Posted on 04/17/2014 12:58:15 PM PDT by Kaslin
WASHINGTON -- Last week a national treasure spoke. That would be Charles Krauthammer, syndicated columnist, television commentator and all around public sage. He also is a chess player.
Krauthammer noted that two months ago a petition bearing the signatures of some 110,000 tyrants was sent to the Washington Post -- from where did it come, I would like to know -- demanding that the Post discontinue publishing articles that deny global warming or -- who knows -- take even a skeptical view of global warming. Yet Krauthammer assures us that precisely a day later his column containing the exact heresy ran in the Post. So, apparently, the Washington Post, unlike the Los Angeles Times, will remain unintimidated by the global warmist tyrants, at least for now.
But their attempted act of coercion against a free press did occasion an extended discourse by Krauthammer on the American left's many attempts to control and even end debate on various public issues in America. Of course, liberalism has for decades pretty much controlled debate in America. Ever since Vice President Spiro Agnew spoke out against mainstream media bias 45 years ago, conservatives have made liberal bias a mainstay of their political complaints. The fact that liberals have been so unmoved by these complaints merely adds credibility to the conservatives' complaint.
It is not only in media that this left-wing bias reigns. In the universities, the biases of the left reign almost unchallenged. And through the universities, vast elements of our culture have a left-wing taint that is out of proportion to the left's political numbers. In the universities, government bureaucracies and the corporate world, left-wing bias overwhelms. As liberalism has been eclipsed in recent years by the more intolerant American left, the left's control of debate has merely strengthened, to the point where the left now dares to dictate to newspapers what can be written and when a debate is to be concluded.
Yet, all is not lost. In fact, the left's attempt to stifle debate is very gratifying to me. It indicates how powerful the opposition has become both in numbers and in influence. Conservatism is represented in newspapers -- for instance, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times -- in Fox News, in talk radio, and in periodicals both at the national level and state and local levels. Then there is the Internet. Maybe someday the tyrants will silence the Washington Post, but how will they silence the Internet?
Krauthammer cites numerous debates in which the left controls the terms of debate. He cites, of course, the environmental debate and global warming where the left chooses a term from the Holocaust and applies it to global skeptics. I have in mind "deniers." Or in the legitimate debate over public policy matters the left drags in the invidious issues of feminism and race. Then the left labels anyone who opposes the left in these matters as "racists" or misogynists engaged in "waging a war on women" -- all women. Of course this use of language and for that matter the entire debate is nonsense. What political party in its right mind would want to wage war on better than half the electorate? What would it gain a political party to oppose black voters and, by the way, many of the conservatives' leading lights are African-American. The left is increasingly out of touch with America.
Thus its members go to extremes in their attempt to control debate. They send out petitions signed by arrant tyrants to muzzle debate. And the very next day a patriot strikes back. Go get 'em, Charles Krauthammer.
By relinquishing control to Russia, or China, or Zimbabwe, or East Westasia. Anything to suppress opposition to the god of liberalism and their messiah, BHO.
I do not share the author’s optimism. Unless and until we fight to take back the universities, just as the left fought, we are sunk.
Likewise the media, high schools and elementary schools.
"Woher," answer in the dative.
"Wohin," answer in the accusative.
The Left CANNOT win the debate in the forum of ideas. Instead, they try to shut down the debate. Hope they lose. I know they will lose sometime in the not-too-distant future and forever.
Did Sour Kraut vote for Obama in 2008? Did he not tell Palin to “get out of the room” when she criticized Obamacare?
That Russell Kirk Essay from many years ago bears a new look. His wisdom then seems to shed light on what is happening now to the "Republic" and the future of liberty.
Kirk's concluding paragraphs, as excerpted below, are especially pertinent:
"Restoring Religious InsightsIn conclusion, it is my argument that the elaborate civilization we have known stands in peril; that it may expire of lethargy, or be destroyed by violence, or perish, from a combination of both evils. We who think that life remains worth living ought to address ourselves to means by which a restoration of our culture may be achieved. A prime necessity for us is to restore an apprehension of religious insights in our clumsy apparatus of public instruction, which -bullied by militant secular humanists and presumptuous federal courts-has been left with only ruinous answers to the ultimate questions.
What ails modern civilization? Fundamentally, our society's affliction is the decay of religious belief If a culture is to survive and flourish, it must not be severed from the religious vision out of which it arose. The high necessity of reflective men and women, then, is to labor for the restoration of religious teachings as a credible body of doctrine.
"Redeem the time; redeem the dream," T. S. Eliot wrote. It remains possible, given right reason and moral imagination, to confront boldly the age's disorders. The restoration of true learning, humane and scientific; the reform of many public policies; the renewal of our awareness of a transcendent order, and of the presence of an Other, the brightening of the comers where we find ourselves such approaches are open to those among the rising generation who look for a purpose in life. It is just conceivable that we may be given a Sign before the end of the twentieth century; yet Sign or no Sign, Remnant must strive against the follies of the time." - Dr. Russell Kirk
That Kirk essay you posted a link to is in one of his books of collected essays and I have read it many times. It has all sorts of great nuggets.
One of the best is:
At the very moment when some states “seemed plunged in unfathomable abysses of disgrace and disaster ‘ Burke wrote in his First Letter on a Regicide Peace, “they have suddenly emerged. They have begun a new course, and opened a new reckoning; and even in the depths of their calamity, and on the very ruins of their country, have laid the foundations of a towering and durable greatness. All this has happened without any apparent previous change in the general circumstances which had brought on their distress. The death of a man at a critical juncture, his disgust, his retreat, his disgrace, have brought innumerable calamities on a whole nation. A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of Nature.”
