Someone’s Dying for Your Vote — As the elections draw near, I find myself getting angrier and angrier. On a daily basis, I receive e-mail messages from conservative readers explaining why they’re not going to vote on November 7. Fellow conservative bloggers have elucidated their views on this subject supporting the abstainers, and explaining why a Democrat victory in eight days isn’t such a bad thing.

Someone’s Dying for Your Vote
October 30th, 2006

2,808 Americans have died in Iraq the past 43 months. Another 282 have met such a fate in and around Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. Likely all are rolling over in their graves as fellow countrymen who sent them to war are threatening to boycott Election Day.

Particularly disheartening to these fallen heroes must be the conservative abstentions, as likely 90 percent of such Americans were in favor of sending soldiers to Iraq in March 2003, while probably 100 percent supported invading Afghanistan after 9/11. It must be unfathomable to these brave souls that the very people who rallied politicians to risk lives for these efforts are now turning their backs on the honored dead, and what they died for.

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.—Thomas Paine

As amazing as it might seem, due to Republican failures to curtail spending, solve illegal immigration, cure Social Security, and police corruption, many Party members are forgetting the more than a million Americans that have died in battle for the precious right to vote.

Should we forsake that right now because this Congress has failed to address such issues? What does that say to the 3,090 soldiers that have died to give Iraqis and Afghanis such a right, or to the 170,000 Americans still at risk to protect it?

Maybe more importantly, would any of the fallen abstain from voting as result of these other issues if they were still alive today?

If the people fail to vote, a government will be developed which is not their government…. The whole system of American Government rests on the ballot box. Unless citizens perform their duties there, such a system of government is doomed to failure.—Calvin Coolidge

As the elections draw near, I find myself getting angrier and angrier. On a daily basis, I receive e-mail messages from conservative readers explaining why they’re not going to vote on November 7. Fellow conservative bloggers have elucidated their views on this subject supporting the abstainers, and explaining why a Democrat victory in eight days isn’t such a bad thing.

Every morning as I drive to work, I hear callers tell Rush Limbaugh why they’re not going to vote; every afternoon I hear the same on Sean Hannity’s program.

The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all. —John F. Kennedy

So I grow angrier, because I’m saddened for the state of the Republican Party, and wonder how we have so fallen from the exhilaration we felt on November 2, 2004, when President Bush was reelected, and we miraculously added to our majorities in both chambers of Congress. We were going to accomplish so much in the next two years. In particular, finally reform Social Security, and extend the president’s tax cuts.

Alas, as 2005 rolled on, such lofty goals were replaced by scandals surrounding former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the Vice President’s former Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby, and a terrible hurricane in the Gulf Coast.

The future of this republic is in the hands of the American voter.—Dwight D. Eisenhower

2006 wasn’t any better, as a proposed sale of American ports to an Arabic company hit the front pages, along with illegal immigrant protests, and a disgraceful scandal involving Congressional pages just weeks before Election Day.

Nice two years, folks. Nice job taking advantage of the mandate we gave you on November 2, 2004.

Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote that he is not making a present or a compliment to please an individual—or at least that he ought not so to do; but that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country.—Samuel Adams

Like many of my fellow countrymen, I’m ashamed of the performance of this Congress, and my Party. However, that shame does not extend to ignoring the most sacred right bestowed upon us by our Founding Fathers. Forsaking that right as a form of protest is un-American and unthinkable for a true conservative.

The ballot is stronger than the bullet.—Abraham Lincoln

Folks that are unhappy with what the Republicans have done in the past 22 months should consider voting for the Democrat in their state or district. Or the Independent. Or the Libertarian. Or write in their grandmother Mabel.

But don’t stay home, for that dishonors all that have died to give you this precious right. Such are certainly the sentiments of great Americans past and present:

If the citizens neglect their duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted; laws will be made not for the public good so much as for the selfish or local purposes.—Daniel Webster

That government is the strongest of which every man feels himself a part.  —Thomas Jefferson

Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us.  The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.—Franklin D. Roosevelt

When you become entitled to exercise the right of voting for public officers, let it be impressed on your mind that God commands you for rulers just men who will rule in the fear of God. The preservation of a republican government depends on the faithful discharge of this duty.—  Noah Webster

In a world that might say one vote doesn’t matter…, it does matter because each person is of infinite worth and value to God… Your vote is a declaration of importance as a person and a citizen.—Billy Graham

We have a duty to our country to participate in the political process. See, if you believe in freedom, you have a duty to exercise your right to vote to begin with. I’m [here] to encourage people to do their duty, to go to the polls. I want all people, no matter what their political party is or whether they even like a political party, to exercise their obligation to vote. —George W. Bush

Wise words all. Yet, caution shouldn’t be capriciously thrown to the wind when exercising this right, for the consequence of error is great, especially today. The truly judicious, before demonstrating disappointment with their Party by voting for a member of another, should recall the last time Elephants behaved this way. Or have you forgotten that such protestations in 1992 gave us fourteen years of the Clintons, with possibly many more to follow?

With that in mind, try to imagine what turning over the House of Representatives to a dove like Nancy Pelosi (D-California) would say to those that have given their lives to this war effort, and those still risking so. What a shocking statement that would be to our military to hand over the reigns of power to such an irresponsible appeaser less than five years after we sent our friends and family members to die for their country.

So think long and hard, conservatives, about the value of your vote, those that have died to give you the privilege, and the folly of abstention. And, if you still can’t bring yourself to the polling booth on November 7, send a proxy to my e-mail address, for only death would prevent me from exercising this precious right regardless of how disappointed I was in my Party.

Noel Sheppard is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.  He is also contributing editor for the Media Research Center’s NewsBusters.org, and a contributing writer to its Business & Media Institute.  Noel welcomes feedback.

Michael J Fox fighting for bad science – UPDATED

October 23, 2006

Michael J Fox fighting for bad science – UPDATED

Filed under: Culture of Life/Death, Medical, TV/Pop Culture/Music, Election 2006When I was a little girl, I remember a neighbor of ours who spent every Labor Day raging at Jerry Lewis for “parading those poor crippled children around to pull on the heartstrings so that people will send him money…” As though the funds raised by the Muscular Dystrophy Association were going into Lewis’ pocket.Today we’re being treated to this political commercial by Michael J Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s Disease and is allowing himself to be used by Claire McCaskill’s political campaign to pull on the heartstrings (and create a sense of “moral outrage”) so as to defeat her opponant. McCaskill “shares my hope for a cure,” says Fox, while her (presumably evil) opponant apparently wants Fox to suffer. Booo…Hiss….The video is indeed difficult to watch, and one sincerely wishes there was immediately in place a cure for Fox and his fellow sufferers. Fox believes that his cure lies in the use of Embryonic Stem Cells Research (ESCR) and puts his hope in research currently being done by using precisely those sorts of cells on Parkinson’s patients. So, this story must have been very unwelcome, yesterday.Stem cells might cause brain tumors, study finds

Injecting human embryonic stem cells into the brains of Parkinson’s disease patients may cause tumors to form, U.S. researchers reported on Sunday.Steven Goldman and colleagues at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York said human stem cells injected into rat brains turned into cells that looked like early tumors.
[…]
Goldman’s team used human embryonic stem cells. Taken from days-old embryos, these cells can form any kind of cell in the body. This batch had been cultured in substances aimed at making them become brain cells.
[…]
The animals did get better.But the grafted cells started to show areas that no longer consisted of dopamine-releasing neurons, but of dividing cells that had the potential to give rise to tumors. The researchers killed the animals before they could know for sure, and said any experiments in humans would have to be done very cautiously. Scientists have long feared that human embryonic stem cells could turn into tumors, because of their pliability.This is not the first time ESC research for Parkinson’s sufferers has frightened scientists and halted experimentation. As reported by the New England Journal of Medicine, and – ahem – the New York Times, the injection of ESC’s into the brains of Parkinson’s patients became nightmarish experimentations gone bad.

