February 20, 1997
Congressional Electronics Instruction:
Lesson One
Ordinary Telephone vs. Cellular Telephone
Ordinary telephone Cellular telephone
1. Looks like a phone yes yes
2. Works like a phone yes yes
3. Talk into it yes yes
4. Listen thru it yes yes
5. Has wires yes no
6. Has an antenna no yes
7. Has wide mobility no yes
Conclusion: ...is a telephone ...is a RADIO!
Grade for lesson 1: Armey, Gingrich, et al.: F
Remedial instruction recommended for all these subjects.
If the object to which one devotes himself is an illusion, the devotion is nevertheless a reality; and that reality is the most splendid ornament with which man may adorn his moral poverty.
... Anatole France
What a vast difference there is between the barbarism that preceded culture and the barbarism that followed it.
... Friedrich Hebbel
It looks now as though Vice-president "Spotted" Al Gore has publicly stepped in some organic material. His head may be in the clouds, but his wallet knows right where to go for a refill. As Bill Clinton's right-hand man, he has learned figurative bullet-dodging from a good teacher. So, he will duck and weave until the press gets tired of pursuing the matter of the Buddhist monks and the $450,000 that those worthy devotees of poverty raised on behalf of Gore and Democratism. However, he has not yet learned how to avoid the appearance of evil (especially while committing it).
Excerpts from President Clinton's recent remarks to the
Democratic National Committee [with some comments]
(1) "We ended the notion that government is the problem." [Not outside the Beltway.]
(2) "We have at least eased this notion that we can advance our country by becoming divided one against the other." [Right, we should all become part of the National Institutional Incumbency Party.]
(3) "We replaced supply-side economics with invest-and-grow economics." [Pure vapor. I propose a new Constitutional Amendment: Congress shall pass no law affecting the economy.]
(4) "We reversed the expansion of social problems which people thought were inevitable," i.e., crime, welfare, joblessness, etc. [With the help of a growing economy that his policies had nothing to do with and 25 Republican governors who have locked the criminals up and thrown away the keys.]
(5) "We restored the primacy of family and community to our social policies," i.e., Family Leave Act, earned income tax credit, Medicare, V-chip, etc. [Hard to know where to start, here: the Family Leave Act is not about families, nor about leave; it is about driving a wedge into the employer-employee relationship and injecting government into it; tax policy is as crude a pay-off as any bagman's extortion; Medicare is a worse swindle than Social Security; the government will enjoy dictating to you which TV programs you are to watch.]
(6) "We not only stood against the forces of division but said that community is a good thing, that we'll be better off in the future in the global society if we can all work together and learn together and build new ties that bind us together," i.e., affirmative action, immigration, church burnings, Religious Freedom Restoration Act, prosecuting the militias, etc. [If it is possible to make a statement of 46 words with less content, I want to see it. This is like shooting arrows into jello. The "forces of division?" Does that mean, anyone who has an idea? Well, let's try the Star Wars analogy, then. The Force (the dark, Republican side of it, anyway) has been at it again, dividing people. Community is a good thing (except when it isn't). Working together is more efficient (at what, we don't know). Social policies are easier to implement when everyone is working together and no one pays any attention to whether people's rights are being harmed. This sounds like a prescription for slavery: we all have to agree; we all have to work toward the same goals; we all have to march down the same path; and we have to be bound together. Do you read anything different in this?]
[Perhaps we all need to stop pretending that Bill Clinton has been saying anything in particular, substitute the words we want to hear, and be counted with the rest of his morons.]
Talk radio in this decade has become a far better medium for the exchange of ideas and the formation of defensible moral and intellectual perspectives than all of television, most magazines, and the vast majority of newspapers. The Internet may eventually displace talk radio, but not any time too soon. Challenging and perceptive ideas are presented every day on talk radio. The contempt of the Eastern elite, the intelligensia, and the newspapers for talk radio is nothing more than envy and vanity. While talk radio is probably not the place to try to formulate policy, it is an excellent place to begin understanding principle.
