Keyword: ideology
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"I don't think people carry around with them a fixed ideology." That's what the president said. Standing up before the country in the wake of a nationwide repudiation, asked if there was anything he could learn from what the voters had said, he responded that Republican and Democrat didn't matter. And maybe they don't. But then he said, "I don't think people carry around with them a fixed ideology." What an interesting arrogance. What an exquisite contempt. What a fundamental misunderstanding of both the American heart and human nature. Because, yes Mr. President, most people do "carry around with them...
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It's easy to use the deceased to claim support for one's positions. The dead aren't around to deny, rebut, and refute false or misleading statements. William F. Buckley, Jr., intellectual giant and "maker" of the conservative movement, has of late become a crutch for statists and ruling-class elites to denigrate the Tea Parties and the surge of the constitutional, small-government conservative movement. Liberals trying to smear the Tea Party cause and constitutional, small-government conservative candidates by referring to Buckley are, however, attempting to rewrite history to suit their own agendas and ideology. For example, E.J. Dionne writes in Monday's Washington...
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Two or three years ago, if I tried to tell people that the problems in the public schools should be blamed on the bosses at the top, that is, the Education Establishment, I might not get too far. People would object, what about the unconcerned parents? The lazy kids? The unions? What about rock ‘n roll, drugs, the internet, cell phones, and teenage hormones? Surely, the elite educators mean well. They just get caught up in fads. You can’t suppose they let the schools get dumb on purpose. Well, that would mean a conspiracy; and that’s crazy. All my research,...
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It is time for a "Team B" approach to Islamist ideology. The strategy has worked before, against a similarly determined threat to freedom. In 1976, George H.W. Bush, then director of central intelligence, invited a group of known skeptics about the strategy of detente to review the classified intelligence regarding Soviet intentions and capabilities. The point was to provide an informed second opinion on U.S. policy toward the Kremlin. The conclusions of this experimental Team B study differed sharply from the government's regnant theory. The skeptics found that, pursuant to its communist ideology, the Soviet Union was determined to secure...
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In a review of the book "The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis" by Robert R Reilly , Spengler raises some excellent theological questions about why Islam is a cultural wasteland. Mainstream Islam rejected Greek-derived philosophy at the turn of the 12th century, when Abu Hamid al-Ghazali established a theology of divine caprice. In the normative Muslim view of things, Allah personally and immediately directs the motion of every molecule by his ineffable and incomprehensible will, according to the al-Ghazali synthesis, directly and without the mediation of natural law. Al-Ghazali abolished intermediate causes,...
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In "The Conservative Mind"(1953),a founding document of the American conservative movement,Russel Kirk assembled an array of major thinkers beginning with Edmund Burke and made a major statement. He proved that conservative thought in America existed,and even that such thought was highly intelligent--a demonstration very much needed at the time.
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As we celebrate Independence Day, I, perhaps like many others today, find myself pondering its significance. While many may be thinking back to the 1770s and the great many personal sacrifices and contributions American families made at the time toward the establishment of the United States, I have found my thoughts to be rooted in present times and, at the core, the seemingly ongoing trend away from independence. I believe there to be a fatal flaw in today’s groupthink. The flaw may simply be that there is too much groupthink. For a country founded in the spirit of autonomy, it...
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Today's liberal is the political expression of postmodernism and those we know as liberals tend to represent all the characteristics of postmodern thinking foisted on them by contemporary higher education, exposure to modern media etc. To successfully thwart modern (not classical) liberalism, some understanding of postmodern thought and its vulnerabilities must be considered and acted upon. Using this line of reasoning has helped me understand the liberal mindset and the stubborn incapacity of liberals to see something other than the truth of things. I haven't made many conversions, but the postmodern argument helps me make inroads as it takes the...
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'Obama Struggling to Show He's in Control," reads the headline on The Washington Post's story on Barack Obama's Thursday press conference, where most of the questions were about the Gulf oil spill. "Defensive, unauthoritative and equivocal," wrote Congressional Quarterly's Craig Crawford of Obama's performance. "He came across as a beleaguered bureaucrat in damage control." Uh-oh. People, even people in the Obama-friendly press, are beginning to say that the oil spill is Obama's Katrina. That it destroys his reputation for competence. Obama's press conference -- his first in the White House in 309 days -- didn't make him look any more...
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“A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women,” I wrote in a 2006 “Spengler” essay about Iranian prostitution. “The French sold their women to the German occupiers in 1940, and the Germans and Japanese sold their women to the Americans after World War II. The women of the former Soviet Union are still selling themselves in huge numbers. Hundreds of thousands of female Ukrainian "tourists" entered Germany after the then-foreign minister Joschka Fischer loosened visa standards in 1999.” It is a cultural marker of inestimable importance that the one Arab whose name every American knows is Rima...