The late development of dystonia and dyskinesia, more than one year after surgery, in five patients who had received transplants deserves comment. Parkinsonism in these patients improved during the first year after transplantation, even with substantial reductions in dosage or the discontinuation of levodopa. The subsequent appearance of dystonia and dyskinesia implies that the continued fiber outgrowth from the transplant has led to a relative excess of dopamine. The simplest response to this outcome would be to transplant less tissue in the future. The distribution of the tissue is also likely to be important.
– NEJM Transplantation of Embryonic Dopamine Neurons for Severe Parkinson’s Disease March 8, 2001

The dystonia and dyskinesia referred to here is more detailed in the report by the NY Times piece:

Although the paper depicts the patients with side effect in impassive clinical terms, doctors who have seen them paint a much different picture. Paul. E. Greene, a neurologist at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and a researcher in the study, [emphasis mine – admin] said the uncontrollable movements some patients suffer are “absolutely devastating.” “They chew constantly, their fingers go up and down, their wrists flex and distend,” he said. And the patients writhe and twist, jerk their heads, fling their arms about.”It was tragic, catastrophic,” Greene said. “It’s a real nightmare. And we can’t selectively turn it off.” One man was so badly affected that he could no longer eat and had to use a feeding tube, Greene said. In another, the condition came and went unpredictably throughout the day, and when it occurred, the man’s speech was unintelligible. For now, Greene said, his position is clear: “No more fetal transplants. We are absolutely and adamantly convinced that this should be considered for research only. And whether it should be research in people is an open question.” In the past when I have cited this article, I have heard from supporters of ESC research that this study used not “embryonic” stem cells, but “fetal stem cells from aborted fetuses.” I know that is what the NY Times piece says, but I don’t see that in the NEJM report. Moreover, we must not forget that before a fetus is a fetus it is an embryo for 8 weeks. If these scientists got their stem cells from aborted pregnancies, they clearly were looking for embryos, and I think might be a safe presumption to say that the words “fetal” and “embryonic” were being used rather interchangably in the Times piece.But the NEJM report clearly uses the world EMBRYONIC both in its title and throughout the study, as we see here: Background Transplantation of human embryonic dopamine neurons into the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease has proved beneficial in open clinical trials. However, whether this intervention would be more effective than sham surgery in a controlled trial is not known.Methods We randomly assigned 40 patients who were 34 to 75 years of age and had severe Parkinson’s disease (mean duration, 14 years) to receive a transplant of nerve cells or undergo sham surgery; all were to be followed in a double-blind manner for one year. In the transplant recipients, cultured mesencephalic tissue from four embryos was implanted into the putamen bilaterally.So, we see that in 2001, ESCR was showing the embryonic stem cells tended to be unmanagable and, actually, too powerful, too malleable. We see in 2006 that labrats treated with the stem cells tended to show some improvement but within a short time tissue growth becomes abnormal – one might assume that the rats, which were killed, might have displayed similiar behavior as was seen in 2001, had they lived. For all the talk we hear about the “great promise” of Embryonic Stem Cells, the research doesn’t support it. Nor, apparently, does private funding. There are, however, wonderful results being seen in various research and testing being done with the use of Adult Stem Cells (ASCR). We don’t hear very much about it, though. Writes Wesley J. Smith in the National Review Online, 2002:

Unless you made a point of looking for these stories…you might have missed them. Patients with Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis received significant medical benefit using experimental adult-stem-cell regenerative medical protocols. These are benefits that supporters of embryonic-stem-cell treatments have yet to produce widely in animal experiments. Yet adult stem cells are now beginning to ameliorate suffering in human beings.Stem cells were harvested from the patient’s brain using a routine brain biopsy procedure. They were cultured and expanded to several million cells. About 20 percent of these matured into dopamine-secreting neurons. In March 1999, the cells were injected into the patient’s brain.Three months after the procedure, the man’s motor skills had improved by 37 percent and there was an increase in dopamine production of 55.6 percent. One year after the procedure, the patient’s overall Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale had improved by 83 percent — this at a time when he was not taking any other Parkinson’s medication!That is an astonishing, remarkable success, one that you would have thought would set off blazing headlines and lead stories on the nightly news. Had the treatment been achieved with embryonic stem cells, undoubtedly the newspapers would have screamed loudly enough to be heard. Unfortunately, reportage about the Parkinson’s success story was strangely muted. True, the Washington Post ran an inside-the-paper story and there were some wire service reports. But the all-important New York Times — the one news outlet that drives television and cable news — did not report on it at all. Nor did a search of the Los Angeles Times website yield any stories about the experiment.Please read Smith’s article – it is long and chock-full of information on successful ASCR you never hear about because, for some reason, only the stuff of embryos is fascinating to the press and the left. I wonder why that is, really? Why are they so hot to exploit the embryo – when study after study says don’t do it – and so bored with a safer alternative that does not in any way exploit or destroy human life?Writing on this same subject a while back, I said: That research…made me believe that Embryonic stem cells are like uncut heroin…waaaay, way to powerful to use – they are part of begotten life in its purest form (perhaps still too near to God for our fooling with) – and they are so maleable as to be (so far in research) unpredictable and unusable. And that’s not even getting into the moral and ethical questions of whether or not a human embryo should be exploited in such a way, particularly when Adult Stem Cells are showing remarkable results in everything from helping sufferers of Sickle Cell Anemia and Thallassemias Major and Minor, to spinal injuries, skin regeneration and more.
[…]
And I say that as a woman dealing with a chronic blood illness, and waiting to hear – finally – about a diagnosis that has taken a great deal of time to pinpoint. Both health issues are being looked into with adult stem cells, and that’s good news…I wouldn’t want any treatment derived from embryonic stem cells.I still feel that way…The proponants of ESC research like to say obnoxious things along the lines of “Bush is against science,” and “[Talent] doesn’t want Michael J Fox to stop moving, just like the nazis on the right didn’t want Christopher Reeve to walk again!” And they like to pretend that ESC research and funding have been – or are about to be – criminalized. The truth is and always has been that scientists are free to conduct experiments using ESC, and private investors are free to fund it. All President Bush has ever said was, “the government is not going to fund it, the government is not going to help you create more ESC lines.” Booo…Hisss….I feel badly for Michael J Fox, and for the father of my former neighbor who worked his garden while his Parkinson’s afflicted body flailed and he paced the plantings with a scissor-like walk. I felt badly for Pope John Paul II when he could no longer control his body, and I feel badly for the Rev. Billy Graham, too. I hope with all my heart that a treatment or cure can be found to alleviate such suffering. But let’s stop pretending that to be against government funding of ESCR is to be some mustachio-curling eeeevil entity who revels in human suffering, and let’s also stop pretending that Embryonic Stem Cell Research is a hotbed of medical innovation and staggering success, when precisely the opposite is true.Michael J. Fox’s ad is affecting, I guess. And as it is showing during the World Series in St. Louis, I suppose it’s going to win the day for his candidate, but in the end, it’s not going to do much for him, personally…and it is going to allow millions of people to feel noble and compassionate when they go to the polls and pull a wholly emotional lever while being completely underinformed about the realities of the matter.UPDATE: Not only am I not a scientist, but I’ve never claimed to be one. Those of you who have suffered through my attempts to make sense of technology are quite aware that I am a woman who knows her limitations! I can read, though, and process information, and I can see by what is presented that ESCR has not lived up to the hype. AJ Strata is much smarter than I am, though, and he goes into absorbing and fascinating detail on the issue of this research, and I urge you to read him. Also, he rightly identifies the “disingenuous” ones here. Michael J. Fox is not the bad guy, and I am sorry to see some rightwing sites being nasty about him. He’s just a guy who wants his circumstance to change; you can’t gainsay his desire. But the people telling him he can have his life back if only there was more federal funding for ESCR, and who think misrepresenting the whole issue is the way to go about it…they’re a whole ‘nother subject. They’re right up there with John Edwards saying that if he and John Kerry were elected, Christopher Reeve would walk away from his wheelchair. Over at National Review Online, Kathryn Lopez notes that the whole ESCR matter is more complicated than the left wants to admit and she is disgusted that McCaskill approved this ad: Amendment 2 is not a matter of voting for or against sick people. Claire McCaskill should be ashamed for approving a message that suggests such a thing. But apparently she’s comfortable running as just another snake-oil salesman. Dean Barnett on the other hand calls the ad disingenuous and points out that Fox never once uses the word “EMBRYONIC,” thus making it sound like those evil Republicans are against ALL Stem Cell Research. But of course. Like me, Barnett has a personal stake in the success of ASCR, but is opposed to ESCR.Meanwhile, John Stephenson has video of McCaskille supporters at work.Related articles on Adult Stem Cell Research:
ASC 72, ESC 0
A sobering setback in stem-cell research
MIT Prof: Embryonic Stem Cell Research Nowhere Close to Helping Patients
The Case for Adult Stem Cells
Real-World Successes of Adult Stem Cell Treatment
Bone Marrow and Cord Blood Stem Cell TransplantAlso writing: Blue Crab Boulevard
Pirate’s Cove
Wizbang
Through the Magnifying GlassOther thoughts: The Dangerous Prayer of Blessing
Captain’s Quarters tracked back with Michael J. Fox on CBS and the goo of victimhood</< a>
Fresh Bilge pinged back with Actual News
Don’t even think about kissing MY baby! « Obi’s Sister pinged back with Don’t even think about kissing MY baby! « Obi’s Sister
Marty McFly, Part Duh. « Nothing pinged back with Marty McFly, Part Duh. « Nothing
Leaning Straight Up tracked back with Was Michael J Fox deliberately enhancing his symptoms for this ad?</< a>
Bogus Gold tracked back with On Embryos and Principles (and Inevitably Politics)</< a>
Stop The ACLU tracked back with Michael J. Fox Ad for McCaskill Airs During World Series</< a>
Sister Toldjah pinged back with Missouri’s Jim Talent: Your typical heartless and cruel conservative
So, now the KosKids endorse the exploitation of Marty McFly « Nothing pinged back with So, now the KosKids endorse the exploitation of Marty McFly « Nothing
Blue Crab Boulevard tracked back with Stem Cells = Tumor?</< a>
Business of Life tracked back with Embryonic vs Adult Stem Cells for Parkinson’s</< a>
The Strata-Sphere pinged back with Embryonic Stem Cell Snake Oil
Spin, Rinse, Repeat « Obi’s Sister pinged back with Spin, Rinse, Repeat « Obi’s Sister

