Author: VD

Gimli on demographics: “The population of Germany at the end of the century is going to be 56 percent of what it is now. The population of France will decline to about 52 percent.” Meanwhile, Muslim immigrants are having babies at a much faster clip, so that in time, they may become the majority population throughout Europe. “Last year, 56 percent of the babies born in Brussels were Muslim,” Rhys-Davies notes. “In a matter of 20-50 years, we are going to see two to three countries become predominately Muslim — Holland, France, and possibly Germany.”

I suspect one reason for the EU’s fast push for complete control over its member states is in order to have a non-democratic mechanism in place before the Muslim vote becomes the majority in those countries. As one of my liberal friends pointed out over dinner last night, Turkey is an interesting litmus test on this theory. There’s no reason that Turkey should not be admitted to the EU, if the EU’s raison d’etre is truly economic. We’ll see.

Rod Dreher sees both sides: My fellow conservative Dallasite Tara B. Ross has a piece out today warning that President Bush has no idea how much he’s angered his base with all his crazy spending. But James Lileks, waxing Podhoretzian, tells right-wingers considering not voting for Bush to think about the importance of the war and get over themselves already.

Rod’s a good guy. Ross is correct. Lileks is a superficial analyst who blindly swallows the ridiculous Republican excuse. First, we’re not still at war, and only someone with almost complete ignorance of military history would attempt to argue that we are. When you can’t even state with assurance with whom we are at war, when Congress has declared no war, we’re not at war. If we haven’t even bothered closing our borders to thousands of people crossing it illegally every day, then we’re not at war. Yes, our troops are sitting in their bases playing garrison in over 100 countries and performing police actions; yes, there’s still some low intensity combat here and there just as there always is. Yes, some troops are being killed. Were we at war in 1983 when we lost over 200 Marines in Lebanon? Were we at war when we killed 20 or 30 Philippinos getting Marcos out?

Does anyone consider World War II to have continued into 1946? After all, our troops were still in Germany and Japan and there were plenty of Nazi leaders still unfound. To argue that we are still at war months after the complete defeat of the Afghani and Iraqi regimes is bizarre. But even if we accept the notion that this undeclared bug hunt equates to full-blown war, how does it possibly excuse Bush governing Democrat-style? It’s nothing but sleight of hand!

Republicans need to get over the notion that a) we are at war and b) war justifies abandoning your principles. There’s no reason to believe Kerry is less likely to fight a necessary war than Bush – Democrats have gotten us into more wars than Republicans have anyhow. As for me, I’m not considering not voting for George Delano, I’m absolutely not voting for him.

Buck writes: Here is a big thank you for the tips on flash cards for teaching my son phonics. I am having what I consider great success with them which translated means great fun. The instructions said that for a child my son’s age 2.5 not to correct him. That’s just fine as his mispronunciations are hysterical. He loves this game we play. When I get home from work he will go get his cards from his room and run up to me saying “play cards daddy play cards!” What a blast.

That’s great, and I’m glad he’s learning so well, but don’t be afraid of correcting him. Don’t make a big deal of it, just say the correct pronunciation, let him repeat it once, and go on to the next one. I remember “fiveteen” being one that took a while to go away – of course, you kind of miss it once they learn how to get it right.

At this rate, your son will be reading The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by the time he’s four. Children love to learn, they really do. It’s only after years of sitting around in a classroom that teaches them to hate it – not that a classroom should be confused with actual learning.

David Limbaugh writes: The Democrats’ unity and the motivation of their base presents a problem for the GOP, which is exacerbated by the restlessness of its own base, some of which has been appreciably alienated by Bush’s gravitation to the left on education, campaign finance reform, trade, overall domestic spending and immigration, to name a few. I don’t think too many of these disaffected conservatives are irretrievable.

One of these days conservatives will stop falling for the “at least we’re not the Democrats” argument. Perhaps it will be in 2004, perhaps not, but it won’t work forever. The Law of the Sea Treaty is only the latest abomination that George Delano has embraced – of the five most important issues that I see, there is only a slight difference between Bush and Kerry on one of them.

