On his Fox News show, Glenn Beck explained yesterday what you can do to combat the trouble awaiting us (or so he believes, at least). Watch the video, Beck’s right that “ the American idea is being wiped out ” and that who believe in this idea have to defend it – now more than ever. Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
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Beck Explains What You Can Do Against The Left’s Attack On The American Idea
I just wanted to flag two thought-provoking articles on the strategic shifts associated with China’s rise, which I’ve taken to calling, “The Great Asia Rebalancing.” The first is by Hugh White (excerpted from a longer essay here ), the second by Michael Clarke . Together, they offer fascinating insights into the strategic choices faced by two historic U.S. allies, both of whom face very real constraints on their ability to keep up with the dramatic changes shaping the global security environment. Clarke notes that with the end of any real security threat either originating from or menacing Europe, the U.S. has effectively reversed poles, becoming an Asian power first, and a European power only a distant second. That shift increasingly renders obsolete Britain’s defense identity of the past 100 years, namely being the trans-Atlantic bridge cementing U.S. engagement with Europe. But facing paralyzing budget constraints over the course of the next decade, the U.K. will have difficulty fielding the kind of expeditionary force that would allow it to maintain the same privileged relationship with the U.S. in the latter’s new stomping grounds, namely the Middle East and Asia. For Australia, as White describes, the shift in U.S. strategic focus similarly calls into question Australia’s security identity, but for the opposite reason. As America’s closest ally in the region, Australia could potentially take on the kind of role in Asia that the U.K. played in Europe. But that role would necessitate a commitment, in terms of both budget and skin in the game, that Australians are unlikely to be willing or able to bear. For White, that means that Australia’s major contribution in the Great Rebalancing will be to leverage its soft power so as to convince the U.S. to privilege Asian stability and order over U.S. regional primacy — essentially, to yield to China’s regional primacy in the interests of the greater good. Should the U.S. choose instead to contest China rather than make room for it, then Australia must consider opting out of the U.S. alliance, whether through armed or unarmed neutrality, seeking a regional alliance to counterbalance China, or even accepting China as the regional hegemon. For Clarke, the U.K.’s predicament means that it, too, must find ways to leverage its soft power — in the Middle East and South Asia — to advance its shared interests with the U.S. in order to maintain the relevance of that relationship. But in order to maintain its own strategic relevance, it must seek out new relationships to supplement its traditional, but increasingly obsolete or strategically impotent alliances. He mentions Japan, Turkey, India, Brazil and Australia as potential candidates. As critiques of White’s essay — by Greg Sheridan here and Graeme Dobell here (with White’s follow-ups here and here worth reading as well) — point out, the question all this raises is whether strategic policy can be as independent of national identity as strategic thinking can be. According to this view, the connective bonds of the Western alliance are civilizational ones that go beyond shared strategic interests. If so, that suggests these alliances are suicide pacts that must persist even when the strategic interests driving their individual members diverge. In other words, a Huntingtonian clash is inevitable. But while that may or may not be true of the U.K. and Australia, it is hardly true of the U.S., which has maintained solid cross-civilizational alliances with Japan and South Korea for as long as it has with Europe and Australia. I recently wrote that the U.S. should essentially accept White’s advice in Asia, as well as Clarke’s in the Middle East, in order to focus its strategic attention on Africa. That might be easier for us to swallow than for our Western allies.
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The Great Asia Rebalancing: The Ghost of Huntington
Bosch: Barack Obama is underestimating the opposition be faces, going full steam ahead into November like the Titanic. I think this is because he doesn’t realize he’s challenging the entire American way of life, which is based upon the rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. This graphic began with an idea by David Horowitz, and is the result of a number of revisions from a back and forth between us, which made for a better piece.
