A Republican Calls it Like He Sees It

A lot of bloggers have picked up on a story emanating from the quaint and historical Westminster College, about 2 and a half hours east of here. Cheney came to campus to give a speech on foreign policy, which is appropriate because Westminster is a remarkably global school in the middle of Missouri. It has a beautiful Christopher Wren church on the grounds, and Churchill delivered his famous "Iron Curtain" speech there.

What did Cheney do in this elevated setting? How did he perform when he had the opportunity to stand in the footprints of Churchill, if not fill his shoes? Was Cheney fit to join the list of distinguished speakers the campus has hosted, such as George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, and Lech Walesa?

No.

Cheney, the vitriolic hateful weasel that he is, launched into a standard stump speech, chock full of lies and deceptions about John Kerry. It was so bad that the President of the College found it necessary to email the entire campus the following day, pointing out that "Frankly, I must admit that I was surprised and disappointed that Mr. Cheney chose to step off the high ground and resort to Kerry-bashing for a large portion of his speech."

While media descriptions of President Lamkin have either not addressed his political leanings or have described him as a conservative-leaning split ticket voter, a quick check of the Political Moneyline shows that he donated $300 dollars to the National Republican Congressional Committee less than a year ago. No evidence of his ever giving money to the Democrats.

The Horror of Bad Punctuation

Okay, I was an English major. Those formative years made me a pain in the ass. I sometimes correct people when they misuse "hopefully", as in "Hopefully, the Chiefs won't waste their draft picks this year," though, more often, I wince and carry on. I appreciate it when people correct me, and admire those who use exactly the right word, especially when it sends me to the dictionary.

If you share these traits, go to Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and try the punctuation game.

Found another great blog!

Liberal Media Conspiracy provides tremendous material, and we share a loathing of hypocrisy. It's amazing how much great content is out there in the Blogosphere, and how a random link on someone's site can lead you to powerful material.

Best Living Writer - a Rightwinger?

It may surprise those who know me and those who read my posts here, but my call for the best living writer (at least writing in English) is Mark Helprin. I first read his work on the pages of the New Yorker, where one of his stories stunned me with its lyricism and insight. Since then, I have read as much of his work as I can find, and his Soldier of the Great War ranks among my 3 favorite books.

Mark Helprin also happens to be a strong advocate of rightwing causes. He publishes regularly on editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and he wrote speeches for Bob Dole (his hand was particularly obvious in Dole's poetic Senate retirement speech).

I recently happened upon a high school graduation speech he delivered in 2002, in which he called upon the graduates to defend civilization. It's a beautiful and truthful piece, and I pass it on to you from a conservative news forum:

I had wanted to speak to you tonight about defense, about the campaign in Afghanistan, and the war against terrorism -- to shower you with facts and figures, which would support my contention that, in regard to the defense of this country, three administrations in a row have not done, and are not doing, enough. Three administrations in a row have not appreciated, and still do not appreciate, the gathering storm. I had wanted to do that, but the president of a surrounding college said, wisely, "Remember the occasion." And I shall, for it is a most worthy occasion, and he is right, it must take precedence over policy, which not only blows with the wind, but disappears with it.

The graduates tonight cannot know what is in their parents' hearts. You have been spared that, until you have children of your own, who are about to take the first step in leaving you . . . forever. Among those of false and mechanistic emotion, the expectation is that your parents will be overjoyed. But in a world where things matter, where love is understood in its relation to mortality, and where there is the courage of commitment -- which is to say, in this world -- they cannot be overjoyed. And this I know not only because I once left my own parents, and then they left, me, forever, but because I have two daughters of your age, and although they must, it breaks my heart to see them go.

My heart will have to wait, however, because by tradition in this the very last act of your extraordinary secondary education I am obliged to impart to you some sort of resolution for which, given the nature of that education, you are particularly suited. It is also my hope that, in regard to resolution, I can outdo the deservedly most famous high school commencement address in all of history, Clarence Darrow's command to a 1918 graduating class: Get out of here, and go swimming. That's admirable, but I would like to add just a little more, and to lengthen it by only a third. My charge to you, then, taking into account who you are and the nature of this institution, is: Get out of here, go swimming, and defend Western Civilization. Admittedly that is a bit more than Darrow asked, but then again he was a Progressive, and Progressives are notoriously permissive with their young. I know that such a charge is most ambitious, but it comes at the right time, both in history and in your lives.

