The Other McCain

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

Good Dad, Bad Dad

Posted on | July 19, 2010 | 18 Comments

Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents . . .
— Romans 1:30 (KJV)

Exactly why I was referring to the first chapter of Romans on Twitter is perhaps irrelevant here. At any rate, I found myself lecturing on the principles of parenthood, which I understand as well as anyone, even if I don’t always apply them consistently.

Mrs. Other McCain is often complimented on the good behavior of our children, for which she certainly deserves nearly all the credit. But I sometimes do a little bit to help.

Nothing is more important to good parenting than love. Everyone understands that. But the second most important thing is a corollary of the first: Authority.

When Mom or Dad says “jump,” the only question a child should ask is, “How high?” Children are being disobedient and disrespectful if their automatic response to such a parental command is, “Why?”

“Because I said so” is a sufficient reply to the child’s obstreporous “why?” and, if the child persists in such an impudent attitude, the parent should not hesitate to apply sterner measures — for which “because Mom is tired of hearing your backtalk” is a sufficient explanation.

You are an adult — experienced, knowledgeable and responsible — and they are children — inexperienced, ignorant and dependent. Assuming that you are a wise and loving parent concerned for your child’s well-being, then there is no legitimate reason for the child to question your judgment. You have good and sufficient reason for saying, “No, you can’t go swimming” and, perhaps more importantly, you have the authority to say so. The child is therefore disputing both your judgment and your authority if he responds, “Why?”

The key to good discipline is that its severity or leniency should never become entirely predictable to the child. Kids are smart, and if they figure out that they can push you a certain distance without risk of a swift and severe response, they’ll push you that far every time. Pretty soon, you won’t be able to get them to brush their teeth or clean up their room without constant cajoling.

Good parenting is best accomplished as a team effort, one tactical advantage of which is that it permits employment of the “Good Cop, Bad Cop” routine: If the child does not cooperate with the Good Cop, then the child will find himself dealing with the Bad Cop.

In our household — as I suspect in most families — Dad usually gets assigned to the Bad Cop role. Mom explains that she isn’t getting acceptable results from a child, and Dad plays the role of enforcer. Thus the classic motherly final warning: “Don’t make me call you father in here!”

Remember: You never want to be entirely predictable in discipline, lest the kids figure out how far they can push you.

Well, after a brief Twitter lecture on this subject, I announced to the three youngest of our children that we were going to Sheetz to get slushies. Not only did we get slushies, but we also got hot dogs and hamburgers and french fries and, for dessert, Hershey bars with almonds.

After we got back home and everyone had gotten their bellies full, I then turned off the TV and convened the children for a meeting.

“We’re going to take a vote,” I said. “Who’s the best dad in the whole world?”

“You are,” the kids muttered.

“I can’t hear you.”

“You are!” they shouted.

“That’s more like it,” I said, before proceeding to tell them that they were to wash the dishes, sweep and mop the kitchen, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Seven-year-old Reagan interrupted with some goofy giggly response.

“Excuse me, young lady,” I said, looming over her in sudden fierceness. “Maybe it’s been too long since you had a spanking.”

Maybe, indeed. Her goofy grin clearly conveyed the impression that this threat wasn’t taken seriously. And her brothers were also giggling, so now I turned my attention to them:

“And you, too! I’m serious — I want that kitchen cleaned. No arguments and no excuses! Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir,” they answered, nodding.

“All right, hop to it!” I said and, on my way to the stairs to return to the basement office, added: “Don’t make me have to come back up here. Get to work!”

About 15 minutes later my wife came home and, finding the kids hard at work, said to me, “Somebody wants to get lucky tonight.”

OK, I’m entirely predictable to my wife, but what do you expect after 21 years of marriage? But we have to keep the kids guessing, you see.

Sometimes, if a kid is bad enough, Mom the Good Cop will ask me to give a special performance as the ultimate Bad Cop. Imagine the child’s reaction when, without warning, the cop who walks into the interrogation room is Andy Sipowicz:

Sweet old ladies will often tell my wife, “Oh, your children are such little angels!”

My wife will accept the compliment with a thank-you and a gracious smile. Little do they know how often my wife plays the Bad Cop — and she’s twice as scary as Andy Sipowicz.

Category: Family

Tactics And Strategy Are Peanut Butter And Chocolate

Posted on | July 19, 2010 | Comments Off on Tactics And Strategy Are Peanut Butter And Chocolate

by Smitty

Ramesh Ponnuru makes one of those points you ignore at your peril: the GOP’s been a cheerfuly party to Progressive over-reach this last century.

It’s that the fiscal future of the country does not turn on grants to the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. We ought to be pressuring Republicans on the right issues.

In other words, fretting about earmarks is fine, but tangential to the real business of restoring the Federal government to its Constitutional boundaries.

One is endlessly amazed at the number of people who think that just changing the names on the doorplates will magically change the
underlying, ruinous system.

