The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Herman Cain Now the Hot Ticket

Posted on | May 9, 2011 | 19 Comments

Atlanta businessman Herman Cain’s strong showing in Thursday’s South Carolina GOP presidential debate — winning over a Fox News focus group in a performance that pollster Frank Luntz called “unprecedented” — has given his campaign a sudden boost, Neil King Jr. reports at the Wall Street Journal:

Interview requests are pouring in, along with donations, volunteers and invitations to speak.
On Friday night, several hundred people turned out to hear him in Las Vegas. The same night, he won a Washington state GOP straw poll. On Monday, former UPS president Ron Wallace will host a high-priced fundraiser for Mr. Cain in the suburbs of his hometown, Atlanta. Three hundred are expected to attend.
Long-shot presidential candidates seek one thing in the early stages of a campaign: Traction. Mr. Cain may have just won that.

At Friday’s event in Las Vegas, “Many came to see [Cain] despite not knowing who he was a mere 24 hours earlier,” blogger Mike Chamberlain reported.

Cain’s strong performance also helped boost him into the Iowa Independent‘s GOP 2012 “Power Rankings,” which noted “the energy he has created in Iowa,” and quoted one observer’s remark: “If you could take Donald Trump and remove all the negatives, you end up with Herman Cain.”

Currently running an exploratory campaign, Cain has scheduled a May 21 rally at Atlanta’s Centennial Park where he is expected to make his presidential candidacy official. Here’s a sample of recent news headlines and blog posts about the Cain campaign:

Isn’t it time you joined the online grassroots army at Citizens for Cain?

Category: Election 2012, Herman Cain

Beat Obama Radiothon May 19

Posted on | May 9, 2011 | Comments Off on Beat Obama Radiothon May 19

Mark your calendars: The Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama will hold a three-hour nationwide radio program Thursday, May 19, from 9 p.m.-midnight Eastern, anchored by KDWN 720-AM in Las Vegas and livestreamed via KDWN.com.

“The program will be hosted by Melanie Morgan (nationally acclaimed radio and television personality), Lloyd Marcus (Vice Chairman of The Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama and a popular conservative singer/songwriter) and Amy Kremer (Chairman of the Tea Party Express),” Joe Wierzbicki, executive director of the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama, said in a statement.

You can learn more about the campaign at their Web site, follow them on Facebook and Twitter (@DefeatBarack).

Category: Barack Obama, Election 2012, Talk Radio, Tea Party

Housing Market Plummets Unexpectedly?

Posted on | May 9, 2011 | 11 Comments

Is this the hope or the change?

Home values posted the largest decline in the first quarter since late 2008, prompting many economists to push back their estimates of when the housing market will hit a bottom.
Home values fell 3% in the first quarter from the previous quarter and 1.1% in March from the previous month, pushed down by an abundance of foreclosed homes on the market, according to data to be released Monday by real-estate website Zillow.com. Prices have now fallen for 57 consecutive months, according to Zillow.
Last year, the housing market showed signs of improving as price depreciation slowed in some markets and stabilized in others. In response, a number of economists began forecasting that housing would hit a bottom in late 2011, then begin to recover. But the improvements, spurred by federal programs that gave buyers up to $8,000 in tax credits, proved fleeting. Sales collapsed when the credits expired last summer, and prices in many markets have been falling ever since.

Meanwhile, with gasoline at $4 a gallon, Democrats think it’s a good time to raise taxes on oil companies.

Because that makes perfect sense, if you’re crazy.

UPDATE: Linked by Ed Driscoll at Instapundit — unexpectedly!

Category: Economics

Moms, ‘Myths’ and Cultural Marxism

Posted on | May 9, 2011 | 25 Comments

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

Liberals invariably use the word “myth” to describe any popular belief that they wish to discredit. Thus the liberal speaks of “the myth of the Old West” in order to attack the belief that pioneers, settlers and cowboys were admirably courageous, embodying noble and heroic traits worthy of emulation. Or a liberal may speak of “the myth of American exceptionalism,” seeking to discredit that view that our country’s phenomenal rise — from primitive colonial outpost to global superpower — signifies some unique or world-historic quality to our national character.

When liberals employ the word “myth,” then, they do so in order to undermine some fundamental belief or tradition that stands in the way of what they deem “Progress.” (Liberals arrogate to themselves the right to judge whether any specific change to the existing order is worthy of being considered Progress Expanding government control over the health care industry is definitely Progress in this sense. Opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas production? That’s not Progress, and how dare you even suggest such a thing!)

