Vox Popoli

The biggest problem with the current Democratic leadership is not that it has lost the will to fight but that it has lost the power to think. When was the last intellectually innovative idea you heard from Nancy Pelosi, the current minority leader, or, for that matter, from Dick Gephardt, her predecessor?

They haven’t really come up with anything new since Marx and Keynes. Everything since then is just implementation. Of course, if they were capable of thinking, perhaps the fact that their entire progressive edifice is constructed upon a foundation of logical equine ejectus might slow them down a little.

Probably not.

Bob Novak has doubts about the second term:

The inaugural address, which evoked lavish praise from many Republicans attending the ceremonies, sounded less conservative than neo-conservative in advocating a global crusade for democracy. But it was not the speech that generated unease among some of President Bush’s staunchest supporters. A re-elected president’s speech at his inauguration is not supposed to be an ideological manifesto.

Instead, concern about Bush’s second-term course is derived from a variety of signals, small and large, coming from the White House. None of them separately signifies a president abandoning the principles upon which he was elected. But taken together, they generate doubt and more than a little unease on the right….

It cannot be disputed that George W. Bush’s tone has changed since the election. The 22nd Amendment, prohibiting a third presidential term, is a two-way street. I reported last month that even loyal Republican lawmakers feel less constrained to follow a term-limited president. But that same president is under far less pressure to obey the demands of his political base.

Of course, that same president almost completely ignored the demands of his political base in his first term, so I see no reason to believe that he’ll even bother throwing the occasional bone to conservatives now that he no longer needs them. This is the drawback of falling for the “lesser of two evils” philosophy; no matter what the president does, his defenders will always argue that conservatives should be happy because the other guy might have been even worse.

And so the country continues to slide to the Left and down towards the landfill of history….

I was poking around the blogroll and discovered this gem from the Baseball Savant:

My football predictions are: Colts over Pats; Jets over Steelers, Vikings over Eagles, and Rams over Falcons. Those seem farfetched, but I really think the Colts are due to beat New England and Big Ben has to lose at some point. Plus, I really like Herm Edwards and want him to do well against everyone he plays against except for the Colts. I have to admit some ulterior motives here in that if the Colts and Jets win, then the AFC Championship game would be in Indianapolis! Sweet! Without Terrell Owens, the Vikings have a very good chance at beating the Eagles. The Falcons just look to be a very average team despite their record.

Stick to baseball, my friend. Stick to baseball. I haven’t made any playoff picks, mostly because I’ve been busy and I hate to think about the end of the season, but I’d been expecting a Steelers-Eagles Super Bowl since the first Steeler-Patriot game this year. The Eagles will shut down Mikey-Mike without too much trouble – they beat the Vikes while practically sleep-walking – so the only question is if Belicheck can come up with a plan to stop the Steelers running game.

Now, a week ago, I would have picked the Steelers, but last week was a powerful and timely reminder that Cowher is not a playoff coach, while Belicheck most certainly is. Rothlisberger also came up small while Brady is easily the best big-game QB since Montana.

Patriots vs Eagles.

UPDATE – As I expected, no more, no less. And on a related note, this tidbit from the Baseball Savant made me laugh: Do I dare make more picks for this weekend? You betcha! I’ll go with the Steelers and Falcons! So I guess that means the Patriots and Eagles will face one another in the Super Bowl. The Baseball Savant and his football picks remind me of my brother’s driving directions. Ask him which way to go and do precisely the opposite. You’ll get there every time. He was rather bitter when I put this theory into practice once when we were lost, but he quit complaining when it became clear that it worked.

So, Savant, who do you like in the Super Bowl?

Somewhere in the shadows of the White House and the Capitol this week, a small group of super-secret commandos stood ready with state-of-the-art weaponry to swing into action to protect the presidency, a task that has never been fully revealed before.

