Victor Davis Hanson names it correctly again

Nobody can make a correct point quite like VDH.  Can we call him a political John Wayne?  Well, according to this he probably wouldn't want that designation because of John Wayne's personal life.

Kingdom of Lies

I am a subject in a kingdom of lies. At 57, I have grown up with decades of untruth — advanced for the purposes of purported social unity, the noble aim of egalitarianism, and the advancement of a cognitive elite in government, journalism, the arts, and the universities.

Alger Hiss really was a communist operative, albeit an elegant and snooty sort of one. The Rosenbergs were tag-team spies.... I admire the lives of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, even as I sensed there were large areas of their biographies that simply could not be disclosed and that the censorship was apparently for our own good. I know that if I did what Eliot Spitzer did I would not be hosting a TV show.

I did not quite know how “witch hunt” characterized the often disreputable tactics of Joe McCarthy — cruel and obnoxious were the better adjectives. You see, there were really communists in Hollywood at a time of a dangerous global cold war against communism, in a way there were never any witches at all in Salem.

But then for some reason I sensed that a murderous, camouflaged Fidel Castro killed more innocents than a murderous, gold-braided Augusto Pinochet. I accepted that we were to be silent about the former’s crimes since his ends were said to be good, while the latter’s crimes were for the bad — though economists of no particular political affiliations have shown that Chileans escaped poverty and dictatorship while Cubans were, and are still, plagued by both.

As far as Hollywood, goes, as I have said, I do not go to the cinema at all. The choices are meager. We can watch a George Clooney, Matt Damon, or Ben Affleck — multimillionaires all of mediocre talent — uncover some corporate or CIA conspiracy that threatens the environment (their employers and distributors are not corporate?), the non-white male, or global peace — or sit through yuppie crises whose double entendres and cute repartees are known mostly only to metrosexuals between New York and D.C., or from Malibu to Newport Beach. .....

The media is our ministry of truth of the Oceania brand: one day Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventive detention, Predators, the Patriot Act, and Iraq were bad; then one day in January 2009 I woke up and heard of them not all.....

Much, so much more from VDH. Read it all here.

Columbus Day 2010

This continent come a long way since 1492.  Many people believe we should not be celebrating Columbus but instead should be shamed by what has happened since his arrival on the shores of an island nearby.

I came of age in 1950's, I learned what the history books told us then.  Since my days in school much has been learned of history, interesting to me, political fodder to others.

Daniel Greenfield writing in Canada Free Press puts it much better than I could ever say. Goodbye Columbus, Goodbye America he writes. Here is some of what he writes:

Columbus Day, once considered a major event, has been undergoing a decline in recent years. Columbus Day parades have met with protests and some have been de-emphasized or outright eliminated. In Denver, the Columbus Day Parade was met by protesters holding signs, such as, “Kick cracker bums off Indian land”.
John Hickenlooper, the Democratic candidate for Governor in Colorado, helped fund violent anti-Columbus Day protests, which featured multiple arrests. In Santa Barbara, a rally will featured a hanged Columbus effigy.
In California, Columbus Day has become Indigenous People’s Day, which sounds vaguely like a Marxist terrorist group’s holiday. But while it’s tempting to put that down to California’s political correctness, in South Dakota, Columbus Day became Native American Day, and that is a trend that other states are likely to follow, as protests continue to grow. And while none have thus far followed Venezuela’s lead in renaming it Día de la Resistencia Indígena, or Day of Indigenous Resistance, which actually is a Marxist terrorist group’s holiday, the whole notion of celebrating the discovery of America has come to be seen as somehow shameful and politically incorrect.
[...........]
While Ferdinand and Isabella may have brought Columbus back in chains, modern day political correctness banishes him to the darkened dungeon of non-personhood, erasing him from history and replacing him with a note reading, “I’m Sorry We Ever Discovered America.”

Much more to read about this, read it here.

"To be able to burn the kind of light bulb I want,"

One of the major purposes of the the Glenn Beck Rally.  This quote is from an editorial by Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post.  Here is the whole quote:

But among those in Saturday's throng, the linkage between faith and libertarian-leaning politics seemed obvious. 

