Author: VD

I’m really not enamored of the serious one-man podcasts. I’ve never been into listening to talk radio and have little interest in trying to imitate it. However, I quite like what the Sports Guy’s podcasts have evolved into, so I can see some value in doing something similar, talking to a rotating group of reliably entertaining individuals.

The White Buffalo, in particular, would soon be an Internet superstar.

Anyhow, what are some of the subjects you’d be interested in hearing discussed, and who are some of the people you’d be interested in hearing me speak with about them? I’m not saying I’ll do it, I’m just kicking some ideas around.

John Lott notes George Bush’s most egregious betrayal yet:

On Friday, the Bush administration’s Justice Department entered into the fray over the District of Columbia’s 1976 handgun ban by filing a brief to the Supreme Court that effectively supports the ban. The administration pays lip service to the notion that the Second Amendment protects gun ownership as an “individual right,” but their brief leaves the term essentially meaningless….

Worried about the possibility that a Supreme Court decision supporting the Second Amendment as an individual right could “cast doubt on the constitutionality of existing federal legislation,” the Department of Justice felt it necessary to head off any restrictions on government power right at the beginning.

George Bush is a traitor to his party, to the people who elected him and his nation. However, he has certainly done yeoman’s work in preparing the way for the next ascendant to the Cherry Blossom Throne. Don’t be surprised when she makes aggressive use of the powers that he has prepared for her.

I was amused to receive the following email from someone at BenBella:

From this morning to right now, the book has moved up more than 300,000 spots on the Amazon ranking!

You know, if they’re that happy about TIA’s movement into the top 200,000, I imagine they’ll be downright delighted about what will transpire this weekend. One nice thing about working with a smaller publishing house is that there’s not only a lot more attention to detail, but also genuine enthusiasm about little things that no one would even notice at the giant publishers.

Anyhow, I am informed that the pre-orders are beginning to show up now, so I’d encourage those of you who have read it to let us know what you think about it here, and to post a review at Amazon as well. It would certainly be nice to have something to counter-balance the inevitable one-star reviews from the non-readers. Amazon really should have a simple check-box for the morons of the left and right alike that would state the following:

“I have not read this, but I know it is a Bad Book because the title indicates the author has probably written something I don’t like. I wish this book had never been published and I hope no one reads it.”

Speaking of amusement, I have a feeling that this guy is going to be somewhat conflicted about the book as well. I am a gamer-for-life and as with the other languages I speak, it occasionally shows. I don’t have a problem with Christians who object to this, but my impression is that the man who referred to some of his own critics as sons of vipers understands perfectly well why I refer to certain individuals in a specific way.

I have nothing but the back of my hand and a dismissive snort of contempt for those who will inevitably attempt to dismiss my case because of the insufficiently respectful manner in which it is made. As Jonah Goldberg has recently experienced, there will be critics who are very quick to point out that I am not an academic. That’s quite true, so there’s no rational grounds for expecting me to abide by academia’s prissy rhetorical etiquette.

By the way, this current list of Amazon’s top ten best-selling books is why I don’t tend to worry too much about how my books sell.

1. Happy for No Reason: 7 Steps to Being Happy from the Inside Out
2. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
3. Eat This Not That: Thousands of Simple Food Swaps That Can Save You 10, 20, 30 Pounds-or More!
4. A Thousand Splendid Suns
5. Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time
6. Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
7. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
8. The Appeal
9. Water for Elephants: A Novel
10. Plum Lucky (Stephanie Plum Novels)

If I simply wanted to sell books, I’d write a work of “non-fiction” dedicated to explaining how fat, mature women are the truly sexy sophisticates of l’amore, a tell-all about my summer of hot, passionate romance with a sweetly chunky, middle-aged American woman in the Cinque Terre.

Mark Levin apparently wouldn’t know a real conservative if it cut his taxes:

“It comes down to three choices in Michigan tomorrow: Romney, Huckabee, and McCain. And there’s just no question Romney is the conservative of the three – there’s just no question.”

If the question is which of these three men is the conservative: the liberal New England flip-flopper, the Southern Social Gospelteer or the speech-silencing Dems best friend, then the correct answer is NONE OF THE FREAKING ABOVE!

