Points to Ponder:

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." [Theodore Roosevelt: Citizenship in a Republic Speech at the Sorbonne (circa April 23, 1910)]

Miscellaneous Threads Worth Noting:

Briefly on each as time is short...

--Nets Didn't Care About Clinton Firing 93 U.S. Attorneys, Lead With Replacement of 8 (Bret Baker)

To start with, lets call this media hubbub over the 8 US Attorneys fired by the Bush Administration what it is: a crock of horse pucky. I remember well the Clinton Administration firing all the US Attorneys two months into the first term of President Bill Clinton and the msm's response was to say nothing. Only the conservatives on talk radio made a big stink about it but that is neither here nor there. Logically, if firing 8 is a "crisis situation" than what does that make firing 93??? And if firing 8 for supposed "political reasons" is so damned evil than what about firing all the US Attorneys as Clinton did??? Where was the msm when that heinous evil was performed by the Clinton's??? As usual, they were AWOL because Clinton was "their guy" and Bush is not.

The truth is, the whole handling of attorneys in the US Department of Justice (USDOJ) is an executive function and the executive can hire or fire whomever they want. That is true with Bush as it was with Clinton. However, I fail to see how this is anything more than a ploy by the Democrats in Congress and their partisans in the msm to sabotage the Bush Administration with another non-scandalous so-called "scandal." If anything was truly a sign of corruption or seeking to impose favouritism onto the USDOJ it would have been the unprecedented firing of all the attorneys as President Clinton did. No president in United States history ever did that before and that was a genuine example of "destabilization" not the Bush Administration's firing of a mere eight attorneys.

What this boils down to folks is yet another obvious and blatant msm double standard against the present Administration in particular and Republicans in general. What more needs to be said than that really???

--Amnesty Follies (Mark Krikorian)

Well, it looks like the whole "anmesty for illegals" absurdity is dead in the water thankfully. It demonstrates once again the value of the approach the Founders of this great nation took towards minority political/social factions and for that I am well-pleased.

--The Burning of Mutinabbi Street (Iraqi Pundit)

Remember these things and other related factors whenever you hear the useful idiots of Al Queda usual suspects prattle on about what a "paradise" things were under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. Remember folks, not a few of these sorts are the exact same sorts of people oftentimes who claimed that Nicaragua and Cuba under communist control was such "wonderlands" and how the Soviet Union was some "workers paradise" despite all objective evidence to the contrary??? The reason for these serious problems of mental cognition on their part has been noted by yours truly before -including briefly in the beginning of this thread{1} so no more needs to be noted on it at the present time than that.

Note:

{1} Look at the quote from a July 20, 2005 posting to this weblog in the aforementioned posting for details.

On Nancy Pelosi, Pseudo "Peace Activists", and a Reminder of Why Conservatives Should Remain Optimistic About 2008:
(Musings of your humble servant at Rerum Novarum)

We could not let this one pass without comment and a bit of analysis:

Peace activists to rally at Pelosi’s San Francisco home

Here is part of the article:

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) A few dozen peace activists marched across the Golden Gate Bridge and gathered outside the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday, demanding that Congress stop funding the war in Iraq.

"San Francisco has been against this war from the very beginning," said Toby Blome, a physical therapist who organized the event. "This is our fifth year of the war, and Nancy needs to wake up and represent San Franciscans."

Blome, holding a plate of cheese and bread and a glass of wine, was stopped on her way to Pelosi’s front door and told the Speaker would not see them. Blom and about ten other activists said they plan to camp outside the residence overnight.

Aaah the beautiful noise of implosion!!! Do not say that your host did not predict this folks -indeed the writing was on the wall from the beginning of the election last year.{1} A key problem that many who support the Democratic majority have --to say nothing of those who took a "doom and gloom" approach to the Republican defeats in the last election-- is that the media as a whole misdiagnosed the election results last year and what they actually mean. To remind the readers of what we wrote on that matter last December in response to a friend who was depressed by the election results:

[W]hat was rebuked in this election was not conservatism but party politics. Conservatives who have supported Republicans for years to get treated like dog turds except around election time finally said (in the words of the great western philosopher Dee Snyder) "we're not gonna take it anymore" and enough of them sat this election out to allow the Republicans to be knocked off of their lofty perch. The war issue served more to galvanize the anti-Bush crowd and while there are enough errors of fact and misperceptions in the "this war is an abomination" crowd to fill a small ocean; nonetheless, perception is often viewed by people as reality.

