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THE FOUNDATION: GOVERNMENT

“A wise and frugal government... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”  — Thomas Jefferson

INSIGHT

“You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot establish security on borrowed money. You cannot build character and courage by taking away men’s initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.”  — William J. H. Boetcker

GOVERNMENT

“[Barack] Obama [has said] the top priority of the next president should be the creation of a more lasting and equitable prosperity than achieved under Presidents Bush and Clinton. Obama apparently missed the class that teaches government doesn’t create prosperity; people do. During [a recent] debate with Hillary Clinton, Obama said he would pay for his proposed new programs, including mandatory health insurance, by imposing higher taxes on ‘the wealthy’ and raising the tax on Social Security wages. He added, ‘What we have had right now is a situation where we’ve cut taxes for people who don’t need them.’ Should government determine how much money people ‘need’? This is Marxism: ‘from each according to his ability; to each according to his need.’ Sen. Clinton expressed similar sentiments on ABC’s ‘This Week’ when she said if people refuse to buy health insurance under her plan she might garnish people’s wages. One reason this socialistic mind-set resonates favorably with many is due to the shift in the last half-century from promoting hard work, self-sufficiency, marriage, personal responsibility and accountability and living within one’s means, to a mentality that I am entitled to the fruits of other people’s labor. That used to be called robbery before government started doing it more than a century ago through the income tax... How many politicians today talk about looking out for one’s self, not relying on government?”  — Cal Thomas

THE GIPPER

“We must remove government’s smothering hand from where it does harm; we must seek to revitalize the proper functions of government. We do these things to set loose again the energy and the ingenuity of the American people. We do these things to reinvigorate those social and economic institutions which serve as a buffer and a bridge between the individual and the state — and which remain the real source of our progress as a people.”  — Ronald Reagan

FAMILY

“Families are civilization factories. They take children and install the necessary software, from what to expect from life to how to treat others. One hears a lot of platitudes about how children are ‘taught to hate.’ This is nonsense. Hating comes naturally to humans, and children are perfectly capable of learning to hate on their own. Indeed, everyone hates. The differences between good people and bad resides in what they hate, and why. And although schools and society can teach that, parents imprint it on their kids. As a conservative, I’m a big believer in the importance of tradition... But tradition can only be as strong as it is in the people who pass it on... Civilization, at any given moment, can be boiled down to what its living members know and believe. This makes civilization an amazingly fragile thing, and it makes parents the primary guardians of its posterity.”  — Jonah Goldberg
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OPINION IN BRIEF

“Iraqi terrorists [recently] outfitted two Muslim women with Down syndrome with IEDs and dispatched them into a busy al-Ghazi pet market in Baghdad’s Jadida section. When the women reached a location where their bomb-laden bodies would cause the greatest carnage, the IEDs were detonated remotely by a cowardly Islamic radical. Apparently, al-Qaida is running short of mentally competent volunteers who want to murder fellow Muslims in the process of becoming ‘martyrs’ for Allah... Using the handicapped, women and children for terror is nothing new for Islamic radicals. During the January 2005 Iraqi parliamentary elections, al-Qaida used a child with Down syndrome to carry out one of 38 suicide attacks at polling stations that left more than 40 people dead. In March 2005, terrorists detonated an explosives-rigged vehicle with two children in the back seat after U.S. soldiers let it through a Baghdad checkpoint. The vehicle had been allowed to pass when soldiers saw the children and became less suspicious. Once the vehicle got through the checkpoint, the adults parked it and ran, detonating the car with the children inside... When coalition forces moved to disrupt al-Qaida networks operating in Diyala province in central Iraq Jan. 30, they encountered armed terrorists using women and children as human shields... In radical Islam, the slogan ‘women and children first’ has taken on a whole new meaning.”  — Oliver North

CULTURE

“If conservatism is not about conserving principles that originate in reality — a reality that comes from God and is made known to man through his reason — then what good is it? A conservatism without the natural law is simply willful liberalism in a more respectable guise, moving more glacially than the Left’s transparent one, but essentially agreeing that man is the measure of all things and political disputes, no matter how obviously they bear upon the God-given nature of man, are to be resolved by power and man’s desires. Both reason and bitter history should tell conservatives that sawing off the natural law leg of its stool makes the whole thing collapse. Without principles rooted in reality upon which to deliberate about the size of government proper to human beings, economic conservatism evaporates and foreign-policy conservatism turns hubristic.”  — George Neumayr

RE: THE LEFT

“This year’s election will be unusually consequential. In 2006, Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress. Democrats also now hold a majority of governors’ mansions and state legislatures. The Left long has been regnant on America’s campuses, in the mainstream news media, in the entertainment industry, and in the unions. A Clinton or Obama victory would put all levers of power into the same hands. What would Democratic Party bosses do with that? How about statehood for Washington, D.C., which would provide two new Democratic votes in the Senate? How about appointing judges who regard the Constitution as clay, and using immigration policy to expand the Left’s electoral margins? These and other creative maneuvers could create an anti-conservative majority that would last a generation or more. Most worrisome of all: Americans today are engaged in a conflict as serious as any we have ever fought... Thinking hard about such questions over the months ahead would be not just alright; it would be commendable — and conservative.”  — Clifford May
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POLITICAL FUTURES