The “common soldier” to whom Burke refers is Arnold of Winkelreid, who flung himself upon the Austrian spears to save his country; the child is the young Hannibal, told by his father to wage ruthless war upon Rome; the girl at the door of an inn is Joan of Arc. We do not know why such abrupt reversals or advances occur, Burke remarks; perhaps they are indeed the work of Providence.
“Nothing is, but thinking makes it so,” the old adage runs. If most folk come to believe that our culture must collapse-why, then collapse it will. Yet Burke, after all, was right in that dreadful year of 1796. For despite the overwhelming power of the French revolutionary movement in that year, in the long run Britain defeated her adversaries, and after the year 1812 Britain emerged from her years of adversity to the height of her power. Is it conceivable that American civilization, and in general what we call “Western Civilization,” may recover from the Time of Troubles that commenced in 1914 (so Arnold Toynbee instructs us) and in the twenty-first century enter upon an Augustan age of peace and restored order?
"Redeem the time; redeem the dream," T. S. Eliot wrote. It remains possible, given right reason and moral imagination, to confront boldly the age's disorders. The restoration of true learning, humane and scientific; the reform of many public policies; the renewal of our awareness of a transcendent order, and of the presence of an Other; the brightening of the corners where we find ourselves--such approaches are open to those among the rising generation who look for a purpose in life. It is just conceivable that we may be given a Sign before the end of the twentieth century; yet Sign or no Sign, Remnant must strive against the follies of the time." - Dr. Russell Kirk
Meanwhile, we appear to fit the description provided by Madison: "Although all men are born free, slavery has been the general lot of the human race. Ignorant—they have been cheated; asleep—they have been surprised; divided—the yoke has been forced upon them. But what is the lesson? ... the people ought to be enlightened, to be awakened, to be united, that after establishing a government, they should watch over it ... It is universally admitted that a well-instructed people alone can be permanently free."
So-called "progressives" understand the "divided" part of Madison's cautionary words, but the rest of us seem to ignore the rest of Madison's statement.
Might it have something to do with our not having been "well-instructed" in the ideas of freedom, as Russell Kirk pronounced in the final paragraph of my original post?
Edmund Burke, in his 1775 "Speech on Conciliation," observed the following "spirit" in the founding generations:
"Permit me, Sir, to add another circumstance in our colonies, which contributes no mean part towards the growth and effect of this untractable spirit. I mean their education. In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful; and in most provinces it takes the lead. The greater number of the deputies sent to the congress were lawyers. But all who read, and most do read, endeavour to obtain some smattering in that science. I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the plantations. The colonists have now fallen into the way of printing them for their own use. I hear that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone's Commentaries in America as in England. General Gage marks out this disposition very particularly in a letter on your table. He states, that all the people in his government are lawyers, or smatterers in law; and that in Boston they have been enabled, by successful chicane, wholly to evade many parts of one of your capital penal constitutions. The smartness of debate will say, that this knowledge ought to teach them more clearly the rights of legislature, their obligations to obedience, and the penalties of rebellion. All this is mighty well. But my honourable and learned friend on the floor, who condescends to mark what I say for animadversion, will disdain that ground. He has heard, as well as I, that when great honours and great emoluments do not win over this knowledge to the service of the state, it is a formidable adversary to government. If the spirit be not tamed and broken by these happy methods, it is stubborn and litigious. Abeunt studia in mores. This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources. In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze." (Underlining added for emphasis)
Burke also declared to the Parliament that what he called the colonists' "fierce spirit of liberty" also must be attributed to their "religion," "under a variety of denominations agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty."
Right now I am reading Robert Conquest’s “Dragons of Expectations” which I picked up when it came out in 2005 and never got finished.
One of the things he points out is that we are arguing with terms that are from ages long gone. Left - Right, Liberal- Conservative, Facist, Communist, Progressive, Democracy and many others are terms of such age and historical abuse that it makes our tasks of planning a good path all that more complicated.
He points out the poison of certain forces in the academic world — the same “Annointed” that Sowell refers to in the Vision of the Annointed and how it marginalizes religous roots in a culture.
We have to look to all of history for the answers and if we ignore the glamourus theories, the cold facts show us the way tempered by plain and sensible prudence.
Calm down Emmett. Kraut isn’t that great. He’s a moderate to left leanging thinker.
Only in your mind
The left has been advancing for decades. Yes, they are outrageous now. Krauthammer thinks that is because the right is threatening...I believe they are pulling out all the stops to advance the final yard into the end zone. (If I may mix metaphors)
The screws are tightening on the first amendment.
If allowed to continue, the Left’s “reasonable people agree” will become “you are mentally ill and require hospitalization.”
While conservatives naively think dainty debate and elections can restore liberty, the Left knows tyranny is advanced through raw power, intimidation and destruction of its enemies.
He’s too wishy washy for me. One of those that thought Cruz was a total moron for his Obamacare filibuster using GOPe consultant language on Fox News.
Charles is a bit late to the party and he didn’t even bring any beer. I mean this is nothing new and was hand waved away by the right’s elite.
I agree that Krauthammer is not particularly conservative. Dr. Krauthammer said that after the dinner he and his fellow DC “conservative” pundits had with Bath House Barry shortly after he was elected, it still took him weeks to figure out Bath House Barry was a liberal. He actually sounded proud of himself for figuring BHB out so fast. I submit that all real conservatives knew Bath House Barry was a hard core liberal long before he was elected. It seems to me that Kraut is conservative like Juan McCain or Olympia Snow are conservative.
Pray this does not happen. simply raising the cost of using the inter net would cut its use drastically!
Do not ignore the Presidents intention in this matter.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.