"We've lost our morality. The country is headed in the wrong direction by removing God from everything," said Bob Erdt, a retired Ford engineer from Michigan, explaining his participation. Then, Erdt shifted seamlessly to the fiscal side. "We're spending way too much money that we don't have," he said. "Anybody with any common sense or honor or morality knows we can't be spending like this and not bringing the country to ruin."

Asked what had inspired her to fly to the capital from Colorado, Andrea Carrasco started with God and ended with light bulbs.

She came, Carrasco said, to "ask God to restore the country. Our freedom is lost. My freedoms are lost. To be able to preach anywhere we want, to have God in our schools, to drive any kind of car we want and if I want to drive a gas guzzler, I can, if I want to eat a lot of sugar and salt, and I shouldn't be forced to buy medical care."

Carrasco paused, but only briefly. "To be able to burn the kind of light bulb I want," she added. "The list goes on."

Even with that Ruth Marcus still doesn't get it.  She begins the article with this:

I left the Glenn Beck rally worried that I didn't have much of a story.

It was all revival meeting, no political fireworks. The news reports accurately likened the atmosphere to that of a church picnic -- and no reporter wants to write about a church picnic.

But then I realized: The abundance of religiosity was the news. Beck is offering -- and whatever the precise crowd count on Saturday, a whole lot of people seemed to be buying -- a new form of fusion politics, melding the anti-government, anti-spending, anti-tax fervor of the Tea Party with the faith-based agenda of the religious right.

And ends with this:

It's too early to know whether Beck's bridge between social and fiscal conservatism is sturdy enough to withstand the conflicting pulls. Already there is edginess among traditional leaders of the religious right about Beck's bona fides.
Another question is whether the linkage between the two wings risks limiting the Tea Party's appeal to independent voters worried about the deficit but at risk of being turned off by overt religiosity or hard-line social conservatism.

Beck's brand of messianic politics feels creepy to me -- but it is clearly compelling to thousands. Make that hundreds of thousands. This was one church picnic worth covering.

The religiosty was news to her, but she missed the biggest message of how many would turn out because they are so dissatisfied at the direction of the country over the past 60 years.  Read it all  here. 

I'm not the only one who has noticed some liberal back tracking

Ed Driscoll has a post on Pajamas Media with a good wrap up of several different ways they are realizing some mistakes, including Richard Cohen's I posted earlier.
Here is Driscoll's post:

The Cassandra Crossing

Just at the moment that President Obama’s “regime,” as MSNBC’s Chris Matthews would say, seemingly became entrenched in DC, there’s a curious reassessment of the current state of what passes as “liberalism” these days, particularly outside of America, where the damage inflicted by a century of the European-inspired “progressive” agenda is that much easier to diagnose:

* “Canada reconsidering health-care model in face of soaring costs.”

* “‘I hate to say it, but Mary Whitehouse was probably right’: Permissive society failed women,” says leftwing veteran BBC broadcaster Joan Bakewell.

* “In a welfare state, how much is ‘enough’?”

* “President Barack Obama spent the last year insisting he doesn’t want to turn the American health care system into a carbon copy of the government-run British system. But Obama’s pick to run Medicaid and Medicare — Donald Berwick — is a pediatrician and Harvard University professor with a self-professed ‘love’ of the British system. . . . Now Senate Republicans are vowing to press their case against Obama’s sweeping new health care law by challenging Berwick’s nomination — just in time to resurrect the brutal yearlong health reform battle ahead of the midterm elections.”

* “What Would a Euro Collapse Mean for the United States?”

And speaking of the US, at Big Government, Michael Zak explores the “Republican Roots of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” an extended post that dovetails well with Bruce Bartlett’s 2007 article in the Wall Street Journal on “Whitewash — The racist history the Democratic Party wants you to forget.”

Finally (at least for now), at Commentary’s “Contentions” blog, Jennifer Rubin spots Richard Cohen at the Washington Post, one of the biggest redoubts of establishment liberalism having a brief moment of second thought. Or as Jennifer puts it, “Poverty Doesn’t Create Crime? Who Knew?”

He goes on to discuss the Richard Cohen post, read the rest here.