Lying is Communist Entertainment

America’s Leftist President Barack Hussein Obama’s devious, dishonest CIA director, John Brennan, was an active  member of the American Communist Party during his rise to power.

It was the Soviet Union which drove me to study the Russian language beginning my first year in university study, September, 1952.  I had followed World War II very closely and suspected my knowledge of Russian might become useful in some kind of service to my country in the future.

(The birth of my three children was the most exiting  thrill of my life….I’m crowding 84 and still labor in my gardened  grounds every day including Sunday when God’s  weather permits.)

Schooling was inspirational in my time….   I collected a BA with a Geography major, a BS with an Education major, a MA with a Soviet Studies Major (classes taught in Russian) and studied to one credit short of an MA in Horticulture, but was hired for the position I was studying for without signing up for another quarter of study for one credit.

I taught Russian at the University of Minnesota’s High School in the 1960s which then allowed me to enroll in any  university  classes for or without ‘grade’.

Being male and curious, and the cost of only  $35 tuition a quarter, I went bananas taking classes driven entirely  by that powerful basic  male drive, curiosity.   Climatology, Soils, Biochemistry -which was my favorite and most religious class of all time both in content, and in instruction….. basic Geology, Geomorphology,  Anthropology,  Astronomy, Plant diseases  amassing altogether, 700 quarter credits of undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Minnesota, Indiana, San Francisco State, and Middlebury College.

In a two year period at the University of Minnesota, again driven by curiosity regarding differences of basic language structure and delivery, I  took beginning classes in Spanish, German, Chinese, and Finnish comparing how these languages compared one to another.  I was already quite fluent in Russian….but, never became fluent in any others.   I found Finnish the most difficult to speak.

I received an NDEA  (National Defense Education Act) grant trip to the University of Indiana and to the USSR,  Summer  of 1966 when that nation was still a fascist dictatorship, a police state but one not quite as brutal as the decades of Stalinism.

In October of 1990  about thirty members of a very conservative Christian Church group from Anoka, Minnesota, had collected hundreds of thousands of dollars to donate by personal delivery to hospitals crowded with victims of the Chernobyl disaster  in hospitals around  Kiev in the Ukraine.  The family of  the young guy installing  an  automatic water system (still working beautifully today) throughout my half-acre landscape gardened grounds, had helped collect the donation and were leading the visit.  They invited me to join them because of my language experience…..I was in Kiev that October of the “whistle rebellion”, the uprising of over 10,000 locals  surrounding the headquarters of the Communist Party of the Ukraine.

I was in my Kiev hotel that morning, shaving in my 14th floor room in  a newly  built Soviet  hotel (whose elevators were already  out of order.)  I was startled by the volume  of countless whistles from the streets below…..and ran down those steps as fast as I could to find out what in hell was going on!   A belch of the rebellion to finally cause the collapse of the Soviet Union had begun…..without any of us visitors really knowing it at the time.

Barack Hussein Obama’s John Brennan was an American Communist for a considerable period of time.    Communists and other similar fascists are never bothered about telling or selling  lies.   It’s the goal of their one party fascist state that counts….the means to achieve one party power is what matters!   Please read the following article:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/05/john-brennan-lying-nutter.php

The Conservative Jonahs Who Turn Rodent if Our Donald Isn’t Perfect!

JONAH’S SUICIDE HOTLINE, AND ALL THAT STUFF

(Dear reader—Fair warning: this is a long post, so best to settle in on the couch and make sure your dogs have completed their morning walks . . .)   

by Steven Hayward  at PowerLine:

Okay class, everyone settle in for today’s seminar and get out your textbook, Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West.  Turn to page 316, and circle this sentence: “Indeed, as much as I hold Trump in contempt, I am still compelled to admit that, if my vote would have decided the election, I probably would have voted for him.”

I begin with this admission against Jonah’s supposed interest to point out to his many detractors on the right that he is actually on our side. A lot of my friends are on a hair trigger with everything Jonah says or writes these days because of his relentless criticism of Trump. (For some reason most of my critical friends seem to be named Julie. A statistician will probably tell me this can’t be chance—it must be a conspiracy! Though actually it is the pseudonymous “Tom Doniphon” who is working overtime at American Greatness to smack Jonah’s book around.) The ongoing divisions over Trump are provoking complaints that, among other sins, Jonah has committed a literary appropriation (heh) of James Burnham’s famous 1962 title. This is a silly charge, as Harry Jaffa first explained to me about why he wasn’t bothered by the many other authors who also titled their Lincoln books A New Birth of Freedom.