Whenever we encounter a liberal using the word “myth,” therefore, our antennae ought to quiver with suspicion. What is this “myth” being attacked, and what is the liberal’s purpose in attacking it?

This was my reaction to reading the first sentence of Stephanie Coontz’s 1,300-word Mother’s Day column in the New York Times:

One of the most enduring myths about feminism is that 50 years ago women who stayed home full time with their children enjoyed higher social status and more satisfying lives than they do today.

My eyebrow arched skeptically as soon as I reached the sixth word of that sentence, knowing Coontz to be one of the great revisionist mythmakers of modern liberal academia. Her most influential work, The Way We Never Were (1992) is a book-length assault on the “myth” of American family life prior to the great Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

The problem with the “myth” that she attacks is that there are still alive today many millions of Americans who actually grew up in the kind of families that Coontz claims never existed.

If you are an American over age 50, chances are that your parents were a lot like my parents — Dad fought in World War, went to college on the G.I. Bill, met and married Mom while at school, moved to the city, got a job, built a house in the suburbs, worked two jobs to pay the bills, etc. Our parents saw to it that we attended church, got us involved in Boy Scouts, youth sports and other wholesome activities, fretted over our report cards, and generally did everything within their power to ensure that we had as much of the Good Life as they could afford to provide us.

While it may be that our lives in the small towns and suburbs of America during the 1950s and ’60s did not in every way live up to the sitcom ideal of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, most of us over 50 look back at our childhoods and marvel at just how well our parents did their job as parents. And however much we, as parents ourselves, have striven to avoid what we see as our own parents’ mistakes, few of us can in all honest say that we have done a better job than they did.

So when I read The Way We Never Were — and the various permutations of that book’s thesis which Coontz has served up in columns and essays over the years — I see it as an attack on my parents, and a disparagement of all the work and sacrifice that my parents devoted to myself and my brothers. How else am I to interpret Coontz’s dismissal of my own childhood as a “myth”?

Why hasn’t anyone in academia ever bothered to debunk Coontz’s revisionism? The most obvious answer is that academia — and especially the humanities and social sciences — is utterly dominated by the Left. The less obvious answer is that any challenge to Coontz’s prevailing revisionism would likely come from a younger scholar, and youth are today separated from the 1950s by a vast gulf, the revolution of the 1960s marking such a complete declension that no one under 40 today could possibly imagine life prior to that revolution. And having been thoroughly indoctrinated to think of the Eisenhower era as the Dark Night of Fascism (to borrow a phrase from Ann Coulter), these young scholars would never dream of revisiting the 1950s with an idea of rehabilitating the image of that era as the American Golden Age.

As Buckley said, these young intellectuals are “altogether positive” that their beliefs are the product of “independent intellectual exertion,” and never for a moment suspect that their teachers and professors and textbook authors may have indoctrinated them.

The bumper sticker on the cars in the campus parking lot may proclaim the owner’s willingness to “Question Authority,” but the one thing they never question is the dominant liberal worldview of academia. No skepticism toward such fashionable beliefs ever crosses their minds.

When Ann Althouse linked to Coontz’s column, her summary was, “Blaming Freud, not feminism, for the denigration of motherhood.” In this, she describes how Coontz overthrows one of liberalism’s former idols in order to defend its more modern Moloch. This part of Coontz’s argument deserves more critical scrutiny than it is likely to get:

In the early 20th century, under the influence of Freudianism, Americans began to view public avowals of “Mother Love” as unmanly and redefine what used to be called “uplifting encouragement” as nagging. By the 1940s, educators, psychiatrists and popular opinion-makers were assailing the idealization of mothers; in their view, women should stop seeing themselves as guardians of societal and familial morality and content themselves with being, in the self-deprecating words of so many 1960s homemakers, “just a housewife.” . . .

Let us be clear, however, that in the mid-2oth-century Freudianism was the faith of an intellectual elite. However prevalent Freudianism was among “educators, psychiatrists and public opinion-makers,” the ordinary American always viewed skeptically the psychoanalytic dogmas of Dr. Freud. This common-sense hostility toward the fanciful theorizing of “shrinks” was, at one time, widely cited as evidence of the “anti-intellectualism” of narrow-minded Americans — then as now disdained as a bunch of backward yahoos by the sophisticated elites.

Fast-forward a few decades, of course, and Dr. Freud’s theories have been so completely demolished by scientific advances — particularly in the area of neurochemistry — that intellectuals are hard-put to explain how their predecessors ever could have believed in such Freudian nonsense as the “Oedipus complex” and “penis envy.”

