Tag: QotD

By now I’m sure that most of you have read Keith Thompsons’s San Francisco Chronicle piece, Leaving the Left. If you haven’t, you need to. Too much crunchy goodness to excerpt even a teaser. But that’s not where the Quote of the Week comes from this time. Mr. Thompson has his own web site, and on that site is another of his essays, Busting the Moral Equivalence Racket. In it he quotes author Sam Harris from his book The End of Faith:

(S)o many Muslims are eager to turn themselves into bombs these days because the Koran makes this activity seem like a career opportunity

But we’re not in a religious war, you understand. Words like “Crusade” must not be uttered.

Mr. Thompson has a blog, too: Sane Nation. I think I’m going to have to spend some time there. He says things like this:

Spot quiz. Who made the following statement:

“The free use of private property is just as important as … speech, the press, or the free exercise of religion.”

A. James Madison
B. Thomas Jefferson
C. Adam Smith
D. Bobcat Goldwaithe

Answer: none of the above. Janice Rogers Brown made that statement. But it sounds a lot like Madison or Jefferson. So what is it that has “progressive” opponents of Brown’s nomination to the D.C. Court of Appeals screaming like Bobcat?

Here’s what: Brown had the audacity to declare that courts have the responsibility not run roughshod over groups that are unpopular or lack political power.

Yup. I definitely need to read more of what this ex-Leftist has to say.

From Instapundit on the topic of Newsweek‘s “fake-but-accurate” reporting on the desecration of the Koran by guards at Gitmo:

Really, I don’t want to hear another word about the superior “responsibility” of Big Media. Not one more word.

Roger that.

This time from Varifrank:

Has it occured to anyone else that the generation that lost Vietnam the first time is now in the process of metaphysically losing it a second time? Was there something in the water when the “greatest generation” came home to breed that helped produce a generation of narcissistic, whiny pathetic and perpetual losers? Is this the true effect of flouridation?

Good question.

UPDATE, 9/19: Connie du Toit comments on the Selfish Generation™

From Lileks’s Thursday Bleat, words to live by:

Appearances to the contrary, I do not mistake my ability to write about something as proof that I’m right. It could just mean I have a gift for ordering my ignorance into pleasing shapes.

Generally, damned pleasing ones. Were mine but a shadow…

From Mostly Cajun, who’s moved off of Blogspot:

(I)n the presence of dead children, my veneer of civilization thins considerably.

Which reminds me of another favorite quotation I first found in the bear pit of the talk.politics.guns newsgroup from poster Trefor Thomas:

To be civilized is to restrain the ability to commit mayhem.
To be incapable of committing mayhem is not the mark of the civilized,
merely the domesticated.

(Hat tip, Kim du Toit)

Charles Krauthammer (a conservative who happens to think that civilian disarmament is a remarkably good idea – boo, hiss) has written an excellent essay entitled Democratic Realism. Highly recommended. As Kim noted, this is not a piece you can easily excerpt from, but here’s a taste:

We like our McDonald’s. We like our football. We like our rock-and-roll. We’ve got the Grand Canyon and Graceland. We’ve got Silicon Valley and South Beach. We’ve got everything. And if that’s not enough, we’ve got Vegas–which is a facsimile of everything. What could we possibly need anywhere else? We don’t like exotic climates. We don’t like exotic languages–lots of declensions and moods. We don’t even know what a mood is. We like Iowa corn and New York hot dogs, and if we want Chinese or Indian or Italian, we go to the food court. We don’t send the Marines for takeout.
That’s because we are not an imperial power. We are a commercial republic. We don’t take food; we trade for it. Which makes us something unique in history, an anomaly, a hybrid: a commercial republic with overwhelming global power. A commercial republic that, by pure accident of history, has been designated custodian of the international system. The eyes of every supplicant from East Timor to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Liberia; Arab and Israeli, Irish and British, North and South Korean are upon us.
That is who we are. That is where we are.
Now the question is: What do we do? What is a unipolar power to do?