NOAH'S ARK RUNS AGROUND

Maybe I have an overdeveloped sense of humour but one of the funniest columns I have read recently is this one by Timothy Noah. Our Tim just cannot figure out why so many working class Americans vote GOP. With typical Leftist condescension, he is amazed that they are not just animated cash-registers. He goes through the explanations for conservatism put forward by Leftist psychologists -- summarized in the absurd "Berkeley study" -- but in the end concedes that the explanations concerned are indeed absurd. His ark just ends up high and dry with nowhere to go.

He really should read Disraeli -- that great Conservative friend of the workers of over a century ago and one of Britain's greatest Prime Ministers. Dizzy could have told him that the workers are perfectly capable of seeing that what is bad for their country is bad for them too and it takes no great insight to see that the shifty characters who infest the Democratic party are bad for America. Most of them don't even LIKE America! Taranto had a laugh at poor Tim too.

Update

I suppose I should have mentioned that have done a fair bit of academic research into working-class conservatism. Some of the articles concerned are here and here and here and here

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ELSEWHERE

Taranto has updated his comments on the way Chrenkoff was treated by Australia's major public Broadcaster (the ABC). It appears that the ABC DID seek prior clarification about some of the issues they mentioned but were dumb enough to try dealing with Dow Jones rather than with Opinion Journal. Dow Jones own an excellent newspaper (The Wall St Journal) and its associated websites but they are absolute corporate shitheads and I believe every word the ABC said about how Dow Jones ignored them. It took Australian mining entrepreneur and Lubavitcher Joe Gutnick 4 years and 27 court appearances to get Dow Jones to retract a libel against him! Their arrogant attitude in that matter ended up costing them around a million dollars all up in the end.

You can trust government employees to care for kids: "Broward Sheriff's Office employee assigned to help protect children was suspended Monday, accused of leaving a 2-year-old unattended in her vehicle for about five hours. BSO said that last Wednesday, Community Service Aide Maribelle Martinez was transporting a 2-year-old child as part of her duties with BSO's Child Protective Investigation Section. Investigators said that Martinez left the child unattended in the vehicle outside the CPIS building in Plantation for about five hours. The child was immediately taken to nearby Plantation General Hospital to be examined, and was determined to be uninjured and in good health. Martinez was suspended pending the outcome of an investigation by the Plantation Police Department and the Department of Children and Families. BSO's Office of Professional Compliance is also conducting an internal investigation". In Australia she would have been taken to the police station and charged immediately

Some little-known truths about WWII: "Stalin was ruthless in rallying support for the war effort. Surrender was declared to be treasonous. Anyone suspected of defeatist or counterrevolutionary sentiments was shot or sentenced to hard labor. During the siege of Stalingrad alone, 13,000 were executed. Though a million inmates were released from prison camps for military service, many more were consigned to the gulag during the war. Millions died at the hands of NKVD secret police. The Red Army eventually showed considerable skill in mechanized warfare, but right up until the end its commanders were profligate with their men's lives. The Soviets suffered 350,000 casualties in the battle of Berlin in 1945. The butcher's bill could have been lessened by going slower but that would have risked letting the German capital fall into Western hands. After V-E Day, Stalin was true to his dictum, "We do not have prisoners of war, we only have traitors." Most Russian soldiers liberated from German captivity were sent to the gulag; some were shot outright".

Uncle John's Cabin: "Considering his much-lauded penchant for what passes for 'populist' rhetoric theses days -- 'Let me say this in simple right and wrong, black and white terms,' [John] Edwards bravely told one New Hampshire crowd during primary season. 'I say no to kids going to bed hungry in America. I say no to kids not having clothes to keep them warm' -- one might be tempted to assume that the former senator put his Georgetown house on the market for an asking price of $6.2 million dollars as a prelude to finally joining a commune. Alas, another progressive hero is about to bite the dust. The sale is not a precursor to Edwards liquidating his worldly possessions for redistribution among the proletariat, but, rather, simply a fundraiser for the country estate currently being constructed for him on a 100 acre plot in Chapel Hill, North Carolina."

Julie Burchill on the antisemitism of British academe: "A couple of weeks ago, on April 22, Britain's Association of University Teachers - an organization representing over 48,000 professional swots - voted to ban all contact with two Israeli universities, and asked its executive committee to consider a boycott against a third, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Israel was accused of being "a colonial apartheid state" worse than South Africa, a "regime" worthy of "removal," and its universities of repressing academic freedom. Needless to say, this show of spite received rapturous applause; well, Britain is currently playing host to the biggest ever annual number of violent anti-Semitic attacks, both on people and on property, since the 1930s. Who can blame the teachers, so conscious of their uncoolness, for wanting to get "down wiv the kidz"? They're too respectable to daub swastikas on a synagogue - but it sure feels good to band together and bully them Israeli academics! .... In one way this turn of events is as unexpected as it is cruel - after all, in this country it tends to be academics who react to anything from mild censorship to book-burning with "That's how Hitler started!" That they are now doing something Hitler would thoroughly approve of, and did - barring contact with Jews - seems to have escaped them.... "

This is almost a matter for intervention by the Holy Father. DePaul University is run by the Jesuits, is America's largest Catholic university and is frantically pro-Islamic -- so pro-Islamic that it suspended its professor Thomas Klocek for defending Israel. The Jesuits have a special oath of obedience to the Pope and the present Pope is known for a favourable attitude towards Israel. DePaul administrators have been particularly arrogant about the matter and the forthcoming court case is not going to do their reputation any good. I don't suppose the Holy Father will intervene so in the meanwhile Marathon Pundit is keeping track of what is happening. Update: A reader tells me that DePaul is NOT run by the Jesuits. As the name indicates, it is theoretically a Vincentian university.

Brendan O'Neill (Can you get a more Irish name than that?) has some amusing comments about lapsed Catholics. One snippet: "First and foremost, to be a Lapsed Catholic is to make a virtue of being a lazy git."

Peg Kaplan explains why Leftists hate Wal-Mart. Leftists hate other people's success, mainly.

John Kenneth Galbraith is THE old warhorse of Left-leaning economists. Newmark has a few good shots at some of his empty assertions.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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