Yet in the mid-20th-century, faith in Freudian theory pervaded America’s intelligentia, and was suffused through the culture by those “public opinion-makers” whom now Coontz wishes to make the scapegoats for undermining the status of mothers. One suspects Coontz of cherry-picking the evidence to support her case, but the burden of her argument is not so much to implicate Freudianism as it is to exculpate feminism. The liberals’ new unquestionable dogma is apparently so valuable to their cause that they are willing to throw poor Sigmund under the bus to save it.

Conservatives ought always to question most rigorously the dogmas that liberals defend most vehemently.

It is apparently essential to the success of liberalism that people believe what Coontz wants them to believe — that feminism has, in fact, vastly improved American life for everyone. And if any woman should be unhappy with some aspect of her life in this post-liberation paradise, it is not feminists whom she should blame, but rather the residual sexism that remains, and which requires renewed effort to extirpate.

This is why, more than four decades after the rise of the Women’s Liberation movement, feminists are angrier than ever: The logic of their movement prevents them from accepting the explanation that their unhappiness can have any cause other than patriarchal oppression. And no feminist can ever permit herself to wonder whether “liberation” itself is the cause of some problems that nowadays plague women. If equality has not solved all women’s problems, the only solution must be more equality. And if you question this logic, buddy, you’re part of the problem.

Coontz is an excellent example of why I insist — to the consternation of Little Miss Attila — that it is folly to attempt to understand feminism except as a movement of the Left. Trying to co-opt feminism, or to create for it some non-partisan, non-ideological pedigree, is to ignore the overwhelming reality of what feminism actually is. Here is Coontz from 1998, during the Lewinsky scandal:

How come the Judiciary Committee members’ invocations of the “ideals” of our forefathers does not include James Madison’s argument that a virtuous republic should strive to eradicate extremes of wealth and poverty? And why doesn’t the charge that Clinton is obsessed with polls rather than principles focus on the fact that he ignored his own bipartisan panel’s politically unpalatable conclusion that distributing needles to drug addicts would not increase drug addiction but save lives?
For that matter, how can legislators on either side of the impeachment issue congratulate themselves on “voting their conscience” when they have allowed 93 percent of all reductions in budget entitlements over the past two years to be borne by the poor? In a nation where the average CEO makes 326 times as much as the average factory worker and 728 times as much as the minimum-wage earner, why has America’s extraordinary economic expansion during the last two years not even trickled down to America’s impoverished children? And why, in one of the only six nations that do not have a national policy requiring paid maternity leave (out of 152 nations surveyed this year by the United Nations), are our leaders spending so much time on sex and semen stains?

So we see that, at a time when the Predator-in-Chief was caught perjuring himself about an exploitative affair with an emotionally unstable subordinate less than half his age, Coontz’s principle concern was that the scandal was distracting attention from the important issues that mattered to liberals. Whatever credibility Coontz as an advocate for the equality and dignity of women in the workplace, she was willing to cast it aside — ignoring Clinton’s sordidly sexist behavior — rather than to let Clinton’s conservative critics gain any advantage by the exposure of his Oval Office affair.

Such was the case with every feminist of any importance or influence. By their defense of Clinton at that critical juncture (in a way they never defended Clarence Thomas) the women’s movement displayed themselves as merely the distaff auxilliary of the Democratic Party.

Sic semper hoc.

At what point was feminism ever anything other than Leftism for Ladies? But the winners write the history books (and also write the New York Times op-ed columns), and so the history of feminism has been written to convince us that all women were equally invested in the success of the movement, so that to criticize or oppose feminism is to be anti-woman.

This is what the success of Cultural Marxism looks like — the unquestionable hegemony of the officially-approved revolutionary perspective, with any contradictory facts erased from memory like Trotsky airbrushed from old Bolshevik photos during the Stalinist era. Those who question the revolutionary triumph are accused of “false consciousness,” dismissed as ignorant believers in discredited “myths.” And so Stephanie Coontz concludes her column:

While stay-at-home mothers may not have the aura of saintliness with which they were endowed in the 19th century, it’s indisputable that their status and lives have improved since their supposed heyday in the 1950s. On this Mother’s Day, it’s too bad that nostalgia for a golden age of motherhood that never existed still clouds our thinking about what’s best for mothers, fathers and their children.

If you dispute Coontz’s telling of the tale, then, it is because your thinking has been clouded by nostalgia. The past as you remember it never actually existed. And the future belongs to Coontz and her colleagues, who will teach your children to hate you.


