Tag: QotD

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Quote of the Day.

(Via 4RWW, from a comment at an excellent post at Protein Wisdom.)

Today’s quote, by Ric Locke:

Saddam Hussein was a hateful, bloodyminded, bloody-handed tyrant who ran one of the nastiest regimes the planet has ever seen. Righties, we’ll stand before the Throne stammering excuses for supporting vile regimes, but Anastasio Somoza never fed people into a chipper-shredder. If the Left, including Democrats, believed one-tenth of what they’ve been spewing for the last half century they would have been screaming in the streets in 1993 for Clinton to remove Saddam by any means necessary.

Instead they have blocked that removal by any means possible, screamed in frustration when that blockage wasn’t successful, excused his excesses, lionized his followers, and made every attempt to vanish his crimes. In the course of that they have betrayed every Leftist and abandoned every democrat in Iraq.

So the only thing, the only strategy remaining to them is make it didn’t happen. It is imperative, a matter of psychic survival, that the Michael Moore “narrative” win out—that Uncle Joe Saddam was a benevolent father figure presiding over a somewhat-strict but peaceful, pastoral land of kite-flying children until viciously mauled by the evil George Bush.

Bush lied—not just about uranium in Africa but about everything: no Kurds got gassed, no Marsh Arabs got killed, no palaces got built with children’s food money, no living babies got thrown in an open ditch to be smothered with the bodies of their parents and buried. It didn’t happen—because if it did, if Bush didn’t lie, they have violated every precept, betrayed every principle, and smashed every ideal that makes the Left, including Democrats, anything but scare-tales to keep people lying awake sweating in fear.

Which is exactly what happened. Whether or not George Bush is a clever man, his record clearly shows that he isn’t a liar.

The thinking ones know it, and sweat bullets and swing into action immediately anything pops up that threatens to expose them. That’s where the feverish desperation comes from—there’s so much they have to suppress. It leaves them open to opportunists. Joe Wilson doesn’t believe in anything but Joe Wilson; his behavior is purely for his own aggrandizement, as is evident to anyone who examines the case, but the Left is forced to support the insupportable because to do otherwise is to threaten the sacred narrative.

Emphasis in original. And precisely the way I see it, myself.

Quote of the Month

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Via Alger, an op-ed in today’s New York Post by strategist and author Ralph Peters explains it perfectly:

Providing aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime is treason. It’s not “just politics.” It’s treason.
And signaling our enemies that Congress wants them to win isn’t “supporting our troops.”
The “nonbinding resolution” telling the world that we intend to surrender to terrorism and abandon Iraq may be the most disgraceful congressional action since the Democratic Party united to defend slavery.

RTWT.

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Quote of the Day.

Via David Hardy, from a Harvard Crimson op-ed you really ought to read the whole of:

Academia is inherently ill-equipped to deal with the realities of conflict, since it is based on the premise that disputes can be resolved through rational exchange of ideas. Yet violence, whether it happens to squirrels or Harvard undergraduates, is a strange animal. It is sudden, profound, and oblivious to logic and theory.

Change “Academia” to “Intellectuals” or “Bureaucrats” or, as David put it, “Elites,” (or Thomas Sowell, “The Anointed,”) and it goes a long way to explaining the Iraq Study Group’s conclusion that we need to engage Syria and Iran in negotiations:

In order to foster such consensus, the United States should embark on a robust diplomatic effort to establish an international support structure intended to stabilize Iraq and ease tensions in other countries in the region. This support structure should include every country that has an interest in averting a chaotic Iraq, including all of Iraq’s neighbors—Iran and Syria among them. Despite the well-known differences between many of these countries, they all share an interest in avoiding the horrific consequences that would flow from a chaotic Iraq, particularly a humanitarian catastrophe and regional destabilization.

Doesn’t that just drip with the belief that “disputes can be resolved through rational exchange of ideas” while completely ignoring the fact that these states are violent, and thus not interested in the stability of Iraq? In fact, that they find the instabilty in Iraq to their advantage?

Doesn’t that one quote explain the urge to find out “why they hate us” – so we can exchange ideas rationally and resolve our dispute? Doesn’t this explain Neville Chamberlain perfectly? Our media? The Left?

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Quote of the Day.

Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery. – Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom.

And for some reason, large parts of our population seem to want us to return there.

Preamble

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In reference to that upcoming piece responding to Publicola, I ran across an excellent post tonight which began with what will be my quote of the week for this week.

From MaxedOutMama (h/t Dr. Sanity):

Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked. That psychic discomfort is the price we pay for basic civic peace. It’s worth it.

It’s a pragmatic principle. Defend everyone else’s rights, because if you don’t there is no one to defend yours.

RTWT.

More to come.

