The Fall

National Review Online ^ | September 24, 2004 | Victor Davis Hanson

[Republic]

Your fabulous post reads as beautifully real as this particularly excellent article.

[Republic]

Nail this one to the door of every network and to the tail of every reporter and editor. He is simply terrific..BRAVO!

OH YEAH!

All-FYI-this read is just so brilliantly put, so revealing and all encompassing. Just about every sentence is worth quoting.

[esopman]

"Hillary in particular intends to resurrect their effort four years hence. That, I suspect, will represent the final battle for the soul of a generation. The battle-lines are being drawn in this election, the veterans have awakened and are discovering that at last they have a voice, and the forces that shouted them down thirty years ago are surprised and shaken, but not defeated. This is going to be a long struggle."

Bumpus Maximus. You, Sir, are not just astute. You are a prophet. (Not that many Freepers aren't).

Yes, this will be a long struggle; we are in very deep weeds as a republic with the malleable middle of the electorate profoundly ignorant of history, the Constitution and the massive manipulation of truth by the media elites. Freepers are, alas, an anomaly: by and large both informed and intelligent.

Hillary Regina and Bubba Rex, the ultimate opportunistic infections of our body politic, are waiting in the wings... Pray.

[MEG33]

Must read..!

[ohioWfan]

Printing it off.....

THANKS for the ping for this excellent analysis, Republic!

[Republic]

Cromwell was not a good guy but he did one great thing. He reversed the policy of forbidding Jews to live in England. This act led to England, and ultimately America, becoming a sanctuary for Jews who otherwise might have perished, first in the pogroms and later in the Holocaust. An under appreciated act of extraordinary importance.

Thank you for this post...I never knew this, or had forgotten it like about a thousand other things, lol, and reading your post was so enlightening. Cromwell certainly did perform an immense 'act of extraordinary importance'.

[bad company]

Bump.

[nopardons]

bttt

[Nick Danger]

Of course, as we learn more about the structure and function of the brain, perhaps we will learn that liberals and conservatives are indeed born and not made, but I have a gut feeling the odds are against it.

My gut feeling is that the odds are for it. Leftists have predominated in education for a very long time, and yet half the population ends up 'conservative' anyway.

Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions and The Vision of the Anointed do a good job of reducing "liberal" and "conservative" views to a very small set of fundamental assumptions about how the world works. Sowell explains, for example, why if you find someone opposed to nuclear power, that person is probably also pro-abortion, in favor of affirmative action, and so on, right down the liberal line. These issues don't seem related, but Sowell shows how they are.

One of my fundamental assumptions about how the world works is that Nature likes systems that wobble around a mean. The world is full of them. Such systems don't seek the mean and stay there; the wobbling is part of the system, designed to shake things up and foment continuous change and experimentation.

My hunch is that Sowell's "constrained" and "unconstrained" visions will someday be shown to be inherent, and like sex, distributed roughly 50-50 in the population. This creates the system that we see: one where neither liberals nor conservatives ever "win the final battle." It's a system that continuously battles around a mean, with no finality to any of it. Nature doesn't want finality. It wants to keep the game going.

[Fatalis]

" My hunch is that Sowell's "constrained" and "unconstrained" visions will someday be shown to be inherent, and like sex, distributed roughly 50-50 in the population. "

In the chromosomes?

[Nick Danger]

I think that VDH is remiss in leaving out the role of Ms. Mapes, who is not of Rather's generation but who is a major power behind the throne in this little escapade.

It was she who pursued this story for five years, and she who attempted the journalistically-verboten coordination of the "news" story with the Kerry campaign. Yes, Rather must take his lumps for his part in this, but these invisible functionaries who run around setting these stories up are a big part of what's wrong with the media. This woman's father as much as said that she went into journalism not to speak truth, but to proclaim it — as she saw it with her thoroughly leftist bent.

The alphabet networks, the AP, and the New York Times are crawling with these cockroaches. The media can't get rid of them fast enough to clean up their act; no matter which "rising star" they turn to, the odds are it's another leftist cockroach like Ms. Mapes. They've been hiring their own kind for so long that there's no other kind left.

[Nick Danger]

In the chromosomes?

I have no idea what the mechanism might be. Have you ever seen one of those studies of identical twins who, because of adoptions, were literally "separated at birth?" I read one where these two guys (identical twins) grew up in very different families, but as adults they bought the same kind of house, married women with the same name, both had the habit of flushing a toilet before they used it, and both had made swings in their front yards from old tires for their kids. There was more stuff like that, I don't remember it all, but it was just amazing how many "coincidences" these two men fell into.

I don't think we understand enough about how the brain works to say for sure one way or the other. But I think the empirical evidence points to a predisposition toward constrained or unconstrained vision in a 50-50 ratio. Despite the best efforts of our "educators" to turn out 100% good little leftists, that's not what happens. What happens is reasonably close elections, most of the time, with the occasional blowout when one side or the other picks an especially good or bad candidate.

BTW, I don't think Bush is an especially good "candidate," but Kerry is an especially bad one, so we might get a blowout this time. Let's hope so.

[Fatalis]

I remember on Donahue or Oprah there was a show about a freshman guy at a college. Someone came up to him and talked to him like he knew him, and it took like 10 minutes to figure out that they never met. It turns out the guy was adopted and had a twin brother going to the same college, with lots of the same experiences. The story made the local papers and some other guy saw the pic and he found out he was a triplet.

[MEG33]

This is the article to read on the media..Terrific.

[MEG33]

Terrific article on Rather and media sins.

[omstrat]

Hanson is the best out there . This needs to be read in ever university and on every network station country wide...I wish ...So well written ..

[MEG33]

I keep posting the link or pinging...It is truly the best.

[omstrat]

Could you name one lib that has anything near this insight and intellect? Compare this masterpiece to the Dems rantings and ravings.

[hershey]

VDH doesn't leave Dan the Man a fig leaf to hide behind, and beautifully said, as always.

[hershey]

And notice he doesn't mention Kerry anywhere, except by implication.