There is a time to lay down arms, and there is a time to take them up, and that we are now in a time to take them up is self-evident. Those for whom it is not self-evident, who would challenge the right to defend against and preempt barbarous attacks upon our persons and our country, and who would instead substitute a distorted inquiry that would end in the condemnation not of the terrorists but of the terrorized, do not find the need to defend their civilization -- Western Civilization -- self-evident. Nor do they find the action of doing so congenial, in that it is something from which they habitually abstain. This is a serious charge, and I have drawn a clear line, but I mean to, so let me give you an example.

Several years ago, I was speaking in a university town in Massachusetts. By some quirk which I hope never to see reproduced, and before I knew what was happening, I found myself debating my entire audience on the subjects of human sacrifice and cannibalism. These well-educated and polite people -- only a few of whom would actually have murdered or eaten one another -- who had sons and daughters, Ph.D.s, and BMWs, were defending the Mayan and Aztec practice of human sacrifice -- that is, in the main, of children -- and the South Sea custom of cannibalism. It wasn't that they were for such things: they weren't. It wasn't that they were not against them: they were. It was that to take the position that human sacrifice and cannibalism are wrong is not only to reject relativism but to place oneself decisively in the ranks of Western Civilization, such a position being one of its characteristic distinctions, and this they would not do. They were ashamed to do so, and they were afraid to do so. My charge to you is that in this, you never be either ashamed or afraid.
Civilization is vulnerable not only to munitions, it is vulnerable to cowardice and betrayal. It is a great and massive thing of many dimensions that can be attacked from many angles. When professors of ethics at leading universities advocate infanticide, you know that civilization is under attack. When governments and churches advocate racial discrimination, you know that civilization is under attack. When a popular "art" exhibit consists of human cadavers in various states of mutilation, including a bisected pregnant woman and her unborn child, you know that civilization is under attack. The list is endless. The daily assault could fill an encyclopedia of decadence and degradation.

You must never fail to stand against such things, to use your education to break the sophistry that surrounds them, and to draw upon it to summon the memory of a thousand struggles, of ten thousand battles, and of the countless millions who fell to establish and defend those principles that not long ago were called self-evident, and that, now and forever, absent moral cowardice, are self-evident.

If civilization can be attacked on many fronts, it can also be defended on many fronts, and to do so you need not necessarily drop into Afghanistan by parachute or found a political party. Last summer, in Venice, I was walking from room to room in the Accademia, which, unlike timid American museums, throws its windows wide open to the light and air of day. As if to bring even further alive the greatness and truth of the Bellinis and the Giorgiones on the walls, the galleries were flooded with music. As is most everything in Italy, it was unofficial. It came from a guitarist and a soprano on a side street. He played while she sang -- gloriously -- Bach, Handel, Mozart, and anonymous folk songs of the 18th Century. Because it was music, I cannot properly convey to you how beautiful it was, but it was accomplished, precise, and infused with the ineffable quality that lifts great art above that which merely aspires to or pretends to be great art. I could not see them from the windows, but when, several hours later, I went outside, they had neither ceased, nor skipped a beat, nor produced a single false note.

They were impoverished Poles, who appeared to be in their late twenties. She was thin, sharp-featured, and hauntingly beautiful. Most people simply passed them by, some dropped a few coins in a basket at her feet, and the visitors to the Accademia had no idea who they were, but she sang as if she were bathed in the footlights of La Scala, where she should have been, and where someday she may be. It did not matter that they were unrecognized, that they sang on the street, or that they were desperately poor, because that day in Venice they rose above everyone else, except perhaps the saints. In this they shared a brotherhood with the American soldier who made the first parachute jump, in the dark, into Afghanistan. For they and he were defending the civilization of the West, and they and he are inextricably linked. Without the soldier, they could not exist except in subjugation, and without them, he would not have enough to fight for.

