho-sexual issues".

Here are three conservatives that don't:

Jane, who I met in DC: Liberals Relish "GOTCHA!" Moment at the Expense of Corporal Matt Sanchez.

Gay Patriot West: Using Matt Sanchez's Past to Dismiss Conservative Ideas

That said, Matt Sanchez is a part of all that he has met. His past figures into the man he has become. But, people do have a right to their own private lives, to deal with their past mistakes - or merely just past experiences which no longer represent their present actions - in their own way. Once again, it seems that all too many are all too interested in the apparent hypocrisy of conservatives, more interested in defining us so that they may more readily dismiss our ideas. Without even considering what we have to say.

Don Surber:

Liberals think they can attack people based solely on their skin color, their gender or the religion if the victim is a conservatives. It is as if the 14th amendment has a clause that says, "except for conservatives — you can beat them like a rug if they are conservatives."

That is plain wrong. I wish someone on the left had the guts to call Blumenthal the homophobe he is.

Keep waiting, Don.

While I believe that Sanchez's past actions were wrong, the matter is that for all that has been said, a. he was an adult, engaged in activities with other consenting adults, and more importantly, b. he has given up those actions (emphasis added):

I don't like p_rn, it reduces the mind, flattens the soul. That's not hypocrisy talking, that's experience. If I started off with liberal leanings, being on a gay p*rn set should have been heaven. In p_rn, everything taboo is trivialized and everything trivial is projected. How does a conservative trace his roots to such distasteful beginnings? Like all followers of a cult, it's tough to figure out when you stopped believing in the party-line, but I can tell you that by the time I finished my summer tour of the major studios, I was pretty disgusted with myself. It was an emotional low, and the people who surrounded me were like drug dealers only interested in being with the anesthetized in order not to shake off the stupor of being high. Why did I become a conservative? Just look at what I left, and look at who is attacking me to today? Let's face it people, you're all cynical enough to know that if I had espoused liberal causes, spoken out against the military, got a liberal award for courage and then outed with a p_rn-past, you'd be clamoring for my memoir, and nominating me for a diversity ticket with Barack Obama.

And with Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd and Barney Frank.

Here is Matt Sanchez's blog.

Update: Behold, a new creation

To understand American conservatives, even those who aren't themselves Christian, you need to understand Christianity--not as it appears in vicious stereotypes and smears on left-wing blogs, but as it is really preached and practiced and understood. As I am fond of pointing out, a lively Christian faith is actually a great defense for American liberty, and a firewall against ideological zeal and extremism. And as seen in the response to the revelations about Cpl. Sanchez, it keeps us human.

As for those who outed him and had this blow up in their face, I pray they look at Chuck Colson's example and take it to heart. There's more to being human than just scoring political points.

Read the rest.
Correction: This quote came from JunkYardBlog, via Cat House Chat.
(Note I spelled it p_rn because of filters.)

Vanderleun does it again: The Vision That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Gerard Vanderleun is a wonderful writer and he's got today's must-read: The Vision That Dare Not Speak Its Name

It is no secret that classic liberalism in the mold of FDR, JFK,and LBJ that reached its apotheosis in Hubert Humphrey, has long been consigned to the bone-yard. What has taken its place hates to be tarred with the brush of liberalism because, frankly, it isn't. What now stands in that place is a kind of perverted one-world idealism in which "the world as it is" is constantly measured against "the world as it should be." Old liberalism at least had the argument that it was being done for the greater good. The new perverted variant is one in which policy and plans are made because it makes the initiators "feel good" about themselves. Those that make and support these measures hold themselves as, in the French phrase popular when many of them were young, "cityoen du monde" -- citizens of the world.

You must read every word.

I'll be posting more later today if time allows.

Lileks takes on Arkin, and I ponder the sixties

Yesterday I linked to Cassandra's smackdown of William Arkin. Today I'm linking to Lileks's (h/t Larwyn).

Lilek's smackdown of Arkin is great, but my favorite line comes before Lileks gets to it - it's about the sixties:

the 60s aren't seen as The Past; the 60s are a Timeless Vault of Cultural Touchstones, the apotheosis of Western Civ.

Indeed, nowadays a day doesn't go by without one having to hear the present-day rehashing of 1960s "counterculture values":

• that tired, old, narcissistic war protestors are speaking "truth to power" when they are actually basking in their own reflections
• that we're fighting a war in a far-away place, and that it'll never affect us, even when it obviously does
• that running away won't have any adverse consequences
• that "saving the earth" matters more than saving unborn children because it's "our bodies, our selves"
• that "world music" and chick lit are better than anything Dead White Men ever produced
• that angry spinsters bestow deranged women "absolute moral authority" to go kiss petty tyrants in Latin America
• that global orgasms will bring about peace because "all you need is love" (and gad, was there ever a more hollow sentiment than "all you need is love"?)
• that we shouldn't worry so much about Iran and pay attention to what's really important - global warming
• that Judeo-Christian values should be despised for the sake of "diversity"
• that America is the cause, alpha and omega, of all evil.

I was hearing this crap back when I was a young fool thirty or forty years ago and, much water under the bridge later, it is disheartening that so many are STILL so deluded.

As Barry Casselman says, the West is in a trance

I am increasingly convinced that the West is in denial of what is truly happening in the world. This self-delusion is the most dangerous response possible to the intense and rapid change all over the planet. This self-denial takes many forms, including obsessions with abstract issues of little real consequence, e.g., animal rights, capital punishment, celebrity gossip, political correctness, etc. It is accompanied by the rise of secular mandates and the suppression of spiritual values. It exhibits excesses of greed that threaten both capitalism and representative government.

The malign forces that conspire against the West (in contrast to the benign forces which only wish to compete with it), however, are not paralyzed. They are moving and growing at great speed.