Now, I have my own specific criticisms of Jonah’s book; in fact I have enough nits that I can probably knit a small sweater. Yes, he has some details of Michael Anton’s biography wrong; yes, his handling of the Declaration of Independence is sloppy in a couple of respects (but correct on the essentials); yes, Lockeans in every corner of the ring will want to dispute his summary accounts of Lockeanism as incomplete. (The irony of the long-running disputes about Locke is that they resemble an intellectual state of nature out of which no civil society seems ever likely to arise. But that’s a subject for another day—and 500 more books.) At the end of the day, as I shall try to explain, all of these nits will yield a sweater barely suitable to cover up an anorexic Barbie doll.

My chief overall complaint about Jonah—aside from not coughing up those old blackmail photos of me from Vegas he keeps in a safe deposit box—is that for all of his copious pop culture references, there is a conspicuous absence of references to Blazing Saddles. Which absence, as any East Coast Straussian will tell you, obviously means that he screens Saddles every Saturday morning. As I’ve paraphrased to him many times, adopting his own self-description, “What’s a dazzling Upper West Side demi-Jew like you doing in a rustic setting like Washington DC?”

Anyway, rather than embark on an undoubtedly frustrating and unproductive disputation over specific criticisms of Jonah and Jonah’s book from my friends (or enemies), I want to set out instead by disputing a positive review of the book that I think starts out wrongheaded, out of which I think a robust general defense can be constructed that does not require frowning at my friends. Adam Keiper opens his review of Suicide of the West in the Weekly Standard in the following way:

Goldberg’s book is a big, baggy, sometimes frustrating, often brilliant combination of intellectual history and political essay. He says that the original manuscript was twice as long as the final product; it certainly should have been much further pruned.

Wrong, and wrong. It’s not the book that’s baggy. Jonah’s pants are baggy, and perhaps Keiper is coming closer to explaining Trump’s famously inscrutable dig at Jonah’s supposed inability to buy trousers. It’s the last sentence—“it certainly should have been much further pruned”—that is the wrongest part of Keiper’s evaluation.

As Jonah has explained, the original manuscript of the book was more than twice as long as the final product, and was reduced at the request of his editors at CrownForum books (my publisher, I’ll add; they were very indulgent of my preposterous notion of writing a huge two-volume political biography of the life and times of Reagan, for which extraordinary latitude I’ll always be grateful). I understand why the publisher would want the book, or any book, to be shorter, and I’m sure the shorter length aids overall sales, but I think the book is in fact too short. I would like to have had the longer version. Too bad we can’t do books after the fashion of movies, with a “writer’s original edition” like we have a “director’s cut” of so many movies.

Okay, yes, I’m weird. For example, I much prefer the complete, unabridged four-volume version of Churchill’s Marlborough to the dreadful one-volume edition edited by Henry Steele Commager, who managed to be unerring in cutting out the best parts of Churchill’s account. (I have a theory about why Commager edited Churchill as atrociously as he did, but that’s for another day, too.)

Another way of getting at the inherent defect—but necessity—of short books is to ask for a show of hands for the following question: how many of you have read even one volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s magisterial trilogy consisting of Bourgeois Dignity, Bourgeois Virtues, and Bourgeois Equality? Confession: I have only read a little of McCloskey’s triptych, but have long been a huge fan of all of McCloskey’s remarkable body of work, and agree with Jonah about McCloskey’s originality and deep cross-disciplinary perception. McCloskey is one of the very few senior academics who can rightly be called a polymath of the old school. Just have a look at McCloskey’s author description in her books: “Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago.” She really is an Erasmus for our time.

And in fact McCloskey is one of the inspirations and sources for some of the main themes in Suicide. McCloskey set out to get at a surprising mystery: there is no consensus about what causes economic growth, or an explanation for why the “industrial revolution” began to take off like a rocket roughly 300 years ago after centuries of essentially no economic growth at all. (The subtitle of Bourgeois Dignity is Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World.) The standard factors we learned in Econ 101 way back when—land, labor and capital—aren’t the driver, nor is technological progress. Institutions matter, yes, as does most crucially classical liberalism. But our picture of the prosperity and success of the West is getting more out of focus as time goes on.