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B-Day is Coming
Tim Kaine / Democratic National Committee : Change That Matters
Forget Fox News, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. Barack Obama needs to blame the mainstream media for his sinking popularity. In the age of citizen journalism and instantaneous, global communication he should have realized that all of the msm’s high-flying exaltation would come back to bite him in the you-know-where. Mr. ‘I won’ never had the intellectual or Machiavellian chops to rise to the level of the media’s glorification. Playing at fascism, the propagandists forgot they needed a Mussolini to execute the plan after the victory. If Obama thinks his conservative opponents treat him “ like a dog ” it’s only because they’re following the lead of the growing number of American people who realize they’ve been suckered. The near canonization of Saint Barack by MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times and magazines like The New Yorker before the ’08 election is now giving way to reality, and it’s not pretty. If the sale of Obama paraphernalia is any indication of the president’s current status, the future does not look hopeful. From the Washington Post : The change in Obama’s political fortunes led Tini Cherkaoui, manager of Discount Souvenirs and Novelties in the District, to alter her inventory. The merchandise touting hope and “Change We Can Believe” has been replaced by items taunting those themes. “It used to be that anything Obama — it was just hot,” she said, as a group of tourists wearing anti-Obama T-shirts milled around on the sidewalk. “Now, they’re just against Obama.” How times change. Barely two years ago, a month before the ’08 election, The New Yorker Magazine published an opinion piece by the editorial staff lauding Obama’s “tropism of unity” while condemning John McCain for his “willingness to lie and to pander.” Then, in adulation they concluded the tribute with these words: The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama. This over-the-top hype at a time when the nation’s financial bottom was falling out may have played to the desperate masses in the short term, enough to put Obama in the White House, but it’s backfiring now. The non-vetting, obedient pawns like Katie Couric , Andrea Mitchell and the rest of the paid lemmings are not only complicit in the country’s downfall but in their master’s as well - how’s that for irony.
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Obama Has No one to Blame But the Lamestream Media
Dan Calabrese My friend David Karki appears to have had it with me, although I’m sure all will be good by the time my son and I visit him in November for our mostly annual Vikings trip. Even disagreements over political principle don’t trump football! But since Dave has posed some good questions to me, all stemming from my refusal to support Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell in the primary (although I hope she wins now), I think I’d like to offer some respectful replies. So here they are, in the order in which I feel like answering them: She makes me cringe, Dave. She's a phony baloney poseur. 1. In his headline, Dave asks, “How does electing liberals help conservatism?” My answer has two parts. First, it is not one of my goals to “help conservatism.” Conservatism is not a thing I serve. It is a general category into which a lot of different political ideas fit. Some of these ideas – like opposition to abortion and a preference for low tax rates – are completely unrelated to each other, but they’re all in the category. That’s fine. I happen to agree with most of them, but not because I feel compelled to, and not because I find it necessary to maintain some sort of conservative bona fides. Conservatism is not a thing that owns some sort of allegiance from me. Only the United States of America owns that. (Well, and God.) I don’t care about conservatism. I am not part of the conservative movement. I am a guy who writes what I think for a living, and if what I think agrees with conservatism (according to whoever gets to define it), fine with me. If not, I don’t care. My interest is in helping America, and if a “RINO” can be persuaded to support priorities that will help America ( which I believe is possible ), it doesn’t matter to me if conservatism was hurt or helped, only that America was helped. Second, Mike Castle is not a liberal. More on that . . . now: 2. Dave writes: “He (meaning me) seems to think the only way to get conservatives into power is to vote for liberals like Mike Castle.” Mike Castle is not a liberal. Mike Castle is a moderate northeastern Republican, a point Jay Cost makes in convincing detail here . Castle supports some things I really don’t like, particularly cap and trade. But he also has sponsored a bill to repeal ObamaCare, which to me is the single most important thing that needs to be accomplished in this country as soon as possible. If you don’t like moderates because they’re not conservative all the time, fine, but there is a difference between someone who sometimes votes with Democrats and someone who always does. The northeastern United States is a very liberal place, and a Republican has to be quite moderate to win there. Case in point: Scott Brown. He opposes ObamaCare too (yay!), but he voted for Obama’s dumbass Wall Street financial reform (hide the rope). Would you rather have Martha Coakley in the Senate? I don’t think Brown is a liberal. I think he’s pretty much what Mike Castle is – a moderate northeastern Republican who will sometimes vote as I prefer, and maddeningly sometimes will not. The political challenge for conservatives is to craft their legislation in such a way that the electorate clamors for its passage, and the likes of Mike Castle and Scott Brown want to support it, too. It is not to cast the likes of Brown and Castle into the nether regions, because you don’t have anyone better. 