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Elena Kagan ’81 got drunk on election night in 1980. Standing in the Brooklyn Academy of Music with her vodka and tonic, she watched Walter Cronkite usher in the news that Democratic candidate Elizabeth Holtzman had lost the race for one of New York’s Senate seats. And then she sat down and wept. Three decades later, Kagan is the first female solicitor general of the United States and one of the leading candidates for President Barack Obama’s nomination to fill the seat of U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, who is due to retire when the court’s term...
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I wish to present a proposition for reasoned debate. I think conservatives should be able to agree on it, but I fear many here do not in their bones accept it. I think it is a key to our ideological conflicts and the political and economic diseases of our time. Proposition - the income from capital is entirely legitimate. It flows to its recipients because they entirely deserve it for the valuable service they have provided. Any attempt to outlaw it, redistribute it, destroy it, or legislate it out of existence or all recognition, is unjust on its face. It...
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In his masterful second volume study of Hitler, Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis, Ian Kershaw discusses a phenomenon called "working towards the Führer," in which every Nazi Party organization, member and office automatically, with little or no prompting or prodding by Hitler or his inner circle, worked to realize the ends and policies articulated by Hitler before and after he rose to power in 1933. It was automatic, because to disagree with or have reservations about a single, even minor aspect of Nazi ideology was to court reprimand, censure, dismissal, or even death. Agreement with those ends and policies was nearly a...
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I’m a glutton for punishment. I could have decided to slouch along the sidelines of ministry and watch the many controversies within the church zip past. Perhaps peeking over the pew on occasion and catching a slight breeze off the mini-tornadoes of debate that exist under the umbrella that is American Evangelicalism. Public prayer, the roles of women, the role of the Holy Spirit, capital punishment, responses to poverty, HIV/AIDS, divorce, adult or infant baptism, health or wealth . . . . . . But you see I’m optimistic to a fault so I have decided to throw myself into...
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Former New York City mayor and presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani minced no words when it came to the Obama administration's massive health care overhaul. In an exclusive interview with CNBC's Maria Bartiromo, Giuliani stated that, plain and simple, it "was an ideological act by the Congress" liberal Democrats "are very happy about." "Instead of privatizing - which is what our government should be doing - we're taking major roles of the economy for the United States government," Giuliani told "Closing Bell" anchor Bartiromo. "And it is not an exaggeration to say we are starting to look more like a European...
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The president is surrounded by acolytes of the Cult of Obama. They consider him to be a "transformational figure" who need not sully himself with the usual rules of politics. The president agrees, rejecting suggestions that he recalibrate his Olympian ambitions. That's not me saying that, nor one of my knuckle-dragging, baby-eating, right-wing brethren. It's Dana Milbank, the liberal Washington Post writer widely seen as Maureen Dowd in drag by most conservatives. Milbank wrote a column Feb. 21 arguing that all the president's problems could be attributed to a single factor. "Obama's first year fell apart in large part because...
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I finally read the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Having read several commentaries on Marxism I felt it time to read the actual Manifesto. Considering the nexus of all communist ideology is the Communist Manifesto, and given the vast number of its "followers," I prepared myself for a deeply intellectual assault on my capitalist ideals. Surely, the bastion of all communism would be based upon solid reasoning, keen economic knowledge, and adept sociology...right? Let's just say I was grossly over-prepared. For those more accustomed to Twitter than Tolstoy, I will provide my synopsis in two sections: one...
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Sarah Palin just came out and told us it's time to pick a party, and she is absolutely right... Republicanism is not Conservatism We all have our own ideologies. When they broadly overlap with others we make common cause via a political movement or party. Our two major political parties only imperfectly concord with ideology. Rather, they are the two vessels, right and left, that carry candidates to victory or defeat. They are the two big tents. Given this True or False question, the only right answer for a conservative is the GOP. I think we criticize politicians too much...
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WASHINGTON -- Retiring Sen. Evan Bayh yesterday denounced "brain-dead partisanship" in Congress, saying the pettiness and focus on personal gain are keeping the institution in a state of dysfunction. "There's just too much brain-dead partisanship, tactical maneuvering for short-term political advantage rather than focusing on the greater good, and also just strident ideology," the Indiana Democrat told ABC News, a day after stunning the political world by announcing he won't seek re-election. "The extremes of both parties have to be willing to accept compromises from time to time to make some progress, because some progress for the American people is...
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'I am not an ideologue," President Obama insisted at his truly refreshing confab with the Republican caucus last Friday. When he heard some incredulous murmurs and chuckles from the audience in response to the idea that the most sincerely ideological president in a generation is no ideologue, he added a somewhat plaintive, "I'm not." The president's defensiveness isn't surprising. He holds his self-definition as a pragmatist dear -- and not just because it polls well. It's clear from interviews that he's fond of the notion that he is above ideological squabbles and is a clear-eyed appraiser of facts and adjudicator...
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