http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/290276/were-all-catholics-now-david-french

You can not attack the Liberty of one citizen without attacking the Liberty of all.  A fact those who call themselves “liberal” conveniently forget whenever a fellow citizen dares to commit the liberal heresy of standing by ancient traditions and institutions.  An attack on the Freedom of Conscience of Catholics is an attack on all of our Freedoms.  I stand today side by side with Catholic Americans whose Free Exercise of Religion is also my own.   Furthermore I demand that Congress impeach Sec. Sebelius for violating the First Amendment.

“There’s always a risk when you fund innovation, but if we abandoned going to the moon when a spacecraft exploded … where would we be today?”

She has an excellent point.  If the government had given up after Apollo 1, today we would have no moon base, no permanent space station and in fact no manned space program at all.  Now wouldn’t that be terrible?

Everytime you think liberal arguments can’t get stupider; they find a way.

Cutting spending 43% and getting social issues off the GOP platform works for you?  Great now please tell me how?  You’re basically describing Schwarzenegger’s original platform, you know how well that worked out.

 

If we have these massive spending cuts, how do we pay for the lack of social reforms.  1 out of 3 children are currently born out of wedlock, mostly the government pays for them.  After this grand spending blow up who pays for those kids?  And who pays for the drug treatments or incarcerations statistics tell us a large number of them will need?   Who pays for the ever growing VD epidemic?  Who pays for the incredibly expensive AIDS treatment?  Who pays for abortions?  Tell me please how we square this circle?

 

If you are going to tell me in that cutsey libertarian pie in the sky fable We The People are going to make these people pay for themselves, consider me laughing in your face.  Americans are not going to be able to stand by and watch the excesses of social liberalism play out in impoverished children and keep those spending cuts we all need so much. 

 

Social liberalism fiscal conservatism sounds so good.  I was a fan of it myself when I was much younger.  The problem always is that social liberalism is very expensive.

“There is the moral of all human tales; ‘tis but the same rehersal of the past, First Freedom, and then Glory—when that fails—barbaism at last.” –Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

“The sun’ll come out tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar
That tomorrow there’ll be sun.” –Charles Strouse and Martin Carmin, Annie

“A bait banker thus desponds,
From his own hand forsees his fall,
They have his soul, who have his bonds;
Tis like the writing on the wall.” –Jonathan Swift, The Run Upon the Bankers

The sample quoted one of my favorite scenes from the Wodehouse’s novels. Steyn mentions how Bertie Wooster and his Aunt Dahlia are discussing his uncle being upset by the Exchequer’s insistence upon taxing his income:

“Is he still upset about that income-tax money?” ask Bertie.

“Upset is right,” replies Aunt Dahlia.” He says that Civilization is in the melting-pot and that all thinking men can read the writing on the wall.”

“What wall?”

“Old Testament, ass,” snaps Aunt Dahlia. “Belshazzar’s feast.”

“Oh, that, yes,” says Bertie. “I’ve often wondered how that gag was worked—with mirrors, I expect.”

Steyn turns to the biblical passage. I thought, “oh, no. He is going Paul Erlich on me.” You must recall those silly books from the nineteen-seventies about end-of-the-world by various combinations of Old/New Tesstaments and space aliens. In After America, we learn how Daniel 5: 25-28 speaks of man’s foolishness with economics.

[note: the passage uses arabmaic names of weights and monetary values. Mina, shekel (1/60th of mina), and parsu (half-mina). In modern terms half-dollar, penny, and two bits.]

“This is the writing that was inscribed: MENE, TEKEL, AND PERES. These words means: MENE, God has numbered your kingdom and put an end to it; TEKEI, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; PERES, your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and Persians.”

“If the deficits are “unsustainable,” than what happens when they can no longer be sustained?” –Mark Steyn

“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” –Herbert Stein

When will it stop? Who will suffer when it does stop? Didn’t the novelist Ernest Hemingway write that the bells toll for thee?

“I keep thinking that insanity is a state where a person can’t tell what’s real.  Well what’s real now is insane and if I accepted it as real, I’d have to lose my mind wouldn’t I?”  Eddie Willers in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Yes I admit it I succumbed to peer pressure; I read Atlas Shrugged.  I knew all the books flaws going into it.  I knew the heroes ranted not talked; the characters were cardboard cutouts; and the climax of the book is a 3 hour speech.  I understand why Whittaker Chambers said on every page was clearly written “get thee to a gas chamber.”   The books conservative critics are correct, and yet, and yet..

 Had I read this book at any other time in my life its flaws would have completely over whelmed its virtues.  Had I read it any time other than during the Obama administration  the message would have been overpowered by the ridiculous presentation.  But reading this book while Obama fiddled I was overcome by Rand’s prescience.  If I can say I told you so how much more can Rand who saw all this clear as a day 60 years ago. 

 It seemed whenever I looked up from the book to read the day’s headlines I hadn’t left the book at all.  Is this the book’s anti-dog eat dog act or Obamacare’s individual mandate.  Is that the moochers destroying Colorado or the EPA seizing  control of businesses in Texas?   Is that Directive 10-289 or the NRLB shutting down the new Boeing plant in a right to work state?   Quite honestly it made me dizzy watching Ayn Rand’s Dystopian vision acted out ever day in the headlines. 

 We are in James Taggert’s America not the America of our Founding Fathers.  Yet almost half the country approves this twisted President who might as well have leapt out of Atlas‘ pages.   And all I’ve got is a shrug.