3. Dave writes: “We should not be projecting blame for the inevitable reaction to Castle’s action on anyone but him, and certainly not on O’Donnell or her supporters.” Irrelevant. I don’t care who’s to blame. I only care that Chris Coons is probably going to become Delaware’s new far-left socialist senator, and I think it’s kind of weird that this bothers me a lot more than it bothers all the oh-so-principled movement conservatives, who consider apostates in their own ranks to be a bigger problem than the people who openly seek to turn this country into the People’s Republic of America, and are not shy about saying so. Blame is a waste of time. Punishing Castle for his faults is stupid if it means Coons gets elected and the Democrats hold their majority. It’s classic nose-cutting-face-spiting. It’s for six-year-olds. 4. Dave asks: “What makes anybody think that if the GOP otherwise runs the table, and the Senate is 51-49, Castle wouldn’t pull a Jumpin’ Jim Jeffords and flip sides so that VP Joe Biden’s 50-50 tiebreaker vote would give the Senate back to the Democrats?” I guess we’ll never know, huh? I can guarantee you 100 percent that if it’s 50-50, Coons votes to elect Schumer as Majority Leader. Why do conservatives think this is somehow better? 5. Dave writes: “With all due respect to my colleague, Dan Calabrese, apparently for whom no RINO is too liberal to support . . .” That’s simply not true. I support Joe Miller in Alaska over Lisa Murkowski with great enthusiasm (and Murkowski is considerably further to the right than Castle, by the way). I support Marco Rubio over Charlie Crist in Florida (and did even when Crist was still pretending to be a Republican). The difference is that Miller and Rubio are both excellent candidates and appear likely to be excellent U.S. senators. I did not support J.D. Hayworth over John McCain in Arizona for two reasons: 1. On the three issues about which I care the most – ObamaCare, spending and national security – McCain is as good as Hayworth on the first and better on the other two. My top policy priorities are in good hands with McCain in the Senate, although I will acknowledge there are a lot of other issues where I have big problems with McCain; 2. Hayworth is a blowhard, a charlatan and a moron. I don’t want people like that in the U.S. Senate, even if they purportedly agree with me on some things. And that brings us to Christine O’Donnell. O’Donnell’s thin-skinned supporters are very upset with Karl Rove this morning because he was highly critical of O’Donnell on Fox News last night. They need to grow up and deal with the reality of what Rove said. He spoke of some very real and serious problems with their glamor girl: “One thing that Christine O’Donnell is now going to have to answer in the general election, that she didn’t answer in the primary, is her own checkered background . . . I’ve met her. I’ve got to tell you, I wasn’t frankly impressed with her ability as a candidate. There are serious questions about, how does she make a living? Why did she mislead voters about her college education? How come it took her nearly two decades to pay off her college loans so she could get a college degree? How does she make a living? Why did she sue a well-known conservative think tank?” When Sean Hannity responded lamely that she is a “solid conservative,” Rove refused to let him get away with that: “It does conservatives little good to support candidates who, at the end of the day, while they may be conservatives in their public statements, do not evince the characteristics of rectitude and truthfulness and sincerity and character that the voters are looking for.” Exactly. What the hell makes Sean Hannity, or David Karki for that matter, so sure that Christine O’Donnell is a “solid conservative”? Because she says so? What record does she have of proving it? None. What record does she have in public office? None. What record does she have of any sort of accomplishment whatsoever? None. She can’t even explain what she does for a living. And yet this is the woman you’re counting on to go to Washington and bring about the conservative revolution? Given a viable option, I will always support the more conservative candidate over a moderate. But ideology – especially publicly stated but entirely unproven ideology – is not the only thing I care about. I will not support a candidate who is fundamentally unqualified. I will not support a candidate who does not have a track record of achievement in his or her own life. I will not support a candidate who gives every indication of being a mere blowhard. And I won’t support candidates who have no chance of winning. If you “true conservatives” find it necessary to ignore all this and support the likes of Christine O’Donnell anyway, then you understand why I am not a member of your movement, which brings us to . . . 6. Dave writes: “And I don’t understand it at all from ‘conservatives’ like Dan.” I don’t know who Dave’s quoting here, but it’s not me. I don’t go around labeling myself as a conservative, and I’m certainly not interested in defending myself to those who scream that I am a RINO or an apostate or not a “true conservative” or whatever. I am me. I am Dan Calabrese. If you read what I write and want to label me as conservative, go ahead. I suspect most would. But I’m not on a mission to maintain good standing in the conservative club. I think for myself, and I think I’d rather have Mike Castle in the Senate, with all his flaws, than Chris Coons. And I think Christine O’Donnell is a phony-baloney poseur who never deserved to get this far. And yet, I do hope she wins. Because when Tony and I arrive in Bloomington, Minnesota on Nov. 6 for our weekend of football and tailgating with Dave, it would be great to spend our time enjoying the Republican takeover of the House and Senate that had just occurred. Even if that means we’ll spend the next six years wincing every time Senator O’Donnell opens her mouth. Become Dan’s friend on Facebook . Become a fan of The North Star National on Facebook . Buy Dan’s novel, Powers and Principalities. To book Dan as a speaker, contact Lourdes Swarts at Speakers Access.
