Remembering the Chesterton people, but How is it Possible to Discuss Matters with Today’s LEFT?

 

Mark Waldeland, a career high school teacher of English, sent me the following:

“Always arguing, never quarreling”

[ excerpted from “A Decade of Deep Delight,” an editorial by American Chesterton Society president Dale Ahlquist in, and commemorating the 10th anniversary of, Gilbert Magazine, the publication of The American Chesterton Society.]

“. . .By being devoted to Chesterton and his ideas, we have often faced the accusation — as did the man himself — of being narrow or of being on the fringe. But our defense is the same as his: we are not eccentric. We represent the central ideas of civilization: family, faith, and friendship. The normal and human ideals remain birth instead of contraception or abortion; natural death instead of suicide or physician-assisted murder; marriage instead of a revolving door of divorce or homosexual mockery; freedom instead of coercion; self-government instead of Big Government; taking care of one’s own property instead of taking care of someone else’s property; science as a tool or a toy instead of a materialistic philosophy; education as truth passed from one generation to another instead of as state-sponsored indoctrination; beauty instead of ugliness; tradition instead of faddism; laughter instead of sneering; hope instead of despair, and finally, faith in God and Christ instead of endless doubt, relativistic tolerance, or nirvana.

“These normal things are worth fighting for. And one of the things we have learned in our own battles is that fighting is fun. Fighting does not mean one cannot be courteous. But courtesy does not mean praising the errors of our opponents or celebrating the defeat of everything we believe in. Courtesy means treating our opponents with respect despite our disagreement, and maintaining the fight with them because their victory would mean even worse things for them than for us. We fight as a matter of charity.

“We fight the feminization of the culture that tries to suppress fighting. We fight the mechanization of the culture that tries to suppress creativity. We fight the sexualization of the culture that tries to suppress creation itself. We fight the secularization of the culture that tries to suppress the Creator.

“And sometimes we may even fight you. Sometimes you might disagree with us. We hope on those rare occasions that you will stay and argue rather than run away. Come, let us reason together. ‘Always arguing, never quarreling.’ ” . . .

Comment:   My, how intellectually empty and savage the American Left has become.   How can one converse, share thoughts, much less argue when in return one is cursed, called names,  and discarded as  a bigot?

Mitt Romney London “Gaffe” Is Another ObamaFolk Media Lie…..Read the Script Yourself

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/07/30/gibbs-romneys-london-gaffe-was-embarrassing-for-our-country/

Comment:  I have looked far and wide on the internet regarding  this alleged gaffe by Governor Romney, for I did hear his words on the day the media, including frothing Charles Krauthammer, convulsed over the remarks?

Where in hell is the gaffe.    An honest man answered the question honestly.   Even my intellectual hero, Krauthammer played Obamapress on this one.  

And, as a switch, I must disdain Krauthammer for his gaffe, at Bless NPR…….for it was at NPR  where I finally found the actual script of the alleged Romney gaffe.   Although NPR plays NPR, left, at the introduction, it provides the unadulterated script…….READ THE FOLLOWING SCRIPT …..WHERE’S THE GAFFE?

In London, the first day of Mitt Romney’s overseas trip didn’t go quite as planned. After calling British preparations for the Olympic Games “disconcerting,” Romney became the focus of British ire — in newspaper headlines and public comments by British Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson. Romney attempted to dial back his remarks, but his woes were compounded by several other minor gaffes.

Copyright © 2012 National Public Radio. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Mitt Romney has begun an overseas trip meant to burnish his foreign policy credentials, but his first day veered severely off-script. His visit to London yesterday offered an opportunity to highlight his experience turning around the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah. Instead, Romney caused a diplomatic incident that snowballed as the day went on. NPR’s Ari Shapiro reports.

ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: Mitt Romney’s schedule for this trip was meticulously planned to portray Romney as a statesman fluent on the world stage – no formal speeches or unscripted news conferences, just six back-to-back photo ops.

MITT ROMNEY: Well, I’ll see a swimming event.

SHAPIRO: But things went astray before Romney even touched down. A British newspaper quoted anonymous Romney aides, saying, quote, “We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special.” When people suggested that the quote had racist overtones, the Romney campaign strongly denied it. Then Romney landed in England, and things got worse. In an interview, NBC’s Brian Williams asked how Romney expects the Games to go.

(SOUNDBITE OF NBC BROADCAST)

ROMNEY: You know, it’s hard to know just how well it will turn out. There were a few things that were disconcerting – stories about the private security firm not having enough people, a supposed strike of the immigration and customs officials. That, obviously, is not something which is encouraging.

SHAPIRO: For any country, putting on the Olympics is a major point of national pride. To Brits, Romney’s comments felt like a poke in the eye. The headline on the Guardian newspaper’s website read: Mitt Romney’s Olympics Gaffe Stuns U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, who had rolled out the red carpet for Romney, defended his homeland against the slight.

PRIME MINISTER DAVID CAMERON: We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active bustling cities anywhere in the world. I mean, of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.