Marty McFly and Poli-Sci — Research on adult and umbilical cord blood stem cells has already provided beneficial medical treatments, something ESCR has yet to do. However, ESCR is a cause celebre, and as such, even states like California and New Jersey are throwing large sums of tax revenue in that direction. Is that because that research holds great promise of bearing fruit, or because it serves a political purpose to do so, even if such targeted funding decreases resources that might otherwise be engaged in more fruitful pursuits?

Marty McFly and Poli-Sci
October 29th, 2006

That’s Poli-Sci as in ‘politicized science’.

Possible best intentions and sincerity notwithstanding, Michael J. Fox is being used in a crass corruption of science, shrouded in a fleeting compassion by politicians solely for political profit.

There’s a popular and popularized perception of purity surrounding science and its search for ‘truth’. Science is supposed to simply rely on observable fact, and is not swayed by venal and ulterior motives. The political left in particular uses this mythical notion of purity for political ends. When coupled, as in the ESCR (embryonic stem cell research) debate, with an aura of caring and compassion, Democrats and the left assume they have taken the unassailable moral high ground.

‘Follow the money’ is a good rule of thumb for uncovering corruption whether in politics or science.

The pool of ‘qualified’ researchers and facilities, however ‘qualified’ is defined in whatever instance, is always finite. Market forces apply, and the funding needs of researchers and facilities assure that they will migrate to where the funding exists. Likewise, what is committed to research on A is not available for research on B, C or D. If funding for a particular area of research is manipulated by less than noble and even ulterior motives, scientific endeavor will be as prone as any to follow that money.

Research on adult and umbilical cord blood stem cells has already provided beneficial medical treatments, something ESCR has yet to do. However, ESCR is a cause celebre, and as such, even states like California and New Jersey are throwing large sums of tax revenue in that direction. Is that because that research holds great promise of bearing fruit, or because it serves a political purpose to do so, even if such targeted funding decreases resources that might otherwise be engaged in more fruitful pursuits?

It would be naïve to expect a situation where medical research funding would always go in the optimized proportions whereby its results would provide the greatest good. Years ago it was noted that while the number of men who died from prostate cancer was comparable to the number of women who died of breast cancer, funding for breast cancer research was multiples of that for prostate cancer research. There was nothing sinister in that. The women’s movement most certainly led to a focus on what were perceived as women’s issues, including and appropriately breast cancer.

That this resulted in unequal funding regarding an issue of life and death for women as opposed to one for men is neither wrong nor unwarranted. Men didn’t complain, the lot of them after all having a mother, and a likely mix of sisters, wives and daughters. But at base, it was not wrong because the focus on and response to breast cancer was driven by genuine caring, not for political ends. Societies, like families and individuals, set priorities for a variety of reasons that are not ignoble simply because they are not equitable.

However, if imbalances or misdirection occur due to a politically driven desire to exploit for political gain, it is reprehensible.

It is not a secret that the ESCR brouhaha is really about abortion, something easily confirmed by a check of the ‘Who’s Who’ of the protagonists on both sides. For decades the pro-abortion side has struggled for some kind of morally compelling and compassionate support for the taking of pre-born human life. Once they had fired off ‘rape, incest and life of the mother’ their quiver was empty, and even NARAL admitted years ago that those causes account for under 2% of abortions.

The destruction of embryonic life in ESCR however, can be presented as a kind of compassion-driven and Star Trekian scientifically noble sacrifice of the needs of the one (if it is actually a one at all!) for the needs of the many. It sets up a mental picture of those Talibanesque-fundamentalist Republicans wanting to defend the supposedly sacred life of some unrecognizable glob of cells for superstitious reason, whereas the loving folks who want simple scientific truth to prevail merely want us all to have, once again, our beloved Marty McFly winging by on his skateboard.

If that seems a bit overly judgmental, simply recall John Edwards in 2004 speaking of ESCR in terms as that a Kerry-Edwards victory would mean that we would do the things that would make folks such as the then just departed paralytic Chris Reeve walk again.

If down the road, it becomes inescapably clear that ESCR has been an overall bust, in that it provides no significant benefit or no benefit not also attained by adult and umbilical blood stem cell usage, will it matter to the political drivers behind the pro-ESCR crusade that resources that might have benefited thousands or millions were squandered?