It’s 40% principles, 10% the nominal leaders enacting legislation. The other half of the battle is We The People making sure the nominal leaders don’t forget how relatively unimportant they are, down at the ballot box.

By all means, let earmarks be a litmus test of sincerity. But don’t think they’re more than a tangent at best. Principles, principles, principles. These elected officials had better either possess them, or do a fine job of simulating them.

Category: Uncategorized

Conservatism 101:
Never Let Your Enemies Tell You Who Your Friends Should Be

Posted on | July 19, 2010 | 40 Comments

Conservative Republicans seeking political advice should not take it from a liberal Democrat like Jonathan Chait:

You don’t have to love Sue Lowden to understand that a 90% chance of Lowden winning is better than a 20% chance of Sharron Angle winning. Nor is there any recognition on the right that conservatives paved the way for health care reform by driving Specter out. In conservative lore, the Pat Toomey primary challenge remains a glorious triumph, when in fact it’s a disaster of historic proportions.

You can read the whole thing, but not without minding this important caveat: Jonathan Chait doesn’t want Republicans to win.

If Lowden had won the Nevada GOP primary, Chait would be busy-beavering arguments intended to help Harry Reid defeat Lowden. If Specter had stayed in the GOP and defeated Toomey in the primary, Chait would now be offering arguments to help Joe Sestak defeat Specter in November (as, in fact, the New Republic did throughout the Democratic primary).

Long ago — in February 2009, when the Tea Party movement was just being born — I explained this fundamental issue:

Among the ill effects of liberal bias in the media is that much political “news” amounts to thinly disguised DNC talking-points. The conservative must learn to think critically about news and politics, to filter out that which is misleading, or else he will internalize the funhouse-mirror distortions of reality that define the liberal weltanschauung. . . .
[O]ne of the major problems of the Republican Party, that so many of its supporters have unwittingly accepted liberal beliefs as political truths. . . .

The GIGO principle (Garbage In, Garbage Out) is as applicable to political discourse as to any other information system. If you let liberals like Chait tell you which Republican candidates you should support, you will never support any Republican candidate — except in a GOP primary, when liberals will invariably tell you to support the most liberal candidate on the ballot. As soon as the primary is over, however, your liberal friends will then return to their usual arguments of why you should vote Democrat. Sic semper hoc.

It may well be, as a source tells Ben Smith, that the Nevada GOP primary was a “total f*** up by the state and national Republicans” — Never underestimate the incompetence of the Republican establishment being another basic lesson of Conservatism 101 — but that is neither here nor there as to the task at hand, namely, defeating Harry Reid.

Chait and his friends are trying to do what liberals in the media always do, shape Conventional Wisdom to their own advantage.

“Sharron Angle Can’t Win” is the Meme-O’-Th’-Day, and liberals are going to pound it as hard and as long as they can. Why? Because they know that a lot of Republicans base their political decisions on Conventional Wisdom so that, by promoting this Angle-Is-Doomed message, liberals will erode support for Harry Reid’s opponent — especially from the Dumb and Rich Coalition who comprise the GOP’s big-money donors.

Sharron Angle can win, and should win, and will win, so long as the conservative grassroots don’t allow themselves to be bamboozled into believing the liberal Conventional Wisdom. 

Obviously, you can’t expect the Dumb and Rich to write any fat checks to make that happen, so it’s up to the grassroots to give those small donations — $10, $20, $50 — that will add up to match the millions Harry Reid gets from his Democratic fat-cat friends.

SHARRON ANGLE for U.S. SENATE

Category: Conservatism 101, Harry Reid, Media Bias, Nevada, Senate

AllahPundit Is A Month Late, Aims Low

Posted on | July 19, 2010 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

Hot Air:

Exit question: Greene in 2014?

This blog had a better idea in the middle of last month:

Where Is Your Gallows Humor? Alvin Greene For President In 2012!

This guy is BHO without all the Ivy League nonsense. Go for it, boss!

Category: Uncategorized

Jews and Israel: Death by Relativism

Posted on | July 19, 2010 | 13 Comments

Frank Luntz quoted by Evelyn Gordon at Commentary:

“The problem that I see is that so many parents in the Jewish community taught their kids not to judge. I’m going to say something that’s a little bit ideological, but I find that kids on the right are far more likely to stand up for Israel than kids on the left. Because kids on the right believe that there is an absolute right and wrong; this is how they’ve been raised.
“Kids on the left have been taught not to judge. Therefore those on the left will not judge between Israel and the Palestinians; those on the right will.”

I’m reminded of the old joke that a liberal is a man who considers it unfair to take his own side in an argument. And liberalism is still a quasi-religion for many Jews, producing a reflexive reaction: If conservatives are pro-Israel and anti-jihad, isn’t it incumbent on liberals to take the opposite stance? Melissa Clouthier writes:

Many Jews in particular have misidentified the problem of the Holocaust as a problem with beliefs themselves. A problem of believing anything too intensely is bad, they reason. So too much patriotism, too much nationalism, Zionism, too much religiosity, too much intensity around any idea is objectively destructive. 