Quote of the Week

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I’ve been reading Orson Scott Card’s Shadow of the Giant, the fourth (I think) book in the Shadow series that he wrote as a sequel to the Ender’s Game series. If you’re not familiar with them, I strongly recommend Ender’s Game. You can skip Xenocide and Speaker for the Dead, if you’d like, and jump directly to Ender’s Shadow and its sequels. I find Card to be a hit-and-miss author, my personal tastes I suppose, but these books are quite good and I think everyone should read Ender’s Game.

Anyway, reading through Shadow of the Giant I came across two passages quite close together that resonated with me, all spoken by one of the main characters, Peter Wiggin:

(America) was a nation created out of nothing – nothing but a set of ideals that they never measured up to. Now and then they had great leaders, but usually nothing but political hacks, and I mean right from the start. Washington was great, but Adams was paranoid and lazy, and Jefferson was as vile a scheming politician as a nation has ever been cursed with.

…

America shaped itself with institutions so strong that it could survive corruption, stupidity, vanity, ambition, recklessness, and even insanity in its chief executive.

—

Islam has never learned how to be a religion. It’s a tyranny by its very nature. Until it learns to let the door swing both ways, and permit Muslims to decide not to be Muslims without penalty, then the world has no choice but to fight against it in order to be free.

Just thought I’d share.

Picking at the Scab

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Quote of the week, from Eric S. Raymond:

The trouble with ‘tolerance’ is that it only works as a cultural compact when all parties are civilized and have in practice largely agreed to abandon the more inconvenient claims of the religions they theoretically profess.

(The title is from a comment I left at a post over at Eternity Road.) (Link broken. – Ed.) Discuss.

Update, 3/18/06: Fran Porretto comments (Link broken. – Ed.) on Eric S. Raymond’s post, but misidentifies which portion I quoted “with approval.”

Apparently he’s still upset with me.

One more update. Og the Neanderpundit links approvingly to Fran’s post, and comments:

We’re not talking about the things so called christians have done in the past, and I will brook no discussion on that subject.

But we have to discuss that subject, because no one’s proven to me that such things can’t happen again:

When news of this holocaust of French Protestants reached the world, Catherine de’Medici received the congratulations of all the Catholic powers, and Pope Gregory XIII ordered bonfires lighted and the singing of the Te Deum. Indeed, the Pope’s joy was so great that he commanded a gold medal to be minted, with the inscription, “Slaughter [strages] of the Huguenots.” He then had Giorgio Vasari paint pictures in the Vatican of “the glorious triumph over a perfidious race.”

I suppose Catherine de’Medici and Pope Gregory XIII were “so-called” Christians? Sarah claims that Protestant Christianity is the answer. Perhaps it is, but some of the Protestant sects seem quite content in quoting the Old Testament and holding it up for reverence. The Ten Commandments, for example, which is a rallying point for a lot of American Christians, is from the Book of Exodus. Fran states:

The Book of Deuteronomy is Old Testament, and has no relevance to the Christian New Covenant; the same applies to the bloody commands of the Book of Leviticus.

Are the Ten Commandments still valid, then? A lot of people seem to believe they are. Or is this just another example of where civilized parties have “largely agreed to abandon the more inconvenient claims of the religions they theoretically profess?”

I’ve made the point that I’m not a biblical scholar, but I’d wager the majority of people who are “so-called christians” aren’t either, and never have been.

—

UPDATE:  As of August 6, 2013, due to the herculean efforts of reader John Hardin, the original (rather long) JS-Kit/Echo comment thread for this post (read-only) is available here.

Quote of the Week:

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Eric S. Raymond is posting again:

Of course, one could argue that Big Media is simply taking its cue from the Democratic Party. (Yes, I know one of those is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the other, I just can’t keep straight which one is on top.) If Republicans are beating the stuffings out of you in every election, it couldn’t be because you have no program beyond screaming “George Bush is eeeeevil!” and licking the anus of the Designated Victim Group Of The Week.

Some have a way with words, others not have way.

Interesting Passage from a Novel. . .

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From The Road to Damascus, by John Ringo and Linda Evans:

“If I could’ve, son, I’d have given you a generalship, but that’s a rank beyond my legal authority to grant. We took to heart lessons learned on old Terra. We chose carefully and wisely when we modeled our constitution and named this world for the man who drafted the original model. Military dictatorships are anathema to us.”

Simon’s lips twitched, despite the gravity of the situation. He’d raised an eyebrow at one of the clauses, which read, essentially, The right of the people to keep and bear arms for self-defense and defense of the homeland shall never be infringed, limited, rescinded, interfered with, or prohibited by any decree of law, decision by court, or policy by the executive branch or any of its agencies. And this time, we mean it.

The planet is named Jefferson, so they’re a little shaky on their history – Madison is most responsible for the Constitution, Jefferson for the Declaration of Independence – but I like the sentiment.