It will matter not one whit. It is about politics and political power, and not about truth or love of one’s fellow man.

Too harsh? Some illustrations:

When the Reagan economic boom became impossible to ignore (but not for lack of media trying), its dark underside was revealed in exposing the plight of countless but supposedly vast numbers of homeless persons, many freezing to death, and Reagan and his folks cared not! This critique continued through Bush Sr.’s kindler-gentler Republican administration.

However, anyone who based his world view on the MSM could reasonably have concluded that something like a quasi-‘needs based’-Rapture occurred about noon on January 20, 1993, when Bill Clinton took the oath of office and every homeless man, woman and child in the country seemed to disappear.

Reagan was also charged with not caring about AIDs victims because they were gay. The only reason a ‘cure’ for AIDs had not been found during the Reagan years was that Reaganites did not have the will to find it and therefore did not expend the resources that would surely have found it, in spite of billions spent on AIDs research under Reagan. Bush Sr. increased that spending, but that his administration didn’t find a cure proved again Republicans didn’t really care.

Then shortly into the Clinton administration, it was accepted that a cure just might not be in the cards at all, something many scientists and researchers had been saying for years. Treatment became the focus, not cure, and AIDs, no longer a political cudgel, went on the back burner as a domestic political issue.

There was little to nothing in the way of soul searching that went on in the nineties by those who had fed the political charge for a decade about their enemies not having the will to find that inevitable ‘cure’, and how that might have filled thousands with a false hope or encouraged, even subliminally, dangerous behavior by many who were led to believe, perhaps until the moment they died, that the cure was coming, was just around the corner, would be theirs with little more than a change to the political landscape.

There was the Clinton Health Care initiative. There were, so we were told over and over for months by Democrats and their echo chamber MSM, thirty to forty million Americans without health care. The image projected was of the desperate mother cradling the convulsing infant with the fever of one hundred and four being bum-rushed out of the ER by the hospital orderlies into the cold uncaring street because we didn’t have HillaryCare! Then the initiative failed in Congress and with the public at large. There was no move to a Plan B, because there are millions in crisis and we must help some at least. When it became clear that the power ploy had failed, those supposed forty or so million Americans in imminent and desperate danger of untreated disease and death simply became immaterial and of no political use.

Again and again the real or merely presumed sufferers and victims were and are treated in the same manner as the Kleenex was for the tears their stories brought about: used and discarded.

As this is about corruption of science and not just faux caring, there is the global warming scheme. Funding is made available for studies of the effects of global warming, not for whether it is happening or not. Funding is made available for study of how mankind is causing that warming, not for whether or not man is having a noticeable or significant effect on that warming. Funding is made available for study of the negative impact on the environment of that man-caused global warming, not for whether such warming will be negative here but offset by a positive there, as flora and fauna adjust and adapt, as they have through the ages. As such, and getting what is paid for, a large body of scientific research seems to support the fact of man’s greenhouse gas emissions as the primary cause of the very real and inarguably catastrophic global warming trend.

What if it was actually determined that while a global warming trend is real, man’s greenhouse gas emission contribution to that effect is negligible, and it is overwhelmingly a natural phenomenon related to solar phenomena or some other uncontrollable factor? What would the politicos like Al Gore do?

Having painted, as Gore did in An Inconvenient Truth, the impending warming of the globe as a real and present imminent threat to human life itself, surely that would not cause ‘the cause’ to be abandoned! But that is exactly what would happen, and why even the hint of such denials of human action as the primary cause leads some on the enviro-left to hysterically speak of Nuremberg type trials for global warming deniers.

First, the political leaders of the left actually know better than to try to convince people, and then be responsible for demonstrating, that the same types of folks, politicians and bureaucrats, who have given the world socialist paradises and DMV offices, ended poverty by declaring a war on it that cost trillions and made generations to be educated by the simple device of reducing the meaning of “educated” to something like barely literate, are capable of controlling the climate of the world to something like eternal stability. Second, it is about power and influence, and global warming-responsive regulatory control over peoples, industries and whole economies is just that. Take that away, and the global warming hype will be given the old SNL Rosanne Rosanadana ‘Nevermind!’. Could that be done when we have been told that the catastrophe on the horizon threatens human life itself? Ask the millions without health care.

Put another way, was it merely by chance that when the old Soviet Union and the dreams of central planning statists everywhere collapsed in the late eighties, so much of the far left of Europe and the US simply migrated in lockstep right into the green/environmental movement, with nary a pause? Did the lost love of central planning foster a newfound love of endangered amphibians? Even Gorbachev soon found himself at home in such environs.

Science is a wondrous and beneficial field of endeavor that has been of inestimable benefit to man. Yet science has also been invoked as the basis for much of Leninist and Hitlerian social policy, including eugenics, with scientists on board for that and more, like the infamous Tuskeegee Syphilis Study.

Pilate asked ‘Quid est veritas?’ What is truth? Science doesn’t have the answer.

Science can present us with fact, not truth. It can inform us how to do things, but not whether we should or should not do them. Facts are facts. The New York City telephone directory contains millions of ‘facts’, but lay them all end to end and they will not arrive at a single truth. Truth is more, and of a higher order, than that.

How can it be that science, seen by so many for so long as the incorruptible search for the objectively true, can be corrupted for political purposes? Perhaps another type of study, one that acknowledges that scientists are human and science is conducted by humans, and that man seems to have this universally demonstrated nature that is prone to falling away from the good and true, may have answers for that.

We all of us want to see, truly, beloved Marty McFly back on his skateboard. Yet, to symbolically hold out such an image based on a corruption of what is scientifically sound while claiming a caring and compassion that is false, convenient and fleeting, is to be in service not to what is true, but to untruth. This supposed moral high ground is, in truth, an amoral swamp.

Denis Keohane is an occasional contributor to American Thinker.

Euro-Humanity Upon the Wane

Euro-Humanity Upon the Wane
October 29th, 2006

People have needs.  When your liberal friend tells you that, he imagines that he’s justified the whole panoply of liberal social programs.  Stop being selfish and pay up.

But after a century of paying up, you get something like modern Europe.  With all basic needs taken care of, the average Euro doesn’t get the point of life.  So s/he doesn’t produce any life—children that is.  That is the argument of Mark Steyn in his book America Alone. When all your needs are met by the European welfare state then you live life as any adolescent living in a family welfare state.  You buy toys and entertainment with your allowance, and you complain while all the important decisions are made for you.

But is Steyn right?

Fortunately, in the remarkable series documentary project,  filmmaker Michael Apted has provided us a historical record of just what happens over the long term to a people living under the welfare state.  This month, in the weeks before the latest DVD debuts in mid November, you can see the latest episode in this amazing chronicle. The movie 49 Up is playing in selected theaters around the United States.

The documentary features interviews with a group of Britons who we first got to see as seven-year-olds in 1963 in the Granada TV documentary Seven Up.  The project was conceived as a melodrama about the British class system.  It featured three adorable little working class girls from a government elementary school in the East End of London contrasted with three insufferable upper-class West End prigs from a swank Kensington private school.  Now these children of the Sixties are forty-nine.

It’s a pity the whole think blew up in the filmmakers’ faces.  But it blew up for an interesting reason.  In the mid-1960s the Labour Party reformed the British secondary school system and gutted the ancient grammar schools that provided a challenging academic program to children who could pass the “Eleven Plus” test.  Instead the government decreed that every child would go to a new expert-designed comprehensive school where there would be no “selection by ability.”

Maybe it’s just a coincidence.  The Up Series children who ended up as angry and bitter adults all went to comprehensive schools.  The children who ended up divorced or as single parents went to comprehensive schools.  The children who ended up on “incapacity benefit,” or “job-seekers allowance,” went to comprehensive schools.

