The Patriot Post Brief 7-23-2012

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The Patriot Post Brief 7-23-2012
From The Federalist Patriot
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The Lessons of Colorado

July 23, 2012

The Foundation

"Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt." --Samuel Adams

Re: The Left

"It didn't take long. Despite 12 dead and [58] injured, reckless media were looking to exploit the rampage perpetrated by alleged killer, James Holmes, as quickly as possible. ABC News reporter Brian Ross led the despicable charge, immediately attempting to politicize the issue. 'There's a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea Party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don't know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it's Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado,' Ross irresponsibly told Good Morning America's George Stephanopoulos. Yet within hours, the network was forced to make a retraction. ... MSNBC used the tragedy to slam the National Rifle Association (NRA), while a blogger at the Daily Kos website blames America in general, contending that real problem 'is getting past the mental and emotional resistance of those who continue to believe that we're the best country in the world, the best culture ever produced by human beings, and the best everything else.' ... Rush Limbaugh was blamed for the atrocity because he reviewed 'The Dark Knight Rises,' the movie playing in the theater at the time, and noted that the name of the lead villain, Bane, was a homonym for Mitt Romney's Bain Capital, and that it was no accident. ... The essence of senseless tragedies such as this one is just that: utter senselessness. And that is exactly why irresponsible speculation, armchair psychology, and attempts to politically exploit them are so despicable. Yet the nonsense continues, led by the Associated Press, which compiled a list -- of more possible parallels between the massacre in Aurora and the Batman comic book character. Perhaps, much like the current bleating for more gun control, such 'insight' will lead to calls for more comic book or movie controls as well." --columnist Arnold Ahlert1

Opinion in Brief

"What happened in Colorado in the early hours of [Friday] morning was not a 'tragedy' but a willful act of mass murder. Beyond his age, name, and ethnicity, nobody yet knows who the shooter is, or why he chose to do what he did. In my view, this is a blessing, albeit a temporary one; for, as has been the way in recent years, once his party registration, television-viewing habits, and random scribblings become known to the public, all sorts of hysterical speculation and unlettered accusations will burst forth. Whole groups will be vilified, blame will be apportioned to those many times removed, and the shooter will be partially absolved of blame by those who prefer to see fault in video games or talk radio or political rhetoric or anything else that can be conscripted to explain why terrible things happen to good people. Few will point out that unless someone commits an atrocity in the name of an ideology -- Timothy McVeigh, for example -- their political beliefs are wholly irrelevant. ... This crime was ultimately about people. It was about the shooter, the victims, and their families -- and very little else besides -- and we would do well to avoid breathlessly proposing radical changes to our constitutional order because a man abused his liberty." --columnist Charles C. W. Cooke2

Culture

"The responses of both presidential candidates to the horror in Colorado feel weak to me. They are characteristic of our culture, which treats each of these grotesque acts of mass killing as 'tragedies.' The proper response to such an atrocity is rage. It wouldn't be out of place for the president and the man who hopes to replace him to refer to the shooter as a 'monster.' We don't do that. Instead, we focus on 'healing.' We've become excellently behaved victims." --columnist Mona Charen3

Essential Liberty

"Freedom is seldom destroyed all at once. More often it is eroded, bit by bit, until it is gone. This can happen so gradually that there is no sudden change that would alert people to the danger. By the time everybody realizes what has happened, it can be too late, because their freedom is gone. ... One of the tricks of professional magicians is to distract the audience's attention from what they are doing while they are creating an illusion of magic. Pious talk about 'giving back' distracts our attention from the cold fact that politicians are taking away more and more of our money and our freedom. Even the envy that politicians stir up against 'the rich' is highly focussed on those particular high income-earners whose decisions the politicians want to take over. Others in sports or entertainment can make far more money than the highest paid corporate executive, but there is no way that politicians can take over the roles of Roger Federer or Oprah Winfrey, so highly paid sports stars or entertainers are never accused of 'greed.' If we are so easily distracted by self-serving political rhetoric, we are not only going to see our money, but our freedom, increasingly taken away from us by slick-talking politicians, including our current slick-talker-in-chief in the White House." --economist Thomas Sowell4

Insight

"There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly." --American author and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Government

"Herbert Croly, the godfather of American progressivism, spoke for a generation of progressive intellectuals when he wrote that the 'individual has no meaning apart from the society in which his individuality has been formed.' For the progressives, society and government were almost interchangeable terms. John Dewey, the seminal progressive philosopher, believed that 'organized social control' via a 'socialized economy' was the only means to create 'free' individuals. For the progressives, freedom wasn't the absence of government coercion, it was a pile of gifts from the state. Progressives invented the idea of the 'moral equivalent of war' as a means of inciting citizens to drop their personal priorities and rally around the state for a government-defined 'cause larger than themselves.' ... To the extent Obama ever speaks the language of religion, it is to justify, even sanctify, the works of government. He often invokes the Hallmark-ized biblical teaching that 'I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper' as a means to rationalize not personal action but government action. ... The problem facing Obama is that there's a reason the American people never fully embraced the progressive vision. The idea driving America is the individual pursuit of happiness. Just because the word 'individual' appears in there doesn't make it a selfish ideal; it means it's a vision of liberty." --columnist Jonah Goldberg5

The Gipper

"It doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property? Such machinery already exists." --Ronald Reagan6

Political Futures

"We accept the negative ads, name-calling and lies as part of the way the political game is played, then we sit back and gripe about how our politics have gone into the dumpster. But we can't have it both ways. It's like going to the Indianapolis 500 hoping to see the accidents -- and then complaining about the accidents. It's like going to a cage fight -- and complaining about the violence. Today we no longer have political ads that tell the truth about a candidate or the issues. We have negative ads that spin, distort and take words out of context. ... The politicians are giving us exactly what we want. If we really want more truth in politics, if we really want less negativity and fewer lies, we have to make it clear to the politicians that we no longer want to watch their grubby cage fight. Until we do, we'll be fed the same old dirt." --columnist Michael Reagan7