Pat Santy looks at the myths that fuel the Left's denial. Neo-neocon examines the political anger firing up the upsurge in Romanticism

There's an interesting socioeconomic trend to Romanticism: it's a philosophy that seems to attract a surprising number of the more well-to-do and well-educated

All of these elements are part of the present-day trance.

That the denial is taking the form of 1960s superficiality only adds insult to injury. Those malign forces Casselman mentions don't simply wait.

Now go read Jeremayakovka, and try to wake up, if you may.


Technorati tags politics, current affairs, Iran, capitalism, Global Warming

Psy Today's Ideological Animal

Cinnamon Stillwell and the liberal hawks (see sidebar) have been discussing an article in Psychology Today titled The Ideological Animal. According to the article,

Liberals are messier than conservatives, their rooms have more clutter and more color, and they tend to have more travel documents, maps of other countries, and flags from around the world. Conservatives are neater, and their rooms are cleaner, better organized, more brightly lit, and more conventional. Liberals have more books, and their books cover a greater variety of topics. And that's just a start. Multiple studies find that liberals are more optimistic. Conservatives are more likely to be religious. Liberals are more likely to like classical music and jazz, conservatives, country music. Liberals are more likely to enjoy abstract art. Conservative men are more likely than liberal men to prefer conventional forms of entertainment like TV and talk radio. Liberal men like romantic comedies more than conservative men. Liberal women are more likely than conservative women to enjoy books, poetry, writing in a diary, acting, and playing musical instruments.

While my house is well-lit, and I keep a clean and mostly uncluttered house, I fit their notion of a liberal because I

• own a couple of hundred books in a wide range of topics (after I got rid of three large bookshelves' worth)
• am an optimist
• am not particularly religious
• enjoy abstract art and am a member of the MoMA
• like good poetry
• play the piano (badly, but I play it)

The same thing applies to their notions of what liberal children were like

As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient.

(Michelle Malkin shredded that early childhood study to bits last year.)

Indeed, I was a liberal once. So the article was a little correct. Where the article errs is in assuming that all people who left modern Liberalism did it only out of fear, and that "thinking rationally" would prevent political shifting. In my case, as it was with Cinnamon and with Neo-Neocon (who was interviewed for the article but the interview was never used), it was a long process that led to changing my political stance. The war on Islamofascism is only part of that picture.

I didn't get up one morning and went "Bam! I'm not a liberal!" as if I were throwing away a pair of old sneakers or changing my lipstick color. My change started during the Clinton administration, watching how Yasser Arafat was the Clinton's preferred guest. It was a process that took years. Someday I'll post about that.

Cinnamon finds that

Finally, the article's closing paragraph indicating that if one is simply encouraged to "think rationally" none of this political shifting (presumably to the right) would be required, is not only silly, but insulting. It was just such rational thinking that led me to reject the left and embrace those (most of whom, it turned out, were on the right) that fully understood the dangers of Islamic fascism. If it's irrational to want to fight against the great totalitarian threat of our day, then count me in.

Another issue that came up is the question of evil: in the liberal hawks discussion Pamela pointed out that the Left hates to think of evil. I am not a psychiatrist and certainly have no intention of becoming one, but I know for sure that not being able to discern between good and evil is the mark of a deranged mind.

ShrinkWrapped, in one of his characteristically thoughtful posts, asserts that

Those who are pathologizing Neo-cons believe that at best we are over reacting to a minor threat and at worst are creating the threat out of minimal evidence.

As ShrinkWrapped explains in the Sanity Squad podcast, if they are not addressing if there is a real threat or not, the article ends up being nonsense.

Which takes me to Dr. Sanity's post on the crux of the issue:

Did Islamic fascists plan and execute the mass murder of 9/11 ; or, was it a conspiracy of the Bush Administration and the US government (and/or the Jews)?

Have Islamic fascists declared war on the U.S. and the West; or, are their statements--made on a daily basis-- simply mere rhetoric and in reality pose little or no threat to our national security?

Are we involved in a global war against Islamic fascism that is being waged right now (in Europe, the Middle East, Russia, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Indonesia, the Phillipines etc.) against the fanatic religionists of Islam ; or is this "war" a psychotic figment of neocons' imaginations?

Are Islamic fascists (both nationed and nationless) threatening to obtain nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction and do they intend to use them against their declared enemies (America, the West, and Israel) ; or, is their intent merely peaceful energy production for the betterment of their own populations?

Is violent Islamic fascism responsible for thousands of innocents murdered in depraved and cowardly acts of terror and violence all over the world; or is all this so-called "terror" simply a perfectly justified response to the aggressive and hostile policies of the U.S. and the West toward the oppressed peoples of Islam -- whose only recourse is to mount suicide attacks against their oppressors?

Are these Islamic nations deliberately fostering and nurturing a malignant and violent version of Islam in order to keep their own populations under control and direct that population's anger and rage externally toward the West and Israel; or, is this entire issue of "Islamic fascism" a clever plot concocted by oil companies, the US government, and political conservatives (i.e., neocons), to steal oil and oppress the people of Islam while advancing American imperialism and hegemony in the Middle East?

As Siggy says in the podcast, rational people made a choice.

I know I've made mine.

Update, Thursday January 18: Dissecting Leftism posts on the study (also at Stop the ACLU.
Round-up at Kesher Talk
IronShrink examines the study (h/t: Michelle Malkin)
A Quick "Sanity" Quiz!

Update, Sunday, 21 January Follow-up post: Neo-neocon posts about the psychology of Psychology Today

Update, Wednesday 24 January: The Left Behind Series (or, Why is the Left so Intellectually and Spiritually Behind?)