“Bog standard” comprehensives is what they call them today.

OK, so the public schools aren’t as good as they should be.  But how can we hope to educate the children of the poor without universal, compulsory, expert-designed government education?  People have needs!

We could ask the Third World.  We could ask Professor James Tooley, who’s done research on educational systems throughout the Third World.  What he has found is that private school systems thrive precisely in the teeming slums where government education does not reach. The Old City of Hyderabad in India is a slum of 800,000 people.  Tooley writes:

“our team found 918 schools: 35 percent were government run; 23 percent were private schools that had official recognition by the government (“recognized”); and, incredibly, 37 percent slipped under the government radar (“unrecognized”). The last group is, in effect, a black market in education, operating entirely without both state funding and regulation.”

If we assume that of the 800,000 people about 200,000 are school-age children, then there is one school for every 218 children.  In fact Toomey’s survey team found that the average unregulated school had about 8 teachers and 170 students.  So it seems that the black market in schools provides an adequtate number of seats for the Old City slum children.  But what about performance?

“In Hyderabad, students attending recognized and unrecognized private schools outperformed their peers in government schools by a full standard deviation in both English and math.”

So what, you ask?  We are just establishing a very small point.

Contrary to the received notion, it appears that the urban poor are not too poor, or too ignorant, or too feckless to send their children to school—or to pay for it.

And we are idly tossing into the air another very small idea, as inadvertently suggested by the documentary Up Series.  What if children suckled at the teat of government schools generally grow up to be adult adolescents, don’t bother to marry, and don’t bother to have children?

They would be well on the way to the status of H.G. Wells’ Eloi inThe Time Machine, “humanity upon the wane,” shortly to fall into the clutches of the Muslim Morlocks.

For when society sets itself

“steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword,” it has no need to develop “intellectual versatility… the compensation for change, danger, and trouble,”

until it is too late.

People have needs, but they must need struggle to meet them.

NBC’s “crazy christians” show — But Hollywood writers know that in a free-speech society, people are free to denounce Hollywood’s shows when they are vile and disgusting. There’s also a remarkable double standard at work here. While denouncing the free-speech rights of “crazy Christians,” Hollywood exercises its own restrictions, zealously avoiding on camera the many social taboos — smoking cigarettes, say — to which it subscribes.

NBC’s “crazy christians” show
By Brent Bozell III
Friday, September 15, 2006
Maybe it’s a good thing that television writers don’t try too hard to get involved with plots about religion. The thoroughly secular TV world seems to tolerate about one seriously religiously themed series at a time. It’s much more common to engage the topic of religion as an odd joke, as an intensely greedy racket of quacks or as the inspiration for a flock of oppressive mind-numbed zombies out to ruin everyone’s guilty pleasures. Usually, they’re simply “crazy Christians.”

That’s the central plot twist in the premiere of the new NBC drama “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” created by “West Wing” producer-writer Aaron Sorkin. The show goes behind the scenes of a fictional sketch-comedy program resembling “Saturday Night Live” at a fictional network called UBS. The censors at UBS have scratched a skit titled “Crazy Christians,” and now all hell will break loose. We’re never shown the skit, but we’re told repeatedly that it’s demonstrably hilarious.

Sorkin uses his first script to throw sharp knives and rusty razors at the Americans who’ve lobbied for less filthy television. The show begins with an improbable “standards and practices” censor telling the producer of the fictional “SNL” that he can’t run “Crazy Christians” because “what do you want me to say to the 50 million people who are gonna go out of their minds as soon as it airs?” The producer cracks wise: “Well, first of all, you can tell ’em we average 9 million households, so at least 41 million of them are full of crap. Second, you can tell ’em that living where there’s free speech means sometimes you’re gonna get offended.”

But Hollywood writers know that in a free-speech society, people are free to denounce Hollywood’s shows when they are vile and disgusting. There’s also a remarkable double standard at work here. While denouncing the free-speech rights of “crazy Christians,” Hollywood exercises its own restrictions, zealously avoiding on camera the many social taboos — smoking cigarettes, say — to which it subscribes.

What Hollywood likes is having the almighty power to offend — to “challenge” society, as they like to describe it — freely. But only some people are sought out for offending. For every supposedly crazy parent who worries about sex, violence and smutty talk on TV, perhaps there’s another supposedly crazy parent who worries about different offenses, such as Twinkie commercials or scenes with cool, beautiful people smoking cigarettes. But those parents don’t get mocked by scriptwriters. It is those with religious objections who get singled out.

But Sorkin wasn’t done lecturing. When his skit is axed, the outraged fictional “SNL” producer bounds onto the stage and unleashes a lecture on live television. It’s what Sorkin has probably wanted to say about network executives (and their alleged overreaction to those crazy Christians) many times: “The two things that make them scared gutless are the FCC and every psycho religious cult that gets positively horny at the very mention of a boycott.” Sorkin was so impressed with his own insult that it reruns later in the show in fictional news clips.

Two major characters fight over how their romance broke up when the woman sang hymns on “The 700 Club.” Again, Sorkin aims low, insisting Pat Robertson is a vicious racist. “You put on a dress and sang for a bigot.” When the woman replies that the faithful audience of the show inspires her, he cracks, “Throw in the Halloween costumes and you got yourself a Klan rally.”

Sorkin actually pushed a similar plot for the first episode of “The West Wing,” in which lovable liberal President Josiah Bartlet instructed a clueless, caricatured Christian evangelist who didn’t know the order of the Ten Commandments and then unloaded a long sermon on vicious Christian pro-lifers threatening his 12-year-old granddaughter. He told the conservative Christians to get their fat (bottoms) out of his White House.

Maybe cursing out the Christians is his show-opening good luck charm.

While Sorkin has an obvious problem with Christianity, it’s actually broader than that. He thinks religion in general is bunk. In 2002, he told a crowd at the Sinai Temple in Los Angeles that “I was turned off on religion.” The rabbi interviewing him asked him if he believed in God. He said he viewed the wide array of religions as “many fairytales” that “seem hardly to be doing what they intended.” For Sorkin, spirituality was “a meditative thing that has to do with helping others and not waiting for it to come from a divine source.”

What this means is Sorkin — and all the Sorkins in Hollywood — are probably never going to write a daring, potentially offensive script with the concept of mocking “crazy atheists.” Instead, in our upside-down popular culture, the unbeliever is the sacred cow.

Lecturer, syndicated columnist, television commentator, debater, marketer, businessman, author, publisher and activist, L. Brent Bozell III, 51, is one of the most outspoken and effective national leaders in the conservative movement today.

United Churches of Castro — The National Council of Churches (NCC) suffered a stinging rebuke last month when the North American Archdiocese of the Antiochian Orthodox Church decided to sever all ties to the organization. “It got to be too much,” said Antiochian spokesman Rev. Thomas Zain. “They have an almost politicized agenda…that opposes conservative Christianity.”

United Churches of Castro
By Johannes L. Jacobse
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 25, 2005

The National Council of Churches (NCC) suffered a stinging rebuke last month when the North American Archdiocese of the Antiochian Orthodox Church decided to sever all ties to the organization. “It got to be too much,” said Antiochian spokesman Rev. Thomas Zain. “They have an almost politicized agenda…that opposes conservative Christianity.”

Zain was being generous. The NCC plays a duplicitous game. Its public statements are laced with the language of Christian benevolence but its policies read like a laundry list of hard-Left causes. It’s a pattern that took a while for the Orthodox to see.