I ask you to join this brotherhood, and, in your own way, whatever that may be, to defend and champion the sanctity of the individual, free and objective inquiry, government by consent of the governed, freedom of conscience, and the pursuit -- rather than the degradation and denial -- of truth and of beauty. I ask you to defend a civilization so buoyant with the presence of God that it need never compel others in His name. I ask you to defend a civilization that rather than deliberately obscuring the difference between combatants and non-combatants, struggles to maintain and respect it. I ask you to defend a civilization of immeasurable achievement, brilliance, and freedom. I ask you to defend civilization itself.

It is not without risk, and to request this of you in the presence of your parents is something I can do only because I ask the same of my own children. Because of the temper of the times (and, some would say, the temper of all times), what may be exacted from you is sacrifice -- of income, position, title, acceptance, respect, perhaps even of life. But what may be provided, or, rather, earned, is a kind of battlefield commission that will give you neither rank nor insignia nor anything but honor. And therein lies the justifying balance, for honor is usually worth at least what you must give up to obtain it. We have heard of late how we are at a disadvantage in the war that has just begun, because in the West we cling to life and comfort at the expense of honor. Our enemies tell us that, and in the telling they barely conceal their enjoyment. Do they really believe this? Because if they do, I have a message for them: The sense of honor in the West may be slow to awaken, but it exists in measures and quantities, when it does awaken, enough to fill the world, as it shall, as it must. How do they think we have come to where we are? How do they think we survived the battles that led to the great revisions in this civilization, its unprecedented turnings, redirections, and rededications -- of which, being entirely unself-critical and subjective, they have not yet had the courage to make even one? They say we have no history. Did we spring from a leaf? How do they think we have come through our five thousand years? Honor. From long familiarity, we know what honor is.

It is what enables the individual to do right in the face of complacency and cowardice. It is what enables the soldier to die alone, the political prisoner to resist, the singer to sing her song, hardly appreciated, on a side street. It is God's valuation and resplendent touch, His gift of strength to those who need it most, when they need it most.

I ask you to defend and protect what is great and good, to choose your battles, but to stand your ground. For little things cascade into big things, and even should the larger battle not go well, hold your position. Even if, in the end, you do not prevail -- though you must -- you will have done right, and the ghosts of those who came before you over many thousands of years, of those who fell unknown and unremembered while doing right, of those who upheld against all pressures and in the face of wounding opposition, will be justly honored, as you will be justly honored, by those who come after you.

Congratulations, and God bless.

Friends, that's how I wish I could write, and, if you liked this, go read A Soldier of the Great War (hint: the story spawls through WWI, but the great war is the battle for love and beauty).

Thank you, Governor Holden!

Governor Holden courageously vetoed the deceptive "tort reform" bill last year, and may be called upon to do it again this year. The Republican legislators support this legislation, claiming that it is necessary to protect doctors from lawyers driving up outrageous malpractice rates. The truth is, the supporters of tort reform are either stupid, uninformed, or well-paid whores of the insurance industry.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch on Saturday published some truths with should be troubling to those who have been using myths about litigiousness and doctors to gin up support for laws which will restrict people's access to the courts. Among the facts:

The Missouri Department of Insurance said Friday that medical malpractice claims filed and paid in 2003 fell to all-time lows.

The drop in payouts combined with the hefty premium increases in recent years give liability insurers a "cash-flow windfall," department director Scott Lakin said.

. . .

Last year, new claims filed against health-care providers, an indicator of the number of future settlement payouts, were at the lowest in more than 15 years, the department said. Claims filed against physicians fell 13.8 percent to 665 in 2003. The previous low was 704 in 2001.

Let me state it plainly - anybody who votes for a legislator supporting tort reform legislation is being fooled by the insurance industry.

Funniest Right-Winger of the Week #5

Let's go right to the top this time. OTB2 gets the nod, with his spectacularly rambling, inconsistent and dishonest performance at his own press conference.

Q: After 9/11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say? And what lessons have you learned from it?

A. Hmmm. I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it. I'm sure historians will look back and say, Gosh, he could have done it better this way or that way. You know, I just — I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet.

I have occasional bad dreams where I have to take a final exam in a class I haven't attended. Dubya must have been having that same feeling.

200 days until regime change in Washington.