President Bush was also hurt (even though he was not running) because of the absurd and illogical "amnesty for criminals" issue he has promoted. Throw in the Katrina debacle and a few other areas where the Bush Administration has looked less than adequate and the general six year pattern for voting historically, and the result is not that surprising.

I would advise against being too pessimistic about this and remind you of an old proverb: it is often darkest just before the dawn. That is how I view this situation and believe this makes it more likely to elect a conservative as president in 2008 than it would have been if the Republicans had gotten away with their normal "treat conservatives like crap and then throw them an occasional scrap to shut them up" approach. [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa December 7, 2006)]

In short, this kind of implosion{2} was inevitable due to the very make-up of the Pelosi-Reid coalition majority -a one seat Senate majority which we predicted could become a key factor and it has in more than one way thus far.{3}

With over a year and a half until the 2008 elections, a lot more could happen still but one thing is for certain: Pelosi and Reid are caught between a rock and a hard place because if they placate these fringe sorts, they will lose the support of Blue Dog Democrats of a much more conservative persuasion who could align politically on key issues with the Republicans.

Conversely, if the Pelosi-Reid contingent try to placate the Blue Dogs too much, then the fringe sorts who are causing the biggest ruckus will be the ones offended. The latter may not have a position of genuine power but they can teach the Pelosi and Reid contingent the same lesson that many conservatives taught the Republicans in 2006 by refusing to support the Pelosi-Reid coalition in 2008.

In summary, remain optimistic folks because the opposition is not as strong as the MSM portrays them. There are a lot of internal divisions and many within the collective who are not very geopolitically shrewd when it comes to governing in contrast to winning an election majority where they were very shrewd indeed as your host noted in his 2006 election synopsis/analysis thread.{4} But what we are seeing with the attitudes taken by the kook fringe wierdos is music to our ears or to borrow a bit from that great western literary figure Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore "I love the smell of Democratic Party implosion in the morning!!!" :)

Notes:

{1} Or as we noted in a post-election synopsis thread:

The reason the Dems will have majorities in both houses is because of southern conservative Democrats being elected. This makes the majority the Democrats will have a very fragile one -particularly in the Senate- and if the more rabid Democrat sorts do not show that they can work and play well with others[...], then they will fail to govern effectively and will be thrown out in 2008. [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa November 24, 2006)]


{2} Far from an isolated incident, the Pelosi protest is one of several that have taken place or are scheduled to take place -as the originally mentioned NC Times article noted.

{3} The main points thus far are the potential incapacitation of Democratic Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota (who though thankfully recovering well thus far still has a long way to go) and the possiblity of Independent Senator Joseph Lieberman (who is caucusing with the Democrats) to shift his alllegience to the Republicans if the Democrats try to defund the military involvement in Iraq. These are not situations that bode well for the Democrat majority in the Senate and could place the Senate in a position where tiebreaking votes are cast on key issues by the President of the Senate. (For those who do not know, the President of the Senate -who only votes when there is a tiebreaker needed- is Vice President Dick Cheney.)

{4} Obviously our concern there ended up being not founded as the Republicans were rebuked on election day. And the reasons why they were rebuked are ones which your host outlined in advance. In other words, while we outlined what the Dems would need to do to win and also noted the historical trackrecord, we obviously underestimated the Dems being smart enough to know what they needed to do to win and to actually do it. We said they would need to nationalize the election around Bush and they did that. We also said that they would need to shut their traps and not tell people what they really planned to do[...] and they actually did that also. Give them credit for actually learning from past mistakes if nothing else. [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa November 24, 2006)]

Points to Ponder:
(On the Purpose of Human Law)