 

Disguising a Marxist past

 

NCC cooperation with the far-Left began in the last century. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, the NCC was one of the leading contributors to the Program to Combat Racism (PCR) created in 1939 by the World Council of Churches (WCC), an NCC affiliate.  PCR subsidized revolutionary Communists governments in the Third World, shuffling more than $5 million to 130 organizations in 30 countries – all under the guise of Christian charity.

 

When Reader’s Digest exposed the ruse in 1982, they reported more than half of the money that went to the PCR wound up in the hands of Communist guerillas. In the 1970’s alone: in excess of $78,000 went to the Cuban sponsored MPLA fomenting Communist revolution in Angola; $832,000 to Nambia’s Communist regime; and $108,000 to the Patriotic Front in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) to support a Communist guerilla force responsible for a campaign of terror that killed 207 white civilians, 1,721 blacks, and nine missionaries including their children.

 

NCC contributions toward the PRC were collected from member churches and funneled through the NCC treasury. When the Reader’s Digest report was published, the WCC frantically tried to cover the paper trail and to this day refuses to release the names of contributors and beneficiaries.

 

The fall of the Soviet Union and subsequent exposure of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of Marxism caused donations to dry up. Throughout the 1990’s the NCC teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. A last minute cash infusion by a wealthy benefactor saved it from ruin.

 

The fall also forced the NCC to account for past sins and it fell to Rev. Joan Campbell, NCC president during the early 1990’s, to offer the mea culpa. “We did not understand the depth of the sufferings under Communism,” Campbell said. “And we failed to really cry out under the Communist oppression.”

 

Social(ist) Justice

 

Like many of its left-wing counterparts, the NCC displayed a slavish devotion to Marxist ideas and anti-American cant. It strove to become the official dispenser of religious respectability to those who adopted either. Dispensing respectability made NCC bureaucrats feel important and offered the rationale that justified the NCC’s existence.

“Liberation Theology” was the dominant fad in the late 1960’s and 1970’s – a patchwork of ideas that claimed that the Christian obligation to care for the poor was synonymous with Marxist social dogma. Liberation Theology dressed Marxist ideas in the Christian moral lexicon convincing gullible activists that Christ was really a crypto-Marxist. The ideology swept through the religious left like wildfire. The NCC was front and center.

 

Pope John Paul II fought Liberation Theology tooth and nail in Catholic circles (his first public rebuke being the scolding of an El Salvadoran priest). “Christian” Marxists would have none of it. Substituting Marx’s secular millennialism for the Gospel, these religious Marxists did what all Marxists do: they refused to take any responsibility for the suffering their ideas generated. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.

 

Campbell was no exception. Her apology was a lie. The NCC not only understood the suffering caused by Communist oppression, it funded and gave religious cover to the oppressors. The NCC wants us to believe that when it crawled into bed with Marx the affair was not consummated, when in fact it adulterated the Christian Gospel and thereby joined the ranks of those who foster evil in the name of religion.

 

The NCC continues the affair even today, mostly with Fidel Castro, revealing that the utopian delusion is as strong as ever. Castro’s seduction of the NCC goes back decades.

 

The NCC wrote educational tracts for American children that praised Cuban totalitarianism. It lauded Cuban health care. It was front man for the deportation of Elian Gonzalez. It condemns the American economic embargo on Castro’s behalf.

 

Several years ago, NCC operatives exploited a visit to Cuba by Greek Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I by protesting American policy at Guantanamo, but refused the pleas of an Orthodox delegate to protest Castro’s human rights abuses at a Cuban prison. The list goes on and on. It is impossible to find any substantive criticism of Castro’s brutal regime in nearly three decades of NCC documentation.

 Orthodox participation 

Given this history, why did the traditional and conservative Orthodox Church sign on with the NCC in the first place? The Orthodox Church, the second largest church in the world, with 216 million adherents, was long divided in North America along ethnic lines. Only three American jursidictions — the Antiochian Orthodox, which is primarily composed of Arab Christians; the Orthodox Church in America, which is of Russian heritage; and the Greek Orthodox — have belonged to the NCC. The answer is that most Orthodox in these jurisdictions were unaware of the NCC’s activist past. Despite having a presence on American soil for more than 200 years (through Russian missionary work in Alaska that spread to California, then New York), the American Orthodox are only now coming into their own. The majority of Orthodox Christians came to America during the great waves of immigration early in the last century and it took several generations for assimilation to take place. Only recently have American converts joined the ranks.

 

The fall of Communism prompted an NCC makeover that obscured their leftist orientation. Brown’s mea culpa was part of this effort, as was the toning down of radical language and the relative silence on divisive moral issues that threatened to alienate a more conservative constituency. The NCC went shopping for social respectability at the same time that the Orthodox sought a venue to make their faith more visible in American society. Each found the other and decided to give union a shot.

 

It was an uneven marriage from the star, with the NCC acting as hen-pecked suitor. The Orthodox contribute no funding to the NCC; a problem the NCC overlooks because Orthodox history and tradition lend an air of moral legitimacy and authority that the NCC could never muster on its own. Clearly the NCC needs the Orthodox a lot more than the reverse.

 

Most informed Orthodox have always been uneasy of the relationship with the NCC but reasoned that an imperfect relationship might be better than none at all. However, when word got out that NCC President Rev. Bob Edgar was actively courting George Soros and other like-minded benefactors, the Antiochian Orthodox Church took notice and began to ask questions.

 

Then Edgar signed a declaration against gay marriage along with the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the National Association of Evangelicals, causing outrage in his Lesbian, Gay, and Transgender delegation. They demanded he change his tune, and Edgar dutifully complied. He apologized, removed his signature, and assured the delegation that the NCC stands behind gay marriage. The proved the last straw for the Antiochian Orthodox.

 

The dustbin of history

 

The Antiochian withdrawal may be a sign of things to come. Within the Orthodox communion, only the Orthodox Church in America (OCA – formerly Russian Orthodox Church) and the Greek Orthodox remain NCC members. The OCA is debating the issue behind closed doors, with some rancor if reports are correct. A parliamentary maneuver narrowly avoided a vote at their national assembly earlier this summer that observers say would have resulted in an NCC ouster. Given that many OCA families have first hand experience with Communist oppression, the exposure of the NCC as a Communist fellow traveler should help close the question.

 

Complete Orthodox withdrawal leaves the NCC beholden to the declining mainstream of American Protestantism. (Catholics and Evangelical Protestants refuse to join.) NCC member churches comprise about a quarter of American Christians and their numbers decline every year. Only the conservative churches are growing. The Antiochian Orthodox decision pushes the NCC one step closer to the dustbin of history – where it belongs.