As part of the extraordinary army of 13,000 troops, police officers and federal agents marshaled to secure the inauguration, these elite forces were poised to act under a 1997 program that was updated and enhanced after the Sept. 11 attacks, but nonetheless departs from how the military has historically been used on American soil…. The precise number of these Special Operations forces in Washington this week is highly classified, but military officials say the number is very small. The special-missions units belong to the Joint Special Operations Command, a secretive command based at Fort Bragg, N.C., whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force….

A civil liberties advocate who was told about the program by a reporter said that he had no objections to the program as described to him because its scope appeared to be limited to supporting the counterterrorism efforts of civilian authorities.

Oh, well as long as its scope appears to be limited, I’m sure it’s fine. Where do they find these naive idiots? I don’t know when and I don’t know why and I don’t know what reason will be given to the public, but I have no doubt that these super troopers will eventually be shooting Americans who want nothing more than to mind their own business.

Doesn’t it bother anyone that the past predictions of the paranoid tin-foil brigade are proving to be far more accurate than those of the nice, normal, mentally-balanced naysayers? Secret commando force operating inside America? Whooh, I bet they fly in black UN helicopters with alien pilots!

Some blogs, including Evangelical Outpost, have recently addressed Greg Boyd’s surprising January 11th comments with regards to abortion. While I am pleased to consider Greg a friend of mine, it will come as a surprise to no one that I am opposed to his notion of seeking a political compromise on first-term abortion.

However, if you don’t know him, there are a few things that you should keep in mind about Greg before leaping to incorrect conclusions. First, he is an extremely intelligent, intellectually honest man with a truly open mind. If he has made erroneous statements about biology or brain death, that is because he simply doesn’t know the facts. Nor do I have any reason to believe that he would be up on the latest science, as science has never been a particular interest of his. I wouldn’t expect him to make precisely accurate statements on astrophysics either.

Second, for all that he regularly finds himself in intellectual and theological controversies, Greg is a uniter by instinct. He is not what most people consider to be pro-choice, instead, I would interpret his words as attempting to help reduce the number of abortions by finding a limit that reasonable minds on both sides of the issue could agree on. Indeed, you’ll never sell NARAL, NOW or Planned Parenthood on outlawing second- and third-trimester abortion and a compromise such as Greg has suggested would save an awful lot of unborn children. From a sheerly practical, life-saving perspective, the compromise concept has a lot to offer.

Third, Greg is relatively apolitical. He’s read my novels – one is even dedicated to him – but I doubt he’s ever read even one of my columns. He may not even remember that I write one. I doubt he realizes that compromise is simply not a possibility, not because the pro-lifers will never go for it, but because the pro-abortion forces can’t. Eliminating second- and third-trimester abortions would put a large number of abortion clinics out of business and give immense momentum to the pro-life movement, and since the passionate abortionettes realize this they’ll never be able to give an inch on the matter. They wouldn’t even back down on partial-birth abortion, you may recall.

In any event, Greg is a good man and has been used by God to lead thousands of men and women to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. He has been a large and positive influence on many lives, including mine, and I will absolutely stand by him even though I have little regard for this particular idea of his.

A reader writes to Jay Nordlinger:

“Jay, in your Impromptus about conservative caring vs. liberal caring, there is a whole arena that you don’t touch, and understandably so: that of religion. Over my life, I have attended three churches: a liberal church in a liberal denomination, a moderate church in a liberal denomination, and a conservative church in a conservative denomination. Need I answer any of the following questions? Which church gives the most to missions? Which has the most volunteers for missions and community services? As a bonus — which is the most ethnically diverse?

I was thinking about this today myself, interestingly enough. We’ve been attending the same evangelical church for three years now, and only this morning did it occur to me that we have a rather large percentage of black people attending regularly. The reason this hadn’t occurred to me before is that I know most of these people, and I’ve tended to think of them separately as “the Brazilians”, “the French-speaking family”, “the real Africans” and so forth instead of lumping them together into one big group. You simply don’t confuse a French-speaking man from the Ivory Coast with a man from south Minneapolis just because they both have dark skin, after all.