Meanwhile, a few posts up, Byron York notes the following: “Romney has all sorts of proposals that will make the federal government a virtual partner with Detroit’s ailing auto industry. A lot of what he says here won’t sit well with free-market conservatives.

As opposed to what sort of conservatives? Planned-economy conservatives? Even Pat Buchanan just wants protection against foreign products, not government-run domestic industries.

So squealed Peter King:

“I just want to tell you one thing,” Ruprecht, a 39-year-old optometrist from LaCrosse told me, his eyes crystal clear. “When Brett Favre retires, I will cry. In fact, the day he retires I will call in sick. I won’t be able to work.”

Now we had built up a little bit of trust and had been talking for a while. Here came the big guns. “This is going to sound weird,” he said. “I dream about this guy. I dream that I’m going shopping with him.”

I like football as much as anyone. I love football. On days when I can’t watch football, I play Maddens. (Okay, I often play Maddens on days when I watch football too.) I probably throw the pigskin around outside every other day; Spacebunny may look like an SI model but she doesn’t throw like a girl. There are even Packers owners in the family.

But mamas, this is why you don’t let your babies grow up to be Packer Backers.

It wasn’t hard to see this one coming. However, I think the American public is wearying of all the scare talk, so they’ll probably need to stage another Maine/Lusitania/Tonkin/Northwoods if they’re going to get everyone to bite on Patriot Act III:

Spychief Mike McConnell is drafting a plan to protect America’s cyberspace that will raise privacy issues and make the current debate over surveillance law look like “a walk in the park,” McConnell tells The New Yorker in the issue set to hit newsstands Monday….

At issue, McConnell acknowledges, is that in order to accomplish his plan, the government must have the ability to read all the information crossing the Internet in the United States in order to protect it from abuse. Congressional aides tell The Journal that they, too, are also anticipating a fight over civil liberties that will rival the battles over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Fortunately, freedom lovers have a trump card this time around. When it’s the government and national security versus free images of naked women, you have to bet on the latter. I can already imagine the hissy fits being thrown when I write the requisite “In Defense of Internet Porn” article.

Jonah Goldberg correctly nails one of his critics, whose common, but erroneous criticism depends entirely on American intellectual parochialism:

Then there’s the omnipresent canard that I must be wrong because of fascism’s “overwhelming anti-liberalism.” Neiwert is again displaying either his ignorance or his dishonesty. It is absolutely true that a great many academic definitions — Ernst Nolte’s “fascist negations” for example — cite fascism’s anti-liberalism. And it is true that Mussolini and Hitler spoke of their disdain for liberalism many times, and there are many quotes to that effect. But guess what? These two European statesmen were speaking in — wait for it! — a European context where liberalism generally means limited government: classical or “Manchester” liberalism. They were most emphatically not talking about progressivism or socialism, which are the correct label for American liberalism and/or the American left (as I demonstrate at length in my book).

This argument about fascism being “anti-liberal” has popped up in the comments here as well. It’s not actually a coherent argument so much as it’s a profession of historical ignorance. Imagine how confused educated-but-ignorant left-wingers of the future are going to be once both “conservative” comes to mean socialism as well as “liberal”.

Robert Bork, a Romney supporter, was on the radio Friday night; the judge argues that neither McCain nor Huckabee are conservatives.

He’s quite right. What both Bork and Lopez, who also supports Romney, fail to point out is that neither are the New York liberal Rudy Giuliani or the Massachusetts liberal Mitt Romney.

I always make a practice of pre-ordering my own books from Amazon to alert me as to when the book actually becomes available, which is usually prior to the scheduled release date. After getting an email from them informing me that The Irrational Atheist was on its way, I talked with the Original Cyberpunk and we decided to move the TIA surge forward to this coming weekend, the 19th and 20th. The OC will post the relevant instructions for everyone who is interested in participating on his blog and I’ll link to them once they’re up.