McCloskey offers some provocative and well-argued ideas, but Jonah’s shorter work casts an even wider net, and attempts to return fire against the contemporary attacks on democratic capitalism, which, in case you haven’t noticed, have been gaining strength lately. One large part of the reason for this is the willful nihilism of the modern left, or what Malcolm Muggeridge way back in the 1970s called “The Great Liberal Death Wish.” Yes, Jonah perhaps owes one of his main themes—that suicide is a choice—more to Muggeridge than Burnham, but in any case he actually explains it with explicit reference to Lincoln’s warning in his Lyceum Address that if America ever fails it will be on account of self-willed causes—suicide—rather than foreign military invasion. Lincoln underestimated the potential for the invasion of bad foreign ideas—this is a major theme of both this book and Jonah’s previous exploration, Liberal Fascism, but in any case this reference alone earns some chits with this Claremonster. (One thinks immediately of Leo Strauss’s remark about German ideology in Natural Right and History that “It would not be the first time that a nation, defeated on the battlefield, and, as it were, annihilated as a political being, has deprived its conquerors of the most sublime fruit of victory by imposing on them the yoke of its own thought.”)

But our confusion over the nature and causes of the success of the West also owes to the increasing specialization of intellectual life. As I plan to explore in either a long article or short book some time soon, the proliferation of academic specializations over the last century, while generating finer and finer slices of advanced insight, has deprived us of our appreciation and perception of the whole. History and politics, for example, were once studied together in universities. Now they are completely separate disciplines, which entails great loss of depth accruing to both. Sociology is really just a branch of political science (ditto anthropology), while social psychology, which is a distinct and separate branch of psychology now, is a bastard recombination of psychology and sociology. Economics is in the process of subdividing into several distinct fields, with the main portion of the discipline looking more like just a wing of the math department, and with one new branch—behavioral economics—ironically casting an imperial reach into psychology. And academic philosophy is almost wholly sidelined and isolated from the public mind in ways and for reasons that take too long to explain. (All of this intellectual subdivision, incidentally, creates a void into which the radicalized “disciplines” of the politicized “studies” departments rush in to exploit. As I say, more on this another time, though I did talk about this some in Power Line Show podcast #69, in case you missed it.)

The result is a situation in which the ambition to write broad-gauge synoptic accounts of the social order of democratic capitalism is nearly extinct. There are a few notable and partial exceptions, such as Steven Pinker’s new book Enlightenment Now, offering a robust defense of Enlightenment liberalism. (And the left is fiercely attacking Pinker, who is otherwise an orthodox modern liberal, for this sin.) Jonah’s book is another, except that it is much more ambitious and wide-ranging than anything else on offer today.

Samuel Johnson argued that “Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed,” and as such Suicide of the West is an attempt to remind us with fresh language and up-to-date cultural analysis of the reasons our democratic order is under attack—a state of things that just a couple decades ago seemed impossible to conceive. The central idea of Suicideis the centrality of human nature, which the left today must fundamentally attack because it is the chief obstacle to their authoritarian dreams. Jonah frequently quotes Horace: “Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret.” Actually, Jonah quotes Horace in English: “You can expel nature with a pitchfork, but it will always came back.”

One might try to make something of a contradiction out of Jonah’s embrace of human nature with his parallel argument that what we today deplore as selfish tribalism is in fact the natural state of humanity, and that liberal notions of equal rights—and democratic capitalism—are in fact unnatural, and are undermined precisely by its very success. Here perhaps he is restating some of the ideas worked out a generation ago by Daniel Bell, but Joseph Schumpeter is the acknowledged larger inspiration for his argument. The point is, uncivilized human nature makes our social order always prone to the same law of entropy as our physical order, and as such is the chief refutation of the easygoing historicism behind the favorite modern liberal cliché about “the side of history.” Civilization takes work, as much to maintain it as to create it in the first place. Or as John Stuart Mill suggested, the chief defect of Hegelian liberalism is the assumption that the progress of humanity from barbarism to civilization is an irreversible process………..”

Television Jonah Goldberg is very windy, a good guy who enjoys staring at central stage.   Count the names of the past he adds to his excitements when lecturing!   Certainly, when colleged, the more names dropped in a thesis, the higher the grade!!

Please read on below to get to know Jonah better!

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/05/jonahs-suicide-hotline-and-all-that-stuff.php