Dennis Prager: “PROUND TO BE A REPUBLICAN!”

Dennis Prager briefly traces his conversion from a Democrat, to vote Republican,  and then finally to become a member of the Republican Party.  He preferred the stupid to the dangerous for his country.  He writes at TownHall, and at the Dennis Prager Show.

“After I became a Republican in the early 1990s — in a recent column, I explained how emotionally difficult it is for a Democrat to vote Republican, let alone become one — I concluded that I had left the dangerous party and joined the stupid party. 

Of course, as I often noted on my radio show, I prefer the foolish to the destructive. But, still, being a Republican engendered little pride.

That all changed in the past year. President Obama and his left-wing party have given his country three enormous gifts:

First, they created a level of political/moral clarity that it has not had in this baby boomer’s lifetime.

Second, they induced a consequent eruption of conservative activism — i.e., activism on behalf of limited government — that may be greater than at any time since the founding of the country.

And third, they are producing a Republican Party that actually stands for something other than being an alternative to the Democratic Party.

The latter was demonstrated first and foremost in its unanimity in opposing the Obama-led attempts to, in his words, “fundamentally transform” America. I don’t think any political observer would have predicted that not one Republican senator or congressman would vote for the Democrats’ 2,000-plus pages of new federal regulations, of controls over Americans’ medical decisions and of massive increased debt.

This was an astonishing accomplishment. It was obviously a credit to the Republican leadership. But most of all, it said that every single Republican was prepared to fight the left, whatever the political cost.

And to whatever extent Republican politicians found their moral and philosophical moorings, the Republican voter did so at least as much. Republican voters announced that they prefer to lose an election than have a Republican who in any way supported expansion of the federal government. Whether this was wise in every case is not my subject here. The subject is the moral/political clarity and the desire to fight for it among Republican politicians and Republican voters.

And if all this is not enough to fill a Republican with pride, there is a development that is as dramatic and unforeseeable as was the unanimity of Republican opposition to the transformational Obama-Reid-Pelosi agenda: The quality of many Republican senatorial and congressional candidates in the 2010 election is the highest in modern memory.

So angry are many Americans at what the left is trying to do to America that spectacularly bright and accomplished individuals from every walk of life have decided to leave their professions and run for office.

There may not be anything like it in modern American history, and there is certainly nothing like it in the Democratic Party, whose candidates for office are overwhelmingly career politicians whose political lives are largely devoted — however sincere their desire to help people may be — to giving the public’s money to people who vote for them.

In Alaska, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Joe Miller has a resume that reads like something a Hollywood screenwriter would make up. He was awarded a bronze star for his military service and is a judge who graduated Yale Law School.

In Arizona, a rocket scientist — yes, a physicist and rocket scientist — has decided to leave the world of science to run in a 55 percent Hispanic district against a Democratic Hispanic congressman. She (yes, she) is another candidate from central casting. When I spoke to Ruth McClung on my radio show, I was struck by her seriousness, her lack of any political guile and her intellectual depth.

In California, two powerhouse women, Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman, are the Republican candidates for senator and governor respectively. The erudite, deep and accomplished Fiorina is on an incomparably higher level than Sen. Barbara Boxer, whose professional life has been largely devoted to getting elected. The same can be said about the comparison between Whitman and Jerry Brown.

In South Carolina, a small-business man named Tim Scott is the Republican candidate for South Carolina’s first congressional district. He is witty and thoughtful — read the UK’s Daily Telegraph’s feature article on him — and, by the way, black.

In Michigan, the Republican candidate against John Dingell is Rob Steele, a distinguished cardiologist.

In Florida, in the Tampa Bay area, the Republican congressional candidate is Mike Prendergast, a recently retired Army colonel with 31 years of active duty experience.

This is a small, almost random sample of the impressive Republican candidates coming from outside politics.

This is a great time to be a Republican. Thank you, President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid. You know not what you have done.”

Comment:  Please check out Prager University at our Visions and Values tab for pithy five minute cleansings of Leftwing distortions about life.

The Friendly Face and Voice of A Genuine Human Being, G. W. Bush

I wish Mr. Bush had been a more forceful leader outlining the tenets of traditional American conservatism.  He didn’t turn out to be a teacher per se.  His presence in the office was honorable….exemplary as a figure, a host, a genuine human being .