Category: Feminism, Intellectuals

LIVE AT FIVE – 05.09.11

Posted on | May 9, 2011 | 1 Comment

TOP NEWS
In Wake Of Bin Laden Raid, The Heat Is On In Pakistan

National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon

Maybe we already know who helped hide Osama in plain sight. Maybe we don’t. But it sure looks like we’re going to push Pakistan into telling us.


Floods Along The Mississippi Lead To Calls For New Strategies
“For decades we’ve treated levees as the only line of defense…They ought to be the last line of defense.” Also, not continuing to build in flood plains.





“Sectarian” Violence Has Egypt On Edge
Salafist Muslims take advantage of relaxed security regime to prey on Coptic Christians; twelve dead this weekend after churches firebombed, shots exchanged



POLITICS
Fallen SEAL Hero Honored By New Destroyer

Maureen Murphy christens the destroyer named for her son, Lt. Michael Murphy

Medal of Honor winner would have been 35 years old

Huntsman Addresses Questions About Serving Obama As Ambassador To PRC

GOP Donors Slow To Commit To 2012 Candidates


Arizona Soliciting Online Donations To Build Border Fence

California Teachers To Rally Against Education Cuts



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Euro Nations Divided Over Greek Debt
US Gas Prices Hit $4/Gallon, May Soon Retreat
Housing Crash Getting Worse
Irish Government Warns Pensions, Welfare, Civil Service Salaries Must Be Cut 33% Without EU/IMF Bailout
Chinese IPad Fanboys In Frenzied Fight
When Steve Jobs Isn’t Happy, He Really Isn’t Happy
David Braben Creates $25 Computer For Developing World



SPORTS
Lakers Swept Into Season Of Uncertainty

Kobe Bryant leaves American Airlines Arena after the Lakers lose Game 4

Mavericks crush Lakers 122-89 for the sweep; LA now has no coach, no bench, and not much room under the salary cap to maneuver for next year

Focused Hawks Get Physical And Get Even


Red Wings Stave Off Elimination, Force Game Six Against Sharks

Celtics Crank Up The D, Defeat The Heat In Game 3

Derby Champ Animal Kingdom Fresh For Preakness

Dickey And The Mets Come Up Short Against Dodgers

Angels Rally Gives Mike Scioscia 1000th Career Win



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Paula Abdul Closes Deal To Join Simon Cowell As “X Factor” Judge

You've come a long way since the Laker Girls, Paula

CBS contract apparently slowed things up

David Beckham In Auto Accident On LA Freeway

Bieber Bratty During CSI Guest Appearance, Says Helgenberger

Johnny & Penelope Premiere “On Stranger Tides” At Disneyland

Heidi Klum & Seal Renew Their Wedding Vows

3AM Balcony Leap The Reason For Prince Harry Looking Rough Around The Edges?

Lindsay Lohan: I’m No $cientologist!

Lady Gag Uncut:”I’m Really Delusional About My Success”



FOREIGNERS
Is Egypt Facing A Counterrevolution?
Syria Steps Up Crackdown On Protesters
Tens Of Thousands March In Mexico City Against Drug War Violence
Seventeen Killed In Iraq Prison Uprising
Watershed Election May Ease PAP’s Grip On Singapore
Japan Expected To Close Hamaoka Reactor Over quake Worries



BLOGS & STUFF
Fire Andrea Mitchell: West Spokeswoman Says Time To Stop Trying To Defund Obamacare (For Now)
Left Coast Rebel: Half Of Adult Detroiters Functionally Illiterate
The Lonely Conservative: When Poverty Becomes Comfortable
Wall Street Journal: The SEAL Sensibility
Don Boudreaux: If Supermarkets Were Like Public Schools
Michael Barone: What The GOP Can Learn From Canada


— compiled by Wombat-socho

Category: Live at Five

FMJRA 2.0: O Superman

Posted on | May 8, 2011 | 4 Comments

“…and when force is gone, there’s always Mom. Hi, Mom!”

S.C. GOP 2012 Presidential Debate UPDATE: HERMAN CAIN WINS!

Herman Cain Wins 2012 Presidential Forum in Manchester, New Hampshire

Obama Administration Won’t Release Photos of Osama Bin Laden Dead UPDATE: Sarah Palin Urges Release of Photos ‘As a Warning to Others’

White House Can’t Get Its Story Straight on How Osama Bin Laden Was Killed

Herman Cain Set to Win S.C. Debate

Question: Why Doesn’t The CompSci Matter In Computer Science?

How Early Is Too Early To Warn Your Son About Those Girls? The Third Trimester?