Ordinarily, one should not concentrate too much on any flaws in the discussions as they occur in the course of a talk radio program, because these represent thoughts in the process of formation: generally, the bad is eventually sifted out; the good, the well-conceived, and the principled, remains, even on talk shows that are tilted a bit left. But, the other day, a radio talk show host -- code-named Popinjay, because I will not be telling you who it was -- Popinjay was making a point about the usual procession of gripers that had called in, and he responded that, "What I can't understand is that these people who say that the government is coming to get your guns, when you ask them whether they voted, they say, 'No.' Well, you have no right to complain if you didn't vote."
Admittedly, Popinjay is not the most brilliant talk show host; now you understand why I will not say who it is. But I promise you that this word peddlar exists and pours his intellectual mush out over the radio daily.
There are three glaring errors in Popinjay's line of reasoning that are worth commenting on, if only because the errors are so common. First of all, they are coming to get your guns. This is exactly what the Brady bunch want: universal confiscation of firearms. Even that might not satisfy poor Sarah Brady, who so badly wants the rest of the world to suffer as her husband has.
I would not walk in Sarah Brady's shoes for anything, but what she asks of us is literally inhumane. It would leave honest, law-abiding citizens defenseless against the multitude of those who care nothing for gun laws, not to mention the fact that it contravenes the clear sense of the Second Amendment, leaving the citizens helpless against tyrannical government. One cannot doubt that confiscation is the ultimate goal of the Brady gang: the Brady Bill did not stop with handguns, but went on to forbid certain kinds of long guns, which play a totally insignificant role in crime statistics, thus giving up the bill's principle justification.
This nightmare of gun confiscation is actually happening in Australia, due to be completed in September. It is very close to happening in Great Britain. I see no particular reason why it cannot happen here. The protests of a few would be useless against the will of the many, if the latter got it into their heads that gun confiscation was the only way to be safe. Do not for a minute imagine that "they" are not coming to get your guns: they are.
Popinjay's second error lies in the interpretation of the act of not voting. Not to vote when one has the right and opportunity to vote is to do one or both of the following things: (1) to assert that voting is too much effort in comparison with one's real interests; or (2) to give one's consent that the resulting government should govern. The latter is, of course, a matter of ancient Common Law: silence gives consent. As to the former, not to care much about the result of voting is the overwhelming sentiment of voters in this country, even among some of those who do vote. The fact that there are so many is frankly a more-than-mild compliment to the form and manner of government in this country. In many cases, the fact that people do not vote does not mean that they do not care about government, only that they do not want to change it much.
All this has nothing to do with rights. The right to keep and bear arms is guaranteed in the Constitution, and it would be the job and the duty of the government to uphold this right even if no one voted. Failure to vote may be imprudent, but it does not give up any rights. The Second Amendment states: "The right to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed..." let alone violated. The language that the Constitution uses makes clear the notion that rights have an independent existence, predating the Constitution, and thus having priority over any consideration of voting.
Of course, if we are not vigilant, government well speedily prevent, obscure, or render vacuous the recognition of all of one's rights, if it serves some purpose of the government's. The Tenth Amendment, for instance, is as dead as great Caesar's ghost (see below). The Fourteenth Amendment might as well have been written in vanishing ink. The Second Amendment could easily meet the same fate. This suggests how imprudent it is not to vote. But rights still exist, irrespective of their exercise, defense, or recognition.
Popinjay's third error is that, of all the rights we have, the right to complain is the most persistent and robust. It is supported in two ways by the Constitution: the freedom of speech, and the right to petition government for redress of grievances, both in the First Amendment. While this right does not automatically extend to speech on someone else's radio program, what cannot be ignored is that complaining about government is the age-old practice of free people everywhere. In sharp contrast to the President's claim that the government is not the problem, when complaints about the government stop, we should get worried.