There was nothing disingenuous or duplicitous or dishonest about Mr. Bush…..unlike the man who followed him in office.

That he was inarticulate at times made the Left call him stupid.    The only Republican president in my lifetime who wasn’t dubbed stupid was Richard Milhaus Nixon, whose  IQ  test results must have been  distributed sometime or another during his political life.  So he was in pretty good company.

Mr. Bush was an American President.   The Left charged him with being arrogant…a reckless cowboy from Texas….remember?   

Mr. Obama could never be called a cowboy except for a joke.   If Mr. Bush was arrogant,  the  level of Obama’s narcissism and pomposity would propel number 44 to the moon and back.   

I especially respected President Bush and actually envied him for his religious  devotion and humility before his God.  Compared to the empty soul and suit of his opponent in 2004, John F. Kerry, George W. Bush looked like a New Redeemer.

Here in this bit of Mr. Bush’s voice is his salesmanship for his book.  Isn’t the guy one hugely decent man…..possessing all of the qualities of a quality Christian gentleman.

And the Left hated him so.  Its believers are good at hating….they practice it so much.

Click on for a bit of Dubya:  http://hotair.com/archives/2010/10/21/video-plucky-author-touts-new-book/

Mark Steyn Hounds and Is Hounded by Political Muslims and Canada’s Lefty Students

Mark Steyn is a profoundly bright and humorous political critic.  He  has spent a small fortune keeping himself out of confinement in Canada, by the Canadian Human Rights Commission Bureaucrats for writing his analysis of the Islamic terrorists and America’s future in his book, America Alone.

When one lives in a country where there is no particular difference between Marxists and Liberals, the censors threaten  conservatives to send not only a message, but, more effectively to actually silence them by incarcerating  them.  The London  in question here is the one in Ontario.  The Muslim in the article preaching peace and understanding is the attorney who pressed the case against Mark Steyn’s right to print his opinions and understandings about the future of America under the threat from  fanatic Islam.  Don’t forget this is Canada, not Saudi Arabia, we are concerned with here.

“London’s Muslim community will show people how wrong controversial author Mark Steyn is by doing good deeds and working with others, a representative of the community says.

“The only killing we’ll be doing is with acts of kindness and with charitable acts,” said London lawyer Faisal Joseph, who knows Steyn’s work from a 2007 human rights tribunal case involving the writer.

“Muslims have been in London for over 100 years. The city is better for the contribution of our 35,000 Muslims.”

Steyn’s contentious views on Islam, included in his book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, landed Maclean’s magazine before the British Columbia Human Rights Commission in 2006.

Steyn will speak at the University of Western Ontario on Nov. 1.

He’s being brought to campus by StrictlyRight.com, the group of bloggers who in March brought controversial author and neoconservative Ann Coulter to Western.

Organizers said Steyn is visiting Western to “shake things up,” and challenge left-leaning students and faculty.

“We saw the success of the Ann Coulter event; there was an appetite for that kind of speaker on campus,” said Andrew Lawton, one of three organizers behind Steyn’s appearance.

“We encourage people to come out and challenge the views of the speaker.”

Views such as those of Coulter — who was soundly booed during her Western appearance when she mocked a 17-year-old Muslim student — and Steyn, Joseph said, will have to be drowned out by the compassion of Islam.

“We’re going to have to deal with the Ann Coulters and the Mark Steyns . . . of the world by donating millions of dollars to charitable causes to help the poor, donate to the food bank, work with the Men’s Mission and women’s shelters,” Joseph said.

Although the B.C. Human Rights Commission eventually ruled the excerpt published in Maclean’s did not constitute hate, it did rule that parts of the article were based on misinformation and misrepresentations of the history of Islam.

“The mandate of some is to cloak the argument of freedom of speech into the mantle of freedom to hate,” said Joseph.”

The above article was written by Kate Dubinsky and appeared in the London (Ontario) Free Press.

Steyn — born in Canada but living in the United States — will speak about American and Canadian issues in a speech entitled Head for the Hills: Why Everything in Your World is Doomed.