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Confessions of a RINO-loving sellout (but we still have the Vikings, right, Dave?)
Chuck Baldwin : There’s no doubt that you shaped the culture. In the book, I notice a picture of you with Ron Radosh and his daughter at Karl Marx’s tomb, High Gate Cemetery, London 1966. I take it that when that picture was taken you had quite an infatuation for Karl Marx. David Horowitz : Oh yeah, I was a Marxist. And I describe in the book how when I was in London I was approached by the KGB. This agent took me to lunch and eventually asked me to spy for the Soviet Union. He put money in my pocket and so forth. I happened to reject his advances. I had more ambitious goals for myself which was I guess to be the new Marx or something like that. But I saw him talking to a lot of other people on the “left” whom I knew. And I know, not only from personal experience, but from talking to people that there were many, many, there must have been hundreds maybe thousands of contacts between “new leftist” and the KGB and the Cuban Intelligence and Vietnamese Communist. I am the only one who has reported these incidents that I know about in Radical Son . That’s why my book, I think, would be very valuable for conservatives. It’s a vindication. Of those of you who are listening to this who have spent 50 years fighting to defend America’s freedoms and got nothing but scorn for it will get a lot of pleasure out of Radical Son . Because it vindicates the struggle that you waged, which was a noble struggle and a patriotic one. And it’s just too bad that patriotism is held in such low esteem in the liberal dominated culture that we live in. – Chuck Baldwin, June 6 1997 If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please email it to DavidSwindle {@} Gmail.com. Please include: “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.) Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)
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From the Interviews of David Horowitz: September 15, 2010
Bob Maistros TV commercial scene . . . a hot-looking female bartender serving young male customer: “When you’re ready to take off your skirt, I’ll serve you a real light beer. “Of course, I understand why you’re feeling a little emasculated. There’s about a one in four chance that you were raised by a single mother. Three-quarters of your teachers were women, even though studies show boys learn better from men. Your schools were set up for girls to succeed – you were more likely to be medicated than motivated. Man up? What for? “It’s no wonder that you were probably outnumbered 3 to 2 by women on your college campus – not to mention that for the first time ever, more women are earning doctoral degrees than men. “The recession has hit men harder than women, and we’re gaining on you in nearly every profession. As younger man, for the first time your girlfriend is probably earning more than you, making your prospects for marriage bleak. If you do get married, you’ll find her making many if not most of the household’s economic decisions. And once you do progress in the workforce, you will likely be passed over for promotions in favor of women thanks to affirmative action. “Not to mention that politically, this is the Year of the Woman. Women are winning high-profile nominations, and the biggest kingmaker – or should I say queenmaker? – is a ‘mama grizzly.’ America’s most powerful woman, the one who pushed healthcare reform through when no one gave her a chance, is the female Speaker of the House. The Secretary who will oversee the humongous healthcare bureaucracy and promulgate the bill’s voluminous regulations is – yeah – a woman. “And when Time magazine featured the ‘New Sheriffs of Wall Street’ – all female – in a cover story, it quoted none other than the Treasury Secretary of the United States suggesting that we will do a better job running the economy. “Not to mention that you’re bombarded from Hollywood by the message that you aren’t really necessary. Women can have and raise children without you. All in all, it looks like your future is to be little more than a sperm bank. “So maybe it’s a little unfair to expect you to ‘man up’ when the rest of the world is telling you to cower, grovel and submit. I should cut you a break. Do you want that real beer now?” “Nah. At this point, I’m thinking I probably need at least two.”
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Man up . . . or is it man down?