The purpose of human law is to lead men to virtue, not suddenly, but gradually. Wherefore it does not lay upon the multitude of imperfect men the burdens of those who are already virtuous, viz. that they should abstain from all evil. Otherwise these imperfect ones, being unable to bear such precepts, would break out into yet greater evils: thus it is written (Ps. 30:33): "He that violently bloweth his nose, bringeth out blood"; and (Mt. 9:17) that if "new wine," i.e. precepts of a perfect life, "is put into old bottles," i.e. into imperfect men, "the bottles break, and the wine runneth out," i.e. the precepts are despised, and those men, from contempt, break into evils worse still. [St. Thomas Aquinas (circa 1273)]

On Hilaire Belloc and the Problems With Being Fair to Past Generations:
(Musings of your humble servant at Rerum Novarum)

In reviewing the notes from the Southern Poverty Law Center on John Sharpe which were mentioned in yesterday's posted thread from The Navy Times, one small point stuck out at me and it was listing Hilaire Belloc amongst the cornucopia of antisemitic literature which John Sharpe's IHS site sells. Hilaire Belloc is an interesting character in many respects with some valuable insights on a variety of issues both of his day and of subsequent times. He also had some rather loopy ideas such as the notion of distributivism as a viable economic model -a hypothesis that your host has explained the intrinsic flaws of on a few occasions.{1} But to assert antisemitism as some have done is frankly absurd.

What it boils down to is the perverse tendency of many modern people to attempt to judge the opinions of people in the past with those common to the present and from that standard dismissing those who do not concur with today's so-called "enlightened" views. It is a variety of the Whig view of history which is methodologically problematical in not a few ways.

This is not to say that Belloc could not be accused of a bias in his work of some sort or another of course. But to admit that much is hardly to say anything profound because everyone has at least some bias. If they do any writing or speaking, these biases will direct at least implicitly what they say. One might even say that some of Belloc's work does not speak well of Jews but that is not adequate to denote antisemitism. As one reader astutely noted in response to the thread from yesterday:

It's too bad the Southern Poverty Law Center and the author of the newspaper article displays an ignorance of Catholic literature. Possession of Belloc and Chesterton hardly counts as incriminating evidence. On the other hand, distributing Hoffmann's Judaism's Strange Gods and Henry Ford's The International Jew is a tad more disconcerting.

Readers who want to see genuine antisemitism can consider the other persons noted in the Southern Poverty Law Center article on John Sharpe. Persons such as Fr. Dennis Fahey, Ernst Zundel, Willis Carto{2} and the names the reader noted above (Michael A. Hoffman II and Henry Ford). Many more could be noted but I think you get the idea.

Antisemitism is a serious issue and therefore, the charge of antisemitism is not one that should be made lightly. John Derbyshire summed up the problem of failing to judge someone in accordance with the standards of their time in his own article on Belloc and the accusation of antisemitism which I will end this posting with:

His opinions were not wildly eccentric in his time and place. His essay on Islam should be taken at its face value, not regarded as tainted because his opinions on other topics would get him chased out of public life today. Belloc does not live today. He lived a hundred years ago.

For goodness' sake. Many of the things we hold to be self-evident truths will look silly or obnoxious a hundred years from now. No doubt some of those being chased out of public life in our time will be regarded by our grandchildren as heros and martyrs. So it has always been in past times, at any rate. Let's use some historical imagination. Our own age is not the summit and end point of all human understanding. In many respects it is a stupid and frivolous age.

Precisely.

Notes:

{1} Offhand, these threads come to mind from the archives of this weblog:

On the Acton Institutes' Critique of Distributivism (circa March 27, 2006)

Miscellaneous Musings on Illegal Immigration, Voting Issues, Audioblogger, Fundamental Rights, Activism, Distributivism, Valid Theories and the Criteria Thereof, Etc.--An Audio Post (circa April 8, 2006)

Miscellaneous Musings on Distributivism, Valid Theories and the Criteria Thereof, Illegal Immigration, Activism, Fundamental Rights, Etc. --A Continuation Audio Post (circa April 8, 2006)

{2} Runs the American Free Press which is the successor to the old Spotlight periodical.