Karl Rove on the Obama’s “Incoherent Message” on the Campaign Trail

At an April 2008 fund-raiser in San Francisco, Barack Obama let loose with his famous “they cling to guns or religion” line. Last Saturday at a West Newton, Mass., fund-raiser, the president said, “facts and science and argument [do] not seem to be winning . . . because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared.”

Memo to White House: Calling voters stupid is not a winning strategy.

The economy and jobs are the No. 1 issue in every poll. Yet Mr. Obama of late has talked about immigration reform and weighed in (unprompted) on the Ground Zero mosque. He devoted Labor Day to an ineffective Mideast peace initiative. He demeans large blocs of voters and now is ending his midterm pitch with attacks on nonexistent foreign campaign contributions and weird assertions that “the Empire is striking back.”

Meanwhile, Republicans have talked about little else than the economy—drawing attention to lackluster job growth, the failed stimulus, out-of-control spending, escalating deficits and the dangers of ObamaCare.

On Sunday, White House senior adviser David Axelrod promised that the administration’s focus next year would be “to generate more growth and jobs” and “on our fiscal situation.” That must have left congressional Democrats—battered for months by the GOP’s message discipline—wondering why there’s been no focus on that up to now.

Much of the blame lies with the president, who has left his party with an incoherent closing argument 12 days before the election.

In a penetrating piece in the New York Times Magazine on Oct. 12, Peter Baker profiles a president who “believes he is the smartest person in any room,” according to one prominent Democratic lawmaker. He and his aides think that the core of their difficulties is “a communications problem” and the result of a “miscalculation” that the president could “forge genuine bipartisan coalitions.”

Communications? After the president devoted 58 speeches and events to health care over a 51-week period, his bill grew progressively less popular.

The comment about bipartisanship is a joke. As a candidate Mr. Obama spoke about it, but as a president whose party enjoyed massive majorities in both houses of Congress, he ignored it. He could have severely weakened his opposition by drawing them in. Instead, Mr. Obama strengthened Republicans by taunting them with their seeming irrelevance, and he fashioned legislation that only Democrats could vote for. Now many of them will lose their jobs because of their votes.

How many? Virtually everyone agrees that 20 of the 37 Senate seats on the ballot this year are in play. Twelve are now held by Democrats and eight by Republicans. The Republican-held seats appear increasingly safe. It’s Democrats’ seats that are at risk.

As for the lower chamber, the political handicappers Charlie Cook and Stuart Rothenberg both now have 91 Democratic House seats and nine Republican House seats in play (albeit with slightly different names on each list). Politico.com sees 99 Democratic House seats up for grabs versus five Republican seats.

How many are likely to fall? The American Enterprise Institute’s Henry Olson examined wave elections (in which one party gains a big number of seats) and found that the winning party picks up roughly 70% of the seats considered vulnerable. If that model holds, we’re looking at a net Republican pickup of 64 to 69 seats in the House and roughly eight seats in the Senate.

I doubt Republican gains will be that big, at least in the House. Democratic candidates have a financial edge—they ended the third quarter with an average of 53% more cash on hand than their Republican opponents. While the GOP is closing the financial gap in the final weeks, money matters.

Democrats have also invested heavily to turn out their vote. Not only will unions spend an estimated $200 million to get their supporters to the polls, but the Democratic National Committee is also investing $50 million in helping state Democratic parties with their ground games. The GOP’s efforts have been much smaller.

These tactical advantages will save some Democrats in close contests. Still, even a superior ground game will not save most of them. The political environment is awful. The party’s record is toxic with the public. And compounding these problems, Mr. Obama is now overseeing one of the worst White House midterm strategies in American history.

Earlier this year Rep. Marion Berry of Arkansas warned moderate Democrats of a midterm bloodbath comparable to 1994. “Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me,” he reported the president as having said. “We’re going to see how much difference that makes now,” Mr. Berry added. Yes, we will.

Mr. Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, is the author of “Courage and Consequence” (Threshold Editions, 2010).