There is, in the final analysis, an attitudinal difficulty exhibited by Popinjay that pervades throughout almost the whole realm of popular political thought; that is, he believes that it is only extremists who question the erosion of rights, the growth of government, and the impossibility of tyranny happening here. Make no mistake, when tyranny comes, it will come with the full approval of the masses; it will satisfy every principle of democracy. The only thing that stands between us and such a fate right now is a piece of paper and the will of government officials not to ignore it, and that is crumbling. When the storm comes, it begins as only a tiny cloud on the horizon. We may now ask ourselves, how big must that cloud become before we act?
I will not make you ill with anything like a full analysis of President Clinton's recent speech to the Democratic National Committee (see Tract, above), for which you can be grateful. I will only highlight a couple of extracts that stuck out, for me, like belching, sulphurous exudations from the sticky morass of crude name-calling, pandering self-congratulation, and byzantine logic that made up the speech as a whole. Not the first oaf-ism was,
"Government is the instrument by which we give each other the tools to make the most of our own lives."One can hardly read the Tenth Amendment and utter any such nonsense. But, then, few people in Washington have read the Tenth Amendment, judging from their actions. Of course, that is what the Clintons want: millions and millions of people waiting for government to hand them the financial opportunities that it has otherwise extinguished in the no-longer-free market. Bah!
After a few more sleepy paragraphs, this trotted out:
"We realized that we could not love our country and hate our government..."a clear case of hubris if ever I heard it. Yes, Bill, the U. S. has the best government in the world. Yes, we are freer and more prosperous than any other nation. Yes, Americans have fought and died for our country, so that our form of government might continue. But it will not be the best government in the world for long if we cannot get your hands off it.
I do not hate our government: I certainly hate some of the things that it does, I hate the direction that it that it appears to be going in, and I hate the contemptible values embraced by most of the people that run it. At times, our government seems very near to becoming something hateful itself. If it comes right down to it, I see nothing at all inconsistent between love of country and hatred of its government. It has happened almost everywhere else in the world at one time or another; why not here?
Inadvertently, the President has offered us a very sobering thought.
Last month's homily on civility has been reprinted by a remarkable journal, Conservative Consensus, published in Seattle, Washington, by Craige and Virginia McMillan. Since this is the third time that they have selected an excerpt from FRATRICIDE for their publication, it is high time for me to acknowledge their kindness and to inform my readers of their work. Over the months that I have been familiar with Conservative Consensus, I have repeatedly been impressed with the quality of the essays and both the depth and the breadth of their coverage of political news.
It has been enormously flattering for my work to appear in the same space with such writers as Dr. Paul Gallant, Jon Dougherty, US Rep Henry Hyde, John D. Trudel, Ellen Craswell, William Bonville, and Dr. Carl McIntire, and so I want to express my gratitude the McMillans for their wonderful work. If you are not yet familiar with Conservative Consensus News Release Service, I urge you to visit the web site at
http://www.eskimo.com/~ccnrs/news.html
sign up for the email news releases, and consider ordering the print publication, the details of which can be found at the end of any of their archived articles.
What must people think when they hear our President praising the butcher of Tian-an-min Square? How can they take the U.S. seriously? The Chinese must think us as deeply enslaved by propaganda and ideology as they are. What evidence have they to the contrary?
As for praising, let me add a few choice words: Deng was red to the elbows in his countrymen's blood. Even within a tradition that sports such monsters as Stalin, Krushchev, Mao, and Chou, he is conspicuous, primarily because he was demonstrably not a mad butcher with paranoid delusions. He continued the policies of his predecessors out of sheer ambition, because he wanted to be the top dog when he had outmaneuvered and outlived his rivals. He was the perfect picture of a ruthless, self-indulgent tyrant with an insatiable lust for power. His departure came not a moment too soon. Even a pretense of regret is inappropriate for Deng.
All contents © Copyright 1995, 1996 by Redmon Barbry ¶ 4:55 PM