“I wanted to post a sober thought. If McCain is the Republican nominee, how will he position himself as a candidate? This weekend Obama already telegraphed the Democrat strategy by picking apart McCain’s inconsistencies on taxes and immigration. If McCain moves to the right during the general election to try to appeal to more conservatives, Obama will be able to portray him as a disingenuous flip-flopper. If McCain moves further left to try and blunt those charges, he will continue to alienate a portion of the base. What is he going to run on? If he runs on the surge, how many Democrats and Independents will that attract? Is he going to run against earmarks and for a balanced budget? I don’t think that’s going to resonate with too many voters. The Democrats will be talking about saving the poor, sick and elderly, in the tradition of FDR. McCain will be talking like Herbert Hoover. And since McCain is running on his personal story, let me suggest that neither McCain’s age nor temperament will be ignored by the Democrats. Do we ignore Obama’s age and Hillary’s temperament?... I don’t think John McCain can win in November because of his record, not ‘unfair’ criticism, talk radio, or what have you. If the issue is electability based on current polls, that’s an absurd position. Six months ago Rudy was the inevitable Republican nominee and Hillary was the inevitable Democrat nominee.”  — Mark Levin

FOR THE RECORD

“CIA Director Michael Hayden confirmed that the CIA has used waterboarding and it works prodigiously. The agency only used this technique of simulated drowning three times since Sept. 11, saving it for terror leaders who have posed the utmost threat to our security: Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole; Abu Zubaydah, the brains behind the thwarted millennium attacks; and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who directed Sept. 11 — as deserving a trio of barbarians as any waterboardist can imagine. From these brutes — and in the wink of an eye — Hayden reports the CIA got a quarter of all the human intelligence it obtained from 2002 to 2006. Now we also know that this impressive interrogation technique was undertaken not only with the knowledge of the Bush administration but also the knowledge of then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and then-ranking Senate Intelligence Committee member Jay Rockefeller. So the news from our chief intelligence practitioners is not all bad.”  — Emmett Tyrrell

SELECT READER COMMENTS

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“Regarding McCain v. McCain, what choice do we have? If we continue to run him down it will suppress the Republican vote and the Democrats take over completely. I’m not sure how to turn the tide, but maybe McCain has turned the corner on some of his liberal stances. My suggestion is to try to influence him to go more right by promoting a conservative agenda and showing that is the real vote he will get to get him over the top.”  — Charlotte, North Carolina

“In your essay, McCain v. McCain, you correctly noted the chasm between McCain and Hillary/Obama on national-security issues, but don’t minimize the differences on domestic issues — judicial appointments, right-to-life issues and taxes to name a few. McCain vowed to make the Bush tax cuts permanent and to lower business taxes. The Democrats would go the opposite way on both. McCain is a committed foe of earmarks. McCain isn’t a reincarnation of Ronald Reagan (who is?), but those differences look pretty substantial to me — substantial enough to make any serious person want to support him over either Democrat.”  — Bloomington, Illinois

“I think you were too generous in your ‘5’ rating for John McCain. To get my vote, he has some serious splainin to do. As of now with him as the candidate, I’ll be voting the local elections but for president, I’ll either leave it blank or write in someone else.”  — Badger, Minnesota

“We reap what we sow! We have no one to blame but ourselves for not supporting the only true conservative in the field months ago. Fred Thompson should have been our Republican nominee, not McCain, who the MSM wanted to battle their favorite Democrat children, Hillary and Obama. I for one am disgusted with the whole process.”  — Clinton, Utah
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THE LAST WORD

“The big loser this election year is clear: the polls. I always said I’d never trust them, which of course I’d promptly proceeded to do in New Hampshire. But the results there made a believer of me. Or rather a disbeliever. By now the pollsters have produced a variety of explanations for their less than exact projections. They always do. Remember their plentiful excuses after reporting all those exit polls anticipating President Kerry’s landslide victory in ‘04? This season, we’re told, the polls were skewed by all the new voters who showed up to cast their ballots, or by the sheer number of voters who waited till the last days or even last minutes to make up their minds, or by the unanticipated number of older women who voted for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, or the number of young, black, and/or well-educated voters who materialized to cast their ballots for Barack Obama in South Carolina and elsewhere, or... well, you name it. Me, I suspect the pollsters were thrown off their stride by global warming. Or maybe the moon and tides. The science/art/guesswork of modern public opinion polling is really quite good — at making excuses... Like most Americans, I’m pleased when the voters don’t meekly follow the polls and pundits. It restores my faith in we the unpredictable people.”  — Paul Greenberg

Veritas vos Liberabit — Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus, et Fidelis! Mark Alexander, Publisher, for The Patriot’s editors and staff. (Please pray for our Patriot Armed Forces standing in harm’s way around the world, and for their families — especially families of those fallen Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen, who granted their lives in defense of American liberty.)