Juan Williams Reviews His Firing from NPR

Please click below to hear Juan Williams review in his own words how he learned about his firing from National Public Radio yesterday.   He makes me proud to be a fellow American.

http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/juan-williams-responds-to-his-firing-from-npr-on-fox-news_b36261?c=rss

Click on another video at realclearpolitics for further reporting:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/10/21/juan_williams_npr_fired_him_for_making_bigoted_statement.html

Juan Williams Fired by National Public Radio! He Spoke Politically Incorrectly

Juan Williams is a hack for the Democrat Party.  (Shawn Hannity is a hack for the Republican Party.)  But Mr. Williams is not a Marxist, but a Liberal…..In other words I think he is misguided, but an honorable man. 

My favorite man of political letters is a conservative,  Charles Krauthammer.   My favorite guru of American culture and its foibles, is conservative, Dennis Prager.  Neither are hacks.  They analyze honestly and deduct from that core their views of the the issues from a conservative preference of view and with a traditional American approach to understanding.  They do not close the door to violations as they recognize them to protect their clans.  I am enriched by their opinions even when I find my view of fault, in them…..I would not like a clone of myself.   We would argue often.

A hack is one who never strays from the political talking points of the Party or religion to  which they are attached.   Most reporters and politicians  in Washington are hacks.  Many modern Democrats are nasty as well as being hacks.  It’s the Marxism within them.

Juan Williams is not one of them.

I do not know what this firing does to Mr. Williams in his daily routine.  I like him and hope that he is in no way harmed by this experience.

He seems to have been a victim of  NPR’s  Left Wing censorship rules governing  Political Correctness.

 He wrote a meaningful book once titled,  ”Enough”….in which he deviated from the hack.   But he had years and years of hack training at NPR.  Perhaps the firing will cast him into the fresher air of freer thinking.

The following is a report on the firing.  It was written by Brian Stelter and titled:  “NPR FIRES ANALYST OVER COMMENTS ON MUSLIMS.”

“NPR has terminated its contract with Juan Williams, one of its senior news analysts, after he made comments about Muslims on the Fox News Channel.

NPR said in a statement that it gave Mr. Williams notice of his termination on Wednesday night.

The move came after Mr. Williams, who is also a Fox News political analyst, appeared on the “The O’Reilly Factor” on Monday. On the show, the host, Bill O’Reilly, asked him to respond to the notion that the United States was facing a “Muslim dilemma.” Mr. O’Reilly said, “The cold truth is that in the world today jihad, aided and abetted by some Muslim nations, is the biggest threat on the planet.”

Mr. Williams said he concurred with Mr. O’Reilly.

He continued: “I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Mr. Williams also made reference to the Pakistani immigrant who pleaded guilty this month to trying to plant a car bomb in Times Square. “He said the war with Muslims, America’s war is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don’t think there’s any way to get away from these facts,” Mr. Williams said.

NPR said in its statement that the remarks “were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.”

The public radio organization said it thanked him for many years of service. Mr. Williams did not immediately respond on Wednesday night to an e-mail seeking comment.

Mr. Williams’s contributions on Fox raised eyebrows at NPR in the past. In February 2009, NPR said it had asked that he stop being identified on “The O’Reilly Factor” as a “senior correspondent for NPR,” even though that title was accurate.

Alicia C. Shepard, the NPR ombudswoman, said at the time that Mr. Williams was a “lightning rod” for the public radio organization in part because he “tends to speak one way on NPR and another on Fox.”

Ms. Shepard said she had received 378 listener e-mails in 2008 listing complaints and frustrations about Mr. Williams.”

Comment:  Good luck, Mr. Williams.   It seems you slipped from being hackish.  If there is anyone in America who doesn’t understand much about Marxism as a religion, please reread the reasons for which Juan Williams has been fired.

He was expressing his honest opinion and not a dishonorable, violent or threatening one.  One which in America is probably shared by 300,000,000 people including the tyrants at NPR (which is in part funded by your and my taxes) if they were to be psychoanalyzed to see truth.

TODAY’S DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAS BECOME THE ENEMY OF  FREE EXPRESSION.  National Public Radio is one of the loudest voices for this Marxist movement to limit and control thought, knowledge, and speech.