SHAPIRO: The mayor of Salt Lake City was not pleased with that comment. Later in the day, Romney dialed back his criticism of the London Games.

ROMNEY: Of course, there will be errors from time to time, but those are all overshadowed by the extraordinary demonstrations of courage, character and determination by the athletes.

SHAPIRO: Cameron joined in the peace-making effort after meeting with Romney.

CAMERON: Well, what Mitt Romney said to me is that he thought it looked extremely well-organized. The venues look good. The country is well-prepared. He ran a successful Olympic Games in his own country, and I think he’s very much looking forward to going to see some of the events here.

SHAPIRO: But by that point, Romney had already become a punching bag and a punch line for London Mayor Boris Johnson. Johnson addressed tens of thousands of people in Hyde Park at the end of the Olympic torch relay.

(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)

MAYOR BORIS JOHNSON: There are some people who are coming from around the world who don’t yet know about all the preparations we’ve done to get London ready in the last seven years. I hear there’s a guy called Mitt Romney who wants to know whether we’re ready. He wants to know whether we’re ready. Are we ready? Are we ready? Yes, we are.

SHAPIRO: Romney’s Olympic gaffe was not his only misstep yesterday. After one meeting, he told reporters…

(SOUNDBITE OF INTERVIEW)

ROMNEY: I can only say that I appreciated the insights and perspectives of the leaders of the government here and opposition here, as well as the head of MI6.

SHAPIRO: Romney’s meeting with the head of MI6, Britain’s spy agency, was not on the public schedule. Such meetings are generally secret, and this slip-up comes just a few days after Romney bashed President Obama for leaking American national security secrets. After Romney revealed that he had met with the head of the MI6, neither the British government nor the Romney campaign would confirm that the meeting took place. And this is only the first stop on Romney’s trip. Next up: Israel. Ari Shapiro, NPR News.

Honest, Adult, Articulate, Intelligent, American Mitt Romney Called a Wimp by Obamalove News Media

Please check out the following interview of Mitt Romney in Israel:

Romney On “Wimp” Comment: I Don’t Care What The Media Says

 http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/07/29/

mitt_romney_on_wimp_comment_i_dont_care_what_the_media_says.html

 Co-ordinated with the cover picture of Mitt Romney on Newsweek Michael Tomasky from the Daily Beast and the Marxist Guardian,  one of the sleaziest of all Obamasleaze reporters offered the following introduction to an article at Daily Beast:

Mitt Romney’s Wimp Factor

Jul 29, 2012 12:00 PM EDT

 Dodging reporters, fearing his base, hiding his taxes—is Mitt Romney just too insecure to be president? In Newsweek, Michael Tomasky surveys a history of presidential manliness and asks just where Mitt would fit amid the studly swagger of Dubya and Reagan.

 

One of the many disease from which Barack Obama and his Marxist associates suffer such as dishonesty, duplicitousness, deviousness, divisiveness, anti Americanism with racist tendencies,  projecting their own evil nature and habits upon their opponents probably leads the list.

The most intolerant, the most racist , the most greedy, the most dishonest, the most unAmerican people in American are leftwingers deviants  just like Obama.

 

Mr. Obama’s most precious gift is his ability to be a con artist…….the wimpy kind who blabs a good story, but has no backbone to take a chance to solve any problems.    There are those who believe he isn’t as incompetent as he is.   These folks claim he is so sharp, and so Marxist, he is plotting America’s demise, by causing the nation’s financial collapse.

 

It takes no courage to be so incompetent or deviant.

Ashley Cole, British Hero in the battle against Lefty’s Rules of Political Correctness

The fun never stops with the British speech police

by Paul Mirengoff    at PowerLine:

I wrote here about the criminal prosecution of John Terry, the English soccer star who was charged with calling an opposing player, Anton Ferdinand, a f______ black c___ during a dustup in a contentious match. Terry was acquitted because the Crown couldn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Terry racially abused Ferdinand. The English Football Association is now trying to decide whether to punish Terry (who already has been removed as captain of the national team) anyway.

The real problem with the Crown’s case, however, was its absurdity. How, in a free society, can someone be prosecuted for calling someone else a name? Ashley Cole, a black defender who has played along side Terry for years with Chelsea and the English national team and certainly would know it if Terry were a racist, summed things up nicely when he testified in court, “We shouldn’t be sitting here.”

But now, Cole’s testimony has led to charges by the Football Association against Rio Ferdinand, Anton’s older brother. It seems that Rio was unhappy that Cole testified in favor of Terry. Thus, when someone tweeted: “Looks like Ashley Cole’s going to be their choc ice. Then again he’s always been a sell out. Shame on him,” Rio responded “I hear you fella! Choc ice is classic! hahahahahahha!!”

“Choc ice” apparently is a commonly used term of contempt for people who are deemed “black on the outside and white on the inside.” The term is another no-no, as far as the PC-addled bureaucrats at the FA are concerned.