But at least Mr. Limbaugh recognizes the truth of George Delano’s governing philosophy, when he admits: Within no time at all, the Democrats were back to hating George Bush as usual, even though he extended numerous olive branches to them and was implementing much of their domestic agenda.

So, we have a Republican president, Republican House and Republican Senate, and they devote themselves to implementing a Democratic domestic agenda. Interesting.

Daniel Weigel writes in Reason: Dispatches From the Culture Wars fundamentally misunderstands politics, pop culture, and the connections between them. By equating aesthetics with ideology, Goldberg makes a common but serious mistake: He thinks you can tell a person’s politics from the music she listens to.

The fact that a Christian Libertarian would write a song about a basically Japanese notion and title it after a Buddhist concept must confuse the smack out of Mr. Goldberg. I like Mozart and Metallica. I like Duran Duran and Dvorak. It signifies nothing, except that the Baby Boomers still haven’t gotten over themselves. Which is hardly news.

I can’t wait for the coming “Dentures are cool!” phase. I swear, that entire generation is 55 going on 16. No wonder the country is so messed up.

DRUDGE: What I represent, if I see it correctly, is an independent voice who’s willing to take on presidents and networks, and reveal ratings they don’t want you to see.

PAGLIA: It’s so true. The Drudge Report has dramatized the process of censorship that’s going on, the filtering of the news by established news organizations. I used to think, at the beginning of the ’90s, that we had a relatively free press and that people were out to make their reputations in the Woodward-Bernstein model. But I no longer think that. Most of the reporters on the networks and in main northeastern newspapers are company men — shmoozing careerists who are desperately afraid to rock the boat.

This is one of the many reasons I love Camille Paglia. She isn’t afraid to admit that she can be wrong about things, that she changes her mind. This interview is definitely of interest if you appreciate either her or Matt Drudge.

I have to thank both Si and Sarah, who were quite helpful in providing material for next week’s column, entitled The Axis of Liberal. I’d forgotten just how perfectly poisonous dear old Jean-Jacques could be.

From the Miami New Times on Drudge: New York’s downtown milieu left a lasting imprint on most people who passed through it, and while the experience may not have transformed them into flaming revolutionaries, it usually left them comfortably within “Bill Clinton’s America” and injected a healthy fear of the “GWB-ies.” To hear Drudge throw in his ideological lot with the latter tribe simply seems unfathomable, particularly when he glides from effusive praise of borderline reactionary Georgia Rep. Bob Barr to singing the lyrics of the house classic “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life” — a veritable gay-nightclub anthem. Drudge says there’s no inherent conflict. “I take this music seriously,” he insists. “In fact I take this music so seriously that I don’t want to see some shirtless freak tweaking. That kind of ruins it for me — club music is the classical music of our age.”

If they can’t wrap their little minds around the fact that Matt Drudge likes club music, I wonder how they’d manage to survive the notion that I wrote three songs that hit the Billboard top 40 dance chart. Because, as we all know, only left-liberals are cool in the city. It’s a degenerate Marxian notion – although in this case, it’s more likely a high school concept – that one is somehow defined by one’s music.

And, of course, the mere existence of the Queer Party Friends would probably make their heads explode.

From the Miami New Times article on Matt Drudge: “And it took just two fingers, a modem, and guts.” He then adds with a snarl: “And not giving a shit!” That sentiment is precisely what alarmed many in the media.

Matt is right. While there certainly are efforts on the part of editors and producers to keep voices of the right and other dangerous notions out of the public eye, it is primarily self-censorship on the part of journalists of all stripes that keeps people from learning about the truth of the world around them.

Lack of fear among the serfs always alarms the masters.

This one is open to everyone since we’re unlikely to have any genuine defenders, but today is not a day for critiques or sarcasm, just serious answers as if you were attempting to defend the subject under discussion.

Why is it unfair to use the history of the Soviet Union to judge communism? In what ways was the Soviet Union not “true” communism? What would make for a better example of true communism in the real world?