Juan Williams wrote an outstanding response to his firing, totally from the mind and heart, in that order, and not at all behind the mastk of a hack.  I like Mr. Williams all the more, even though he may have significantly different views regarding the health of the country.

He has been handed the hand of establishment Marxists.  It is not a friendly hand, but one of intolerance and repression. 

Please click on the following for Mr. Williams’ comments which irked those at NPR:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/10/21/npr_fires_juan_williams_after_muslim_remarks_.html

Are the Riots in France in Our American Future?

Of course they are!

Who are the master rioters of modern world history?   If we list them we discover they are the mobs of the  Far Left, added to in  recent years, the animals of the Islamic extremes. 

In the West as in France today they are the bonded by  the entitled, organized by those Marxists whose religion demands total government rule…..as with the Islamists.

Of course they are!  …………. when an entitled citizenry is created by the religious Left, one whose children and youth are programmed to worship themselves with self esteem simply for breathing air.  They learn to be deprived…..and  to bleat..”Life owes me”

The nineteenth century riotings and the slaughters they have caused were led by unionists, the ‘landed’ intellectuals, and the many suffering stuggling to survive.  It would be an error to call these mobs spoiled of mind and entitled by a new religion…..Marxism. 

The twentieth century slaughters of tens of millions were more calculated……and ALL were the products of Marxist relgion….the Nazis and their devotions to Germanized Marxism….the Soviets and their devotions to holy Moscow, the Maoists, the post war French, Italians, whereever the Che Guevarra vacuums show up, and today’s Paris and Lyon collections of street entertainers……plotted and populated by organized Labor and the spoiled, arrogant, empty-headed student entitleds.

Today they protest in France a two year extension of  retirement time for public employees, (from age 60 to age 62)…….the children of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and president Barack Hussein Obama here at home…….along with the mobs of student know-nothings, the ones we program at university to be our Marxist entitled.

What is observed  in the scenes in Paris, Lyon, and Marseilles, was seen on the streets in Washington, Chicago, and New York, Berkeley, Ohio, in Minneapolis forty years ago    While a dedicated administration was struggling with the problems in Viet Nam, a  nobody, John F. Kerry was interested in becoming famous and was paraded around the country by CBS and other ratings interested agencies to spread his lies, extortions, and fevers…..among the vilest Americans of the twentieth century.

Eventually the street mobs disappeared, but the country changed…….maybe forever, we don’t yet know the end of our story.  Marxism would be raised from the dead.

Civilized Americans should see the documentary film, “The Weathermen”, a thoughtful review of the evils of this American chapter of insanity despite its nostalgia for the commaraderie of the plotters and killers of that time.

Our American Christianity, now disappearing from  American patterns of thinking and behavior, once taught personal responsibility for ones deeds as a core teaching.   We are taught otherwise today.  We are told to be free of Christian chains.

The  economic and moral condition, the Barney Franks, Chris Dodds,  Nancy Pelosis, Barack Obamas, Maxine Waters, Al Sharptons, Jesse Jacksons, Jeremiah Wrights, John Kerrys, Alan Specters, etc, ad nauseum, these potentates ruling  our days attest to the disappearance of this primary teaching of a healthy culture.

It is only a matter of time as the Barack Obama Marxists plunge the nation  deeper into financial ruin by spending money which doesn’t exist, by corrupting the citizen mind by teaching  behaviors which  are classically evil or  immoral, by demonizing their critics, those  striving to solve problems along   rational rather than hysterical paths, when honesty is abandoned to achievement,  that the nation will reach the boiling point and explode.

Some folks claim “People deserve the government they earn”.  I happen to be one of these people.  Are you?  

We can still vote…..but we wonder whose ballots will be counted.

We can still vote…..but do we know what the issues really are?

One Party wishes to solve American problems rationally.   They believe that the Smaller the government, the Bigger the People…..that in our grand American experiment, the people should be responsible for their their own actions  and their government’s duties.

The other Party believes in something new to America…..that the  Barack Obamas know how to manage citizen lives better than the citizens themselves.    It is a Party primarily of Americans who do not pay national taxes, a group made large enough over the years by  being bribed   with   entitlements pleasures, to take ever more from those who create jobs, to pay for their entitlements.

What happens when the well of the taxed goes dry?