Ferdinand later tried to claim that the term isn’t racial at all. Rather, supposedly, it means “someone who is being fake.” Sure, Rio, and welcome to the world of the speech police.

What does Ashley Cole make of this development? Unlike the Ferdinand brothers and the British Crown, he has no desire to make a mountain out of a molehill. Thus, Cole’s lawyer issued the following statement:

Ashley Cole has been made aware of the discussion following comments appearing on Twitter and wishes to make it clear that he and Rio Ferdinand are good friends and Ashley has no intention of making any sort of complaint.

Ashley appreciates that tweeting is so quick it often results in off-hand and stray comments.

Ashley Cole is derided in England for serial infidelity to his ex-wife, a popular singer. He has also had a few minor brushes with the law. And unlike Rio Ferdinand and John Terry, Cole apparently has never seriously been considered for the role of captain of England despite having played (usually brilliantly) roughly 100 times for his country.

Yet Cole is a sage in these matters, especially compared to the Football Association and the Crown.

White House Discrediting of Krauthammer Backfires

Busted: Mr. Pfeiffer and the White House blog

 

By Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post

Shortly after 9/11, President George W. Bush received from Prime Minister Tony Blair a bust of Winston Churchill as an expression of British-American solidarity. Bush gave it pride of place in the Oval Office.

In my Friday column about Mitt Romney’s trip abroad and U.S. foreign policy [“Why he’s going where he’s going,” op-ed], I wrote that Barack Obama “started his Presidency by returning to the British Embassy the bust of Winston Churchill that had graced the Oval Office.”

Within hours, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer had created something of a bonfire. Citing my statement, he posted a furious blog on the White House Web site, saying, “normally, we wouldn’t address a rumor that’s so patently false, but just this morning the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer repeated this ridiculous claim in his column . . . This is 100% false. The bust [is] still in the White House. In the Residence. Outside the Treaty Room.”

Except that it isn’t. As the British Embassy said in a statement issued just a few hours later, “the bust now resides in the British ambassador’s residence in Washington D.C.”

As the British Embassy explained in 2009, the bust “was lent for the first term of office of President Bush. When the President was elected for his second and final term, the loan was extended until January 2009. The new President has decided not to continue this loan and the bust has now been returned.”

QED.

At which point, one would expect Pfeiffer to say: Sorry, I made a mistake. End of story.

But Pfeiffer had an additional problem. In his original post, he had provided photographic proof of his claim that the Oval Office Churchill had never been returned, indeed had never left the White House at all, but had simply been moved from the Oval Office to the residence.

“Here’s a picture of the President showing off the Churchill bust to Prime Minister Cameron when he visited the White House residence in 2010,” he wrote. “Hopefully this clears things up a bit and prevents folks from making this ridiculous claim again.”

Except that the photo does nothing of the sort. The Churchill sculpture shown in the photograph is a different copy — given to President Lyndon Johnson, kept in the White House collection for half a century and displayed in the White House residence. The Oval Office Churchill — the one in question, the one Pfeiffer says never left the White House — did leave the White House, was returned to the British government, and sits proudly at this very moment in the British ambassador’s residence.

Was that little photographic switcheroo an honest mistake on ­Pfeiffer’s part? Or was it deliberate deception? I have no idea. But in either case, the effect was to deceive Pfeiffer’s readers into believing that my assertion about the removal of the Oval Office Churchill was “patently false . . . ridiculous . . . 100% false.”

The decent thing to do, therefore, would be to acknowledge the (inadvertent?) deception and apologize for it. He could send the retraction to Mediaite, the nonpartisan media Web site run by Dan Abrams, whose report on this contretemps was headlined: “British Embassy Confirms Krauthammer Right, White House Wrong: Churchill Bust Returned in 2009.”

Or he could send it to New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal, who at first repeated Pfeiffer’s denunciation of the Churchill bust “falsehood,” and then later honorably corrected himself, admitting that “I got some facts wrong, because I made the mistake of relying on a White House blog post by the communications director Dan Pfeiffer.” Rosenthal then chided Pfeiffer for posting “a weaselly follow-up comment” after the facts became clear that “fails to acknowledge that his post the previous day was false.”

In my view, this whole affair was completely unnecessary. Pfeiffer devoted an entire post (with accompanying photography) on the White House Blog to a single sentence in a larger argument about foreign policy, and blew it up into an indignant defense of truth itself and a handy club with which to discredit the credibility of a persistent critic of his boss. (After all, why now? Why this column? Since the return of the Oval Office Churchill in 2009, that fact had been asserted in at least half a dozen major news outlets, including Newsweek, CBS News, ABC News, the Telegraph and The Washington Post.)

So I suggest Mr. Pfeiffer bring this to a short, painless and honorable conclusion: a simple admission that he got it wrong and that my assertion was correct. An apology would be nice, but given this White House’s arm’s-length relationship with truth — and given Ryan Zimmerman’s hot hitting — I reckon the Nationals will win the World Series before I receive Pfeiffer’s mea culpa.