I am in mourning: Ronald Reagan, my only hero, has passed away. I loved that man. He was such a great gentleman. For my money he is the greatest President the USA has ever had. He won his war without a shot being fired. I will never forget him.




ANOTHER CHRISTIAN CONSERVATIVE

C.S. Lewis is mainly considered an able Christian apologist, which he was, but he was also an incisive conservative political critic and an opponent of the planned state which, like Hayek, he saw as ending in tyranny. Unlike Hayek, Lewis was no free market economist and approached social issues from a very different perspective. That he reached the same conclusions about planned states as Hayek from a different route only reinforces the argument.

Some quotes: "The modern state exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good--anyway, to do something to us or to make us do something... We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.... I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has 'the freeborn mind.' But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by the Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of the Government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology".

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JOHN KERRY

A New York reader has sent me a brief but penetrating analysis of the elitist and socialist thinking behind John Kerry's recent pamphlet A Call to service. Read it here.

More on John Kerry's dishonest attempts to exploit his fleeting presence in Vietnam here: "Larry L. Rose said: "If John Kerry allows this commercial to run, it will show the kind of person John Kerry is. That he allows his campaign team to lift Hispanic faces from a Caller-Times book, to violate copyright, and to violate the individual rights of those Hispanic veterans, is appalling."

"John Kerry's campaign strategists and top Democratic officials say their party is more unified than ever for the 2004 presidential election. Don't believe it, of course. Apparent desertions by Democrats backing independent candidate Ralph Nader are mounting, along with bitter grumblings from black and Hispanic leaders who say Mr. Kerry has taken them for granted. His troubles with an often-contentious political base do not end there."

John Kerry opposes medical research: "If Kerry's plan were implemented and America tried to piggyback on Canada's price controls, it would create an unprecedented health care disaster not just in Canada, but in the U.S. as well. American companies spend an average of $800 million to develop a new drug. They must be able to recoup that investment, which is why the price of a drug is so much higher than the simple cost of manufacturing a pill."

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ELSEWHERE

Leftist elitism again: Dick McDonald reproduces an excerpt from a WSJ article in which the head of Fox News replies to an attack on Fox: "John S. Carroll, the editor of the Los Angeles Times, recently gave a speech at the University of Oregon, in which he attacked Bill O'Reilly, Fox News Channel and me, the chairman of Fox News. However, Mr. Carroll obviously did not feel particularly restricted by facts, truth or sources.... In fact, the Fox News Channel today has 53% of the audience share of cable news. CNN and MSNBC divide up the rest. According to Mr. Carroll, that proves most Americans are therefore stupid and gullible. It's that elite, arrogant, condescending, self-serving, self-righteous, biased and wrong-headed view of Americans that causes viewers and readers to distrust media people like John Carroll."

Australian blogger Evil Pundit has reproduced an email he received from an American reader which powerfully evokes the sheer foaming rage that many American Leftists feel towards GWB. The successes of someone so different from them are just unbearable to these jealousy-consumed haters. And THEY are the ones who claim to admire "diversity"! There is also a quote here from American novelist John Updike about the New York literary scene in the Reagan era. He says it "seethed with barely suppressed anger and was audibly impatient with any utterance other than a straightforward condemnation of the Reagan administration". So the present cross-eyed rage is really nothing to do with GWB in particular. It is just their normal psychological state when they are not getting their own way.

There is an excellent short essay on The Belmont club about why Leftists are such murderous miseries. It echoes much that I have been saying and anybody who likes this blog should read it. One quote: "The naive scholar who searches for a consistent Leftist program will not find it. What there is consists only in the negation of the present"

I kind of like this unfortunate guy: It is a wonder that there are so few such protests against bureaucracy: "Heemeyer on Friday plowed the armor-plated bulldozer into the town and within two hours had knocked down or damaged nine buildings before the machine ground to a halt in the wreckage of a warehouse. City officials said he was angry over a zoning dispute and fines for city code violations at his business in the town about 50 miles west of Denver".

Agitprop is a good Canadian blog -- from the big frogpond of Montreal. I loved his post about the modern Canadian version of the ant & grasshopper tale.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

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