Since Luntz’s comments were the result of his discussion with a group of Harvard undergrads, it’s important to point out that young people don’t know history and are thus easily propagandized, as I explained last month:

There are today in America many thousands of impressionable young liberals who, like Rachel Corrie, are predisposed to buy into the deadly lies that justify the “armed struggle.” They don’t remember the wars of 1967 and ‘73, and they know nothing of the real origins and history of modern Middle Eastern terrorism. They don’t know, for example, that Arafat was allied with Moscow during the Cold War and that the PLO (as well as the Assad regime in Syria) endorsed the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Having been propagandized in their schools to accept the twisted Hamas/Fatah version of Middle Eastern history, young liberals swallow the Zionism-is-racism anti-colonial claptrap . . . and easily imagine the Palestinian cause as the moral equivalent of the U.S. civil-rights movement.

“Confirmation bias” is a basic problem in this context: If you have a liberal worldview, you will tend to believe information that confirms that worldview, while ignoring or discounting contradictory information. And here is the point that Luntz’s audience of Harvard students has probably never considered: Intelligence does not inoculate you against error.

This is the self-flattering syllogism of the intellectual elite:

  • I am extremely intelligent;
  • I believe X; therefore
  • Anyone who doesn’t believe X is stupid.

Intelligence is not the same thing as knowledge, a commodity of which all young people have a meager supply, and even very intelligent young people can be easily seduced into error by providing them with carefully selected facts (and factoids) that prejudice their opinions. William F. Buckley Jr. once observed:

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 . . .

You see this phenomenon in action, for example, in the global warming debate. Many young people have been carefully indoctrinated — e.g., shown Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in science classes — and therefore refuse to credit any evidence that contradicts the bogus “hockey stick” alarmism.

As with global warming, so too with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The three-decade ascendancy of the Edward Said cult in Mideast studies has poisoned the academic well to such a degree that one can scarcely find an “expert” on the subject who is not tainted by it. Meanwhile, the veterans of the ’60s New Left have penetrated organized liberalism to such a degree that, vis-à-vis the Middle East, the Democratic Party is now more aligned with Sirhan Sirhan than with RFK.

Even the most intelligent young people are apt to be impressed with the enormous prestige of those numerous academic experts who present the Middle East conflict in the context of Arab victimhood. And if those young people have been raised within a liberal Democrat environment — remember that John Kerry got 74% of the Jewish vote in 2004 — their partisan and ideological allegiances will naturally make them sympathetic to the “Blame Israel First” crowd, who were among the most outspoken voices in the anti-Bush chorus during the past decade.

Thus we behold the astonishing spectacle of young Jews who eagerly align themselves with the Sirhan Sirhan wing of the Democratic Party.

Category: Education, Israel

Irish Debt Woes

Posted on | July 19, 2010 | 4 Comments

Not a Greece-style crisis, but not good news, either:

Ireland’s efforts to pull out of a deep economic slump suffered a setback Monday when a major credit agency downgraded the country’s bond rating, citing a weak banking system and rising debt.
Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Ireland one notch, to Aa2 from Aa1, although it remains comfortably above junk level. Moody’s also changed the outlook on the ratings to stable from negative.

More at the Guardian.

Category: Economics

Andy McCarthy’s Grand Jihad Is A Must-Read

Posted on | July 19, 2010 | 9 Comments

by Smitty

I just finished Chapter 9, ‘Not Such Strange Bedfellows’ in McCarthy’s book. The summary paragraph:

Revolutionaries of Islam and the Left make fast friends when there is a common enemy to besiege. Leftists, however are essentially nihilists who hazy vision prioritizes power over what is to be done with power. They are biddable. Islamists, who have very settled convictions about what is to be done with power, are much less so. Even their compromises keep their long-term goals in their sights. Thus do Leftists consistently overrate their ability to control Islamists. Factoring the common denominator, power, out of the equation, something always beats nothing.

Looking at these bedfellows, it’s been obvious for some time that each thinks the other a tool, and both are correct.
However, the notion of timeframe as a factor hadn’t occurred to me. This is a profound insight.
Also, I’m unsure that the corrosive nature of Lefty nihilism cannot, in the long run, have the same kind of destructive effect that it has had on Western civilization. I would expect that they depend on their seeming ability to bury almost anything in Critical Theory. Convincing the audience not to answer sophistries with the scimitar will be the challenge.

Category: Progressivism, Terrorism

Stenography as Journalism

Posted on | July 18, 2010 | 22 Comments

Agence France-Presse:

The Democrat’s House Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer, however urged a focus on a positive election year, calling to a move beyond the ongoing debate over racism in the conservative “Tea Party” movement that has divided voters.

Is there any such “ongoing debate”? Has it really “divided voters”? Why is this reporter just pushing Democratic Party agitprop?

Category: Neutral Objective Journalism, Tea Party
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