Porn Is The Third Question

Facial Hair That Only Andrew Sullivan Could Love

Birth Certificate Proves Ace of Spades Was Born on the Forest Moon of Endor

National Offend a Feminist Week 2011

Feminists vs. the FBI

Albert Haynesworth, Victim

BREAKING: Libya Spokesman Says NATO Strike Killed 3 of Qaddafi’s Grandsons UPDATE: Attack Also Reportedly Kills Qaddafi’s Youngest Son, Saif al-Arab, 29

The Politics of Nostalgia

VIDEO: Andrew Breitbart vs. Bill Maher

Obamas Birth Certificate As A Distractor?

Professor Reynolds and Journalism

FMJRA 2.0: We’re An American Band

Going to the Hospital
UPDATE: Diagnosed With Pneumonia

Rule 5 Sunday: The Marshall Plan

Obligatory Osama Post

Selecting The Next Bob Dole Proving More Than A Trifle Tedious

How Smitty Killed Osama bin Laden

VIDEO: You Knew This Was Coming

Paul Krugman: Invisible Pimp Hand Strongly Squeezes Gay Buttock Near You

Will No One Rid Us Of This Troglodyte And His Osama Theories?

‘USA! USA! USA!’ (I’m Just Saying That Because It Bothers Liberals So Much)

Just a Coincidence, I’m Sure

Feminists Offended by TV Commercial; Osama bin Laden? Not So Offensive

Two Kinds of Crazy

“LIVE AT FIVE – 05.03.11“

Congressional Investigation Exposes White House ‘Transparency’ Myth

‘Renounce and Abjure’

Fun With Pneumonia Update: I’m Still Sick, But These Drugs Are Great!

Rep. Allen West: End Aid to Pakistan

Youthful Ignorance

It’s Kinda Hard to ‘Work the Refs’ When the Refs Are Playing for the Other Team

St. Lawrence the Sanctimonious

Feminism: Synonym for Insanity?

TheDaily.com: How to Lose $10 Million on a Startup Web Site in Three Months

Pneumonia Update, Etc.

“LIVE AT FIVE – 05.05.11“

Bin Laden Dead; Liberal Media Sick

Death Porn Is Not The Answer

Let Me Generalize Mr. Rumsfeld

Arianna Huffington Offers Exciting New Opportunities for You to Blog for Free!

Obama at Ground Zero

Bubble Bursts? Wall Street Tumbles, as Silver Prices Slump on Margin Hike

“LIVE AT FIVE – 05.06.11“

Dept. of Not Getting It

‘Smart’ Pundits Sneer at Herman Cain

VIDEO:  Michael Moore Tells Americans How To Be Good Americans – Like Him!

Top linkers for this week:

  1. The Lonely Conservative (14)
  2. (tied) Da Tech Guy and Republican Redefined (6)
  3. (tied) Don Surber, Rhetorican, and That Mr. G Guy (5)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Please remember, if you blog on Blogspot and want to be included in the FMJRA, to send e-mail to Wombat-socho with those links and either FMJRA or “Shameless Blogwhoring” in the subject line no later than Saturday, May 14.

Category: FMJRA Award

VIDEO: Chomsky vs. Israel

Posted on | May 8, 2011 | 8 Comments

Donald Douglas at American Power got this video during Noam Chomsky’s appearance at UCLA:

Donald describes Chomksy’s lecture as “propaganda, and says:

[W]hat’s even more fascinating than hearing Chomsky’s America-bashing is observing the rock star status he’s afforded by the huge crowd of collegiate wannabe bohemians, diehard pro-terror communists, and the campus Islamist jihadis who thronged the event.

Only at an American university — in the America that Chomsky so loathes — can such a person enjoy this “rock star status.” Read more at American Power.

Category: American Power, Israel, Video

The End-Game of Kellerism

Posted on | May 8, 2011 | 8 Comments

In late March, I unloaded on New York Times editor Bill Keller, who has presided over the disastrous decline of his newspaper, but who fails to acknowledge any responsibility for the catastrophe he has done so much to bring about.

Today, Keller’s column and a column by NYT ombudsman Arthur Brisbane get picked apart by Felix Salmon:

Just like Brisbane, Keller makes sure that every single link in his column is an internal one, to some other NYT web page — I count 26 different links between the two columns, which implies that in the eyes of the New York Times, the 26 most important online resources to link to when writing those columns are all NYT stories or pages. It’s as arrogant as it is hermetic.

Via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, who has more. In an information environment characterized by connectivity and collaboration, those who pretend that they owe no obligation to others — who refuse to give credit where credit is due — will inevitably suffer for that pretense when the truth becomes known.

Category: New York Times
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