Leftist Church Union Condemns Terror…Sort Of

Leftist Church Union Condemns Terror…Sort Of
By Mark Tooley
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 29, 2005

The National Council of Churches (NCC) has been infamous in recent decades for its unwillingness to criticize the human rights abuses of any adversary of the United States, from the old
Soviet Union to modern Islamic and Marxist states. But now, the NCC is expressing concern about some Islamic “extremism,” though it declines specifically to name it as such. Thirty-five denominations with a combined population of over 40 million American church members belong to the New York-based NCC. Typically since the 1960’s, the NCC elites have been Religious Left activists rather than mainstream church members. Criticizing Marxist regimes usually has been taboo for the NCC because of its own discomfort with capitalism. And the NCC’s obsessive commitment to multiculturalism and inter-faith “dialogue” has typically prevented any critique of nasty Islamist regimes. In contrast, the NCC is not shy about condemning “fundamentalist” Christianity and policies of the Jewish state.The NCC took a little break from condemning America and Israel at its recent General Assembly, actually acknowledging “violence” and “attacks” against Christian targets in Egypt and
Turkey. These attackers were unnamed, of course, by the NCC, which is too polite to name names except, for example, when condemning conservative Christians.   Even more unusual was the NCC’s criticism of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust and call for
Israel’s destruction. “In the face of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s call for the obliteration of Israel, the National Council of Churches USA reaffirms its support for the security of the State of Israel, alongside a viablePalestinian
State,” the NCC’s December 16 statement said. “We also reaffirm our respect for Judaism and our friendship with the Jewish people.”NCC concerns about Islamist violence in Egypt and
Turkey were stated more vaguely but still were striking, by NCC standards. Introduced by Eastern Orthodox delegates at the NCC’s annual assembly, held in November outside Baltimore, the resolution on Egypt lamented “horrific and violent acts against the Coptic Orthodox and Protestant Christians in
Alexandria” in October. It offered prayer for “Egyptian sisters and brothers in Christ” and for “equal rights” in their native land.

Similarly, but more briefly, another NCC resolution expressed “sadness and dismay” at “recent attacks and demonstrations by extremist elements” in
Turkey against the Eastern Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. It commended the
Istanbul police for their “timely response” to “these elements of fanaticism and extremism” and offered “solidarity” to Patriarch Bartholomew. This resolution also came from Eastern Orthodox delegates. The Egypt resolution did not offer specifics, but it was alluding to an angry mob that surrounded Alexandria’s
St. George’s Coptic Church in October, in response to newspaper reports that a church play had insulted Islam. That play portrayed the attempted forced conversion to Islam of a Coptic youth. Egyptian police restrained the mob of 5,000 to 10,000 in a melee that resulted in several deaths by police and demonstrators.  A Coptic nun was stabbed, nearby Christian businesses were looted and several other
Alexandria churches were attacked. Egyptian Copts complain that anti-Christian violence by Islamic groups is often abetted or ignored by the Egyptian government.  The NCC resolution on Turkey, which also avoided details, was alludingto an October demonstration by Turkish nationalist “Grey Wolves,” who demanded that the Patriarch Bartholomew leave
Turkey. They placed a black wreath on the Patriarch’s
Istanbul compound to make their point.In the
Egypt resolution, the NCC carefully thanked President Hosni Mubarak for his “exhortation” to Muslim scholars to “teach tolerance and shun extremism.” It also thanked Sheikh Mohammed Sayed El-Tantawi, rector of Al Azhar University for his ostensible encouragement of “peaceful coexistence” between Muslims and Christians.Not surprisingly, an NCC’s resolution attacking the U.S. Patriot Act was significantly more detailed and sweeping than the resolutions about Christians living under Islam. Among other shibboleths of the left, the NCC warned of a “creeping reliance on selective religious fundamentalism [i.e. conservative American Christianity] as the lens for shaping public policy.”The NCC, in another resolution, also went after torture – by the
U.S. It declared, “We find it particularly abhorrent that our nation’s lawmakers would fail to approve the pending legislation disavowing the use of torture by any entity on behalf of the
United States government.”

A Coptic delegate to the NCC General Assembly complained that the anti-torture resolution did not condemn torture perpetrated by non-U.S. entities, such as the Iraqi insurgents. But the resolution remained U.S.-focused. Do not look for NCC resolutions to express alarm about torture practiced routinely by dozens of regimes around the world, from North Korea, to Cuba, to
Saudi Arabia.Predictably, the NCC trumpeted its statements on torture by the
U.S. and opposition to the Patriot Act. But it largely ignored its own resolutions on Egypt and
Turkey, which had been crafted by Eastern Orthodox delegates rather than NCC staffers.  For the curious, NCC resolutions from the November 2005 General Assembly can be found here.

Not long after the NCC General Assembly, a Thanksgiving essay from NCC Associate General Secretary for International Affairs and Peace Antonios Kireopoulos related that the “our torture of detainees, directly or through extraordinary rendition, makes us a target of contempt,” while “assaults on constitutional guarantees – attempts to dismantle due process, the prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures, and basic privacy norms – call into question our commitment to justice.”   Meanwhile, “with the policy of preemptive strike, the manipulation of intelligence to justify war, and the willingness to use white phosphorus in
Iraq, our country is now seen as a major threat to security worldwide,” Kireopoulos fretted. “With a “penchant for unilateralism, blustering in the United Nations, the discarding of treaty obligations, and disregard for environmental protections, the
U.S. is fast becoming the lonely bully on the block.”

So the NCC is still the NCC, with all of its usual preoccupations. But the oblique criticism of Islamic radicalism in Egypt and Turkey, and the condemnation of the Iranian president’s call for
Israel’s destruction, at least show some potential capacity for non-leftist moral reflection within the church council, however rare.

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Economically flexible morality — One of the reasons I abandoned the Left was because I came to believe that, while there are certainly moral individuals who hew Left politically, the Left collectively has no morality. By morality, I mean a transcendent set of ethical rules, external to specific individual needs and concerns. The best example is the Ten Commandments, which are unconcerned with individual situations or cultures but, instead, are ethical practices applicable to all people at all times. Abiding by these virtues is good; failing to abide by them, bad.

Economically flexible morality
October 28th, 2006

Art, or things that pass for art, can be useful.  Otherwise, how can one explain the epiphany I had when watching 2004’s Maria Full of Grace, a critically acclaimed movie about a teenager from Columbia who smuggles drugs into America.  Both the movie, and the critics’ unconditional praise for the movie, helped clarify something I’ve been struggling with for a long time, which is defining what exactly constitutes morality on the Left.

One of the reasons I abandoned the Left was because I came to believe that, while there are certainly moral individuals who hew Left politically, the Left collectively has no morality.  By morality, I mean a transcendent set of ethical rules, external to specific individual needs and concerns. The best example is the Ten Commandments, which are unconcerned with individual situations or cultures but, instead, are ethical practices applicable to all people at all times.  Abiding by these virtues is good; failing to abide by them, bad.

The most obvious thing that has replaced traditional morality on the Left is the elevation of personal feelings.  Thus, a Leftist who has given up on old-fashioned morality confidently defines the ethical thing to do in any given situation by deciding whether it feels good or not.

One of the great examples of this approach – and a defining moment in my drift from Left to Right – was a story I heard long ago on NPR about a high school ethics class.  The subject on the day the reporter attended class was theft.  The teacher asked students to describe how they imagined they would feel if they learned someone had stolen their purse or wallet.  Some described rage, some sadness, some frustration.  At that point, the NPR reporter observed with some incredulity, the class simply ended.  The teacher made no effort to draw any larger conclusions about whether theft is morally right or wrong.  Instead, the teacher apparently thought it sufficient for the students to understand that, were they to steal a purse or wallet, their victim might be as unhappy as they had imagined themselves being under similar circumstances.

A more recent example of feelings-based morality is the Michael J. Fox video  aired during the World Series.  In this video, Fox, showing the distressing effects of his Parkinson’s disease, urges Missouri voters to choose Democrat Claire McCaskill as their Senatorial candidate because, he claims, Republican Senator Jim Talent is all for making stem cell research illegal.  Aside from the commercial’s significant factual errors, its whole point is that you, the voter, can make Michael J. Fox feel better by allowing unfettered, government sponsored stem cell research to go forward.  After all, wouldn’t you want someone to make you feel better? Of course, in a more traditional universe, where feelings do not substitute for ethics, neither Michael J. Fox’s manifest suffering, nor your feelings about his suffering, would replace a reasoned, principled approach to a challenging moral dilemma.