And you’ll never confuse anyone with the Brazilians, who are probably the largest single group there. They’re just as exuberant as the stereotype imagines them to be, they won’t sing without dancing and they throw in enough “glory to Gods” and “amens” during the sermons to put a fifth-generation Southern Baptist to shame.

Meanwhile, you can’t find anyone who is more than three generations removed from Scandinavia at your average pro-gay, left-wing Lutheran church.

But it’s the evangelicals who are the racists, of course. This we know, for the media tells us so….

And by cats, I mean pussies. I remember two days my senior year of high school when we had 23 inches of snow on one day and 24 the next. School was canceled the second day, but was right back on again the next day.

Space Bunny was watching Fox last night and I found myself marveling at the disaster-like tone of the reporting, until one of the reporters dramatically stuck a ruler in the snow and reported that although it wasn’t snowing at the moment, they’d already received THREE inches in Washington D.C. I’m only surprised they didn’t call out the National Guard and declare martial law.

I’m truly sorry, by the way, but when I heard about the incredible number of accidents taking place in North Carolina following a single inch of snow, my first thought was: no wonder the South lost. Driving on ice is really quite simple.

1. drive 65 percent of normal speed.

2. pump the brakes – tap – tap – tap – don’t stomp on them.

3. steer into the slide and switch when the back end does. It’s a rhythm thing.

Chuck is sensitive on the Dear Leader’s behalf:

…nobody enjoys a sore loser, compadre.

P.S. If you really must call someone “Dear Leader”, I’d suggest you emigrate to someplace they’ll appreciate it.

Who’s sore? I predicted George Delano’s re-election long before any of the pundits were willing to commit to a candidate, I never wavered from it throughout all the ups and downs of the daily polls and I was proven right in the end.

As for Dear Leader, I assert that it is the natural nickname for a second-generation political leader who, as William F. Buckley has opined, holds the right to rule unquestioned. Like Kim Jong Il, the president considers himself to be a friend of the Chinese government, is the primary symbol of a red state movement and believes in a powerful and activist central government.

It also fits the passionate way in which the Three Monkey sorts absolutely love the guy. I mean, Ronald Reagan was my idea of a near-perfect president, but the enthusiasm with which some conservative writers write about George Bush the Younger manages to put even the over-the-top Clintonistas to shame. Okay, maybe not the one reporter who was wishing she could have been in Monica’s place, but let’s be honest here; until her surprisingly skeptical piece on the inauguration we were all expecting something in a similar vein from Peggy Noonan.

But I do find it intriguing that the president’s defenders are already so sensitive that a deficiency of enthusiasm for him should be considered grounds for exile. Although I suppose that’s a step forward from the notion that a defiency of enthusiasm for Middle East nation-building should be grounds for execution.

The Dear Leader manages to alarm even Peggy Noonan:

Ending tyranny in the world? Well that’s an ambition, and if you’re going to have an ambition it might as well be a big one. But this declaration, which is not wrong by any means, seemed to me to land somewhere between dreamy and disturbing. Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn’t expect we’re going to eradicate it any time soon. Again, this is not heaven, it’s earth.

There were moments of eloquence: “America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.” “We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery.” And, to the young people of our country, “You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs.” They have, since 9/11, seen exactly that.

And yet such promising moments were followed by this, the ending of the speech. “Renewed in our strength–tested, but not weary–we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.”

This is–how else to put it?–over the top. It is the kind of sentence that makes you wonder if this White House did not, in the preparation period, have a case of what I have called in the past “mission inebriation.” A sense that there are few legitimate boundaries to the desires born in the goodness of their good hearts.

One wonders if they shouldn’t ease up, calm down, breathe deep, get more securely grounded. The most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what is actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not.

And rather more to the point, history is most eloquent with regards to those who seek to establish Heaven on Earth through the use of force. They always end up unleashing all Hell instead.