If you just can’t wait, hey, go ahead and order one now and give the second one to a friend or whatever, but I’d really prefer for you to participate in the surge if you’re only intending to buy one. Yes, of course I will make some money off these book sales, but that’s honestly of tertiary significance because the importance of the surge and the book’s ultimate success is directly tied to my ability to publish – not write – more books. Regardless of how TIA is received by the market, I will always continue writing and making my books available electronically, but publishers tend to place a certain priority on actually selling dead tree copies. So, if you want to see more of my work in print, please seriously consider ordering several copies of TIA from Amazon next weekend.

In the interest of putting my royalties where my mouth and my position on IP are, I’m very pleased to inform you that Glenn, my very open-minded and forward-thinking publisher at BenBella Books, graciously worded the book contract in such a way as to give me the right to release the complete electronic text of The Irrational Atheist in multiple formats on the book’s official launch date. This will be done in a Radiohead-style pay-what-you-want format, which includes the ability to pay nothing if you like. There is absolutely no obligation to pay anything, so critics and fans alike may download the ebook for free in good conscience if they so choose. Any proceeds derived from these downloads will be divided between BenBella Books and me just like any other book revenues.

Thank you very much for your enthusiasm, your support and even your criticism. Without those three things, TIA would never have been written, let alone published. As far as critical response to the book goes, you probably already know that John Derbyshire, an atheist, named TIA one of his 2007 holiday recommendations for NRO. So, it may further interest you to know that the philosopher Jacob Needleman, the author of The American Soul, had this to say about TIA:

“Mr. Day has made a much-needed contribution to the religious/atheist controversy by significantly raising the intellectual level of the entire debate.”

I was, of course, delighted that Dr. Needleman didn’t happen to mention anything about the way I lowered its tone. It’s probably safe to say that this is the only book on the subject which begins with an unprintable quote from Tupac Shakur.

Having demonstrated that he is no conservative in nearly every possible way and taken every opportunity to assault American liberties, George W. Bush now attacks the Second Amendment:

Since “unrestricted’ private ownership of guns clearly threatens the public safety, the 2nd Amendment can be interpreted to allow a variety of gun restrictions, according to the Bush administration.

The argument was delivered by U.S. Solicitor General Paul D. Clement in a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in the ongoing arguments over the legality of a District of Columbia ban on handguns in homes, according to a report from the Los Angeles Times. Clement suggested that gun rights are limited and subject to “reasonable regulation” and said all federal limits on guns should be upheld.

“Given the unquestionable threat to public safety that unrestricted private firearm possession would entail, various categories of firearm-related regulation are permitted by the 2nd Amendment,” he wrote in the brief, the Times reported.

As you all know, I never trusted George W. Bush from the very beginning. I tried to warn everyone about him, starting with my first political column written in September 2001. Very, very few listened, insisting that he was a secret small-government conservative with a double-secret plan to hoodwink those evil big-government liberals.

Do you still have confidence that the Supreme Court judges he appointed will be either pro-life or pro-gun? I don’t.

I cannot stand George Bush, I dislike him every bit as much as the leftists who fail to understand that he’s essentially on their side and call him Chimpy Bushitler or whatever do. But I also have a deep and abiding contempt for those who call themselves conservatives and continue to support him and his fellows – Giuliani, McCain, Romney, Huckabee, and yes, Thompson – who will govern in exactly the same treacherous manner that Bush has. You want war? Oh, they will give you wars a plenty, both at home and abroad!

Now, the Manhattan conservatives at places like National Review, Fox News, FrontPage and Townhall* will assure you that this just isn’t so, because times have changed and that conservatism must evolve as it moves forward into the future and so forth. What they won’t tell you is that what this “conservatism” is evolving into is nothing more than the progressive all-encompassing vision of the Platonic Left.

I readily admit that there are a lot more of them, they’re all much better-known and more highly regarded than I am and they’re much better connected in Washington D.C. than I will ever be. So, it’s perfectly understandable that most conservatives will be inclined to believe what the conservative commentariat is trumpeting rather than heed my warnings. I simply ask them to consider one question before they blithely trundle off to repeat their previous mistakes:

Who was correct about George W. Bush?

* I am not saying that every columnist or staff writer associated with these media outlets is a faux conservative, only that they appear to outnumber the genuine conservatives there.