Bush's Bumper Stickers

A friend sent this to me - I can't claim authorship.

Here are some choices the Republican National Committee is thinking about for the coming election:

Bush/Cheney '04: Because you don't change horsemen mid-Apocalypse.

Bush/Cheney '04: Because the truth just isn't good enough.

Bush/Cheney '04: Compassionate Colonialism

Bush/Cheney '04: In your heart, you know they might or could be technically correct.

Bush/Cheney '04: Leave no billionaire behind

Bush/Cheney '04: Making the world a better place, one country at a time.

Bush/Cheney '04: Putting the "con" in conservatism

Bush/Cheney '04: Thanks for not paying attention

Bush/Cheney '04: This time, elect us!

Bush/Cheney '04: How Did Our Oil Get Under Their Sand?

Bush/Cheney '04: It ain't over 'til your brother or his "friend" Katherine Harris counts the votes

Funniest Right-Wingers of the Week, #4

A bunch of anti-gay crusaders trying to protect their schools from the homosexuals relied upon an old article from The Onion reporting on a homosexual recruiting drive in schools. Even funnier, they're trying to act like they were in on the joke, and mistakenly claim that the Onion is a "gay paper". It must be a frightening world when you are so colossally stupid that you fall for an item in paper with other headlines such as "Antique dealer sick of appraising smurf collections" and "Orgy a logistical nightmare".

The Myth of Frivolous Medical Malpractice Cases

I received an email from Richard C. Miller of the Monsees, Miller, Mayer, Presley & Amick law firm concerning the issue of tort reform. He provided a clear explanation of what the real story is surrounding medical malpractice cases.

"Tort 'reform' is having an effect. For instance, we used to say we did med mal cases, now we generally do not, although that is not set in stone. Perhaps the numbers are a better explanation. We used to take about 1 in 25 potential med mal cases, then it went to 1 in 50, now the only time we take them is if it is almost a perfect case. We are not alone - the number of people who do med mal has diminished, as has the number of cases filed. The economics of the practice dictate this result: minimum of $50,000 cash investment on our part; little chance of settlement since the doctors/hospitals control this decision and are risking little of their own money; a win rate at trial that is less than 30% (one of the lowest in plaintiff's cases); and high expectations on the client's part because they have been told that multi-million dollar verdicts are common, which we know could not be further from the truth and the jurors come in with the goal of making sure of that. Consequently, a lot of people who have experienced clear malpractice, but without damages huge enough to justify all the risk of taking the case never get a chance at justice. The number of people who cannot find an attorney in this area has gone up drastically, as has the frustration level of the people I talk to - remember, we are the ones who see the consequences of malpractice and hear the complaints of those who cannot find a lawyer (I average 1-2 declines a week). Access to justice in this country is diminishing, not increasing. Any further reduction in the tort rights of people only closes the courthouse to more people."

The next time you get one of those foolish "Stella Award" emails detailing outrageous lawsuits, please understand that they are not true. Those cases simply do not exist in the real world - they are made up by somebody trying to convince the American people to give up their access to a jury of their peers.

The Mercenaries in Fallujah

As I read about the horrible happenings in Fallujah, I was puzzled why this rage would be focused on "contractors". When I think of contractors, I think of guys doing home repairs. Further research about them, though, shows that they were actually mercenaries. And that the US Government, as well as private companies, are increasingly turning to mercenaries to handle security needs, not only in Iraq, but in other hotspots, such as Colombia.

Like The Agonist, I want to be crystal clear here in saying that I am not diminishing their deaths or saying that their brutal murder was more acceptable because they were mercenaries. But two points come to mind - 1) is this a way for US military forces to completely avoid Congressional oversight (what if Lieutenant Calley were just a Halliburton employee?), and 2) to what extent will the "real" military be called upon to support the missions they launch, or avenge their deaths?

Wading into a topic like this, I am painfully aware that I am a middle-aged non-veteran in Kansas City, who has never been anyplace more exotic than Wales. I acknowledge that I am out of my depth, and I half-expect Jack Nicholson to thunder "you can't handle the truth!" at me. But these are legitimate and important questions, I think, and if Joe Sixpack cannot ask them, who will the US military be serving?

Happy April Fool's Day