For a long time, the fact that so many on the Left subscribe to the amorphous, situational navel gazing school of morality blinded me to the fact that there is indeed a hard and fast rule guiding those on the Left as they face situations that don’t personally involve them.  Maria Full of Grace, however, revealed to me that there is a second element to modern Leftist morality that transcends mere feelings.  It is, if you will, Marxist morality.  This ethical paradigm isn’t premised on right and wrong.  It is, instead, concerned with oppressor and oppressed.

We all know, of course, that Marxism orders the world by oppressors and oppressed.  I always saw this hierarchical standard, however, as ex post facto retrofitting explaining, not why someone was right to do as he did, but why he shouldn’t be punished.  This Marxist approach was an explanation for things that had already happened (a la the Officer Krupke song), not a moral justification for determining future conduct.  Maria Full of Grace, however, puts this Marxist algorithm in a whole new light.

If you haven’t seen the movie, the plot précis is that a poor, unemployed, pregnant Columbian girl gets herself a job as a mule, running cocaine into America.  The San Francisco Chronicle, in its review, introduced the movie as follows:

A “Bonnie and Clyde’’ moment — when you find yourself rooting for the outlaw over the authorities — comes a third of the way into “Maria Full of Grace,’’ a revelatory independent film whose moments of incredible sadness are offset by the same state of grace that blesses its astonishing title character.

Given that the lead character is an unwed pregnant woman engaged in illegal conduct, I naively assumed that the “state of grace” to which the review refers was the moment in which Maria suddenly realizes that she is engaged in evil, immoral conduct; repents; and works to undo the wrongs in which she was involved.  Had I begun by reading the Roger Ebert review, I never would have made this silly mistake.  Thus, Ebert has this to say, in relevant part:

Long-stemmed roses must come from somewhere, but I never gave the matter much thought until I saw “Maria Full of Grace,” which opens with Maria working an assembly line in Colombia, preparing the roses for shipment overseas. I guess I thought the florist picked them early every morning, while mockingbirds trilled. Maria is young and pretty and filled with fire, and when she finds she’s pregnant, she isn’t much impressed by the attitude of Juan, her loser boyfriend. She dumps her job and gets a ride to Bogota with a man who tells her she could make some nice money as a mule — a courier flying to New York with dozens of little Baggies of cocaine in her stomach. [….]

Maria is a victim of economic pressures, but she doesn’t think like a victim. She has spunk and intelligence and can think on her feet, and the movie wisely avoids the usual cliches about the drug cartel and instead shows us a fairly shabby importing operation, run by people more slack-jawed than evil. Here is a drug movie with no machineguns and no chases. It focuses on its human story, and in Catalina Sandino Moreno, finds a bright-eyed, charismatic actress who engages our sympathy.

By writing the above, Ebert unwittingly defines the second part of Leftist morals, the part that states that, if you are on the bottom of the Marxist hierarchy, your status preemptively sanctifies any conduct in which you engage, provided that it is directed against oppression (however you define that oppression, or whoever creates that oppression).  In other words, morals aren’t just about feelings, anymore.  Instead, they can be determined relative to a person’s status on the economic ladder. “Maria is a victim of economic pressures.”  Given her situation, she cannot make immoral choices.  All of her choices are virtuous responses to her degraded situation.

As it happens, I saw the movie very differently. Maria’s travails appeared to arise less because of economic concerns and more because of her sour, selfish personality — a personality that drives every minute of this ugly, demoralizing movie.

Although Maria certainly has a dead-end job – stripping thorns off roses – there’s no indication that the environment is unduly abusive.  In a short scene, we see that her boss is a petty, quota-driven bully, but Maria’s problems with him actually appear to arise from her own oppositional personality.  As for that boyfriend that Ebert so casually denigrates, he’s responsible for the one traditionally moral moment in the movie.  When he learns that Maria is pregnant, he immediately offers to marry her.  Maria turns him down with insults aimed at letting him know what a boring pig he is, and immediately goes off with another man who introduces her to the drug trade.

When Maria heads off to America with a large load of cocaine in her stomach, she enters into a superficial of friendship with one of the other women doing the run.  She is understandably upset and frightened when this woman dies from a ruptured cocaine pod, and the drug dealers eviscerate her for any remaining pods.  Maria doesn’t respond by having second thoughts about the morality of her conduct; instead, she just gets scared.  As a clear-headed Rhett Butler says to a weeping Scarlett after her selfish conduct leads to her husband’s death in an abortive Klan raid,

“Your ethics are considerably mixed up too.  You are in the exact position of a thief who’s been caught red handed and isn’t sorry he stole but is terribly, terribly sorry he’s going to jail.”

Faced with the risk that she may be killed for knowing too much, Maria decides she should hide from the drug runners by going to the dead woman’s pregnant sister.  There’s no indication in the movie that it’s morally wrong to impose on an innocent women the risk that murderous thugs might come to the door seeking their drugs.  (The drug operatives do not, in fact, hunt Maria down, but I sweated through that whole part of the movie, convinced that Maria’s selfish decision would result in a bloodbath.)

I might have spent several days brooding over the movie’s complete immorality, and the critics’ swoons over that same movie, if I hadn’t heard the next day a laudatory review on NPR  about the new Battlestar Galactica series. In that science fiction show, cyborgs have conquered humans living on a distant colony, and the humans are struggling to deal with the situation and to overthrow the cyborgs.  The critic interviewed in the NPR spot said that, to him, the show worked to make the viewer understand the insurgents in Iraq by showing us that they have an “oppressed minority fighting against conquering majority” viewpoint. In other words, it makes the Iraqi insurgents sympathetic.

Frankly, I have a hard time being sympathetic to people who back regimes that murder millions of its own people; who enjoy beheading innocents; and who would like to impose a relentlessly grim religious rule that requires death sentences for eating ice cream, singing, playing tennis, or putting on a clown show for children. These are not good people whether they’re in power or are seeking power.

In the Leftist moral view, however, just as all workers are exploited and should be praised for taking the initiative by engaging in utterly immoral, illegal activity, so too are all underdogs virtuous. If you’re in charge, you’re bad; if you’re struggling to overthrow those in charge, you’re good. It doesn’t seem to occur to Leftist moralists to examine the motives of those involved in any given struggle.

Lest you think I’m imagining this, just cast your mind back a few days to the way in which Byron Calame finally acknowledged that he acted wrongly when, in his capacity as public editor of the New York Times, he appoved of a story exposing the government’s secret program tracking terrorist finances.  While he conceded that he erred, he nevertheless advanced his moral justification for having written the story in the first place:

What kept me from seeing these matters more clearly earlier in what admittedly was a close call? I fear I allowed the vicious criticism of The Times by the Bush administration to trigger my instinctive affinity for the underdog and enduring faith in a free press — two traits that I warned readers about in my first column.  [emphasis mine.]

The “underdog” to which he’s referring is either the terrorist or the New York Times itself, a striking example of poor writing from an editor. If his meaning is the latter, he is seeing the most powerful critic of the Bush administration as as victim and approving of damaging national security to hurt its oppressor. If his meaning is the former, in a battle to the death between America and terrorists, he’s rooting for the terrorists.  And he’s rooting for them, not because he cares about their ideas (violent oppression, genocide, degradation of women, etc.) but simply because, at this moment in time, their relative position on the economic hierarchy is lower than America’s.

You can just imagine a modern Leftist moralist passing backward through time, and putting his spin on 20th Century events. If he were to land in 1920s Berlin, he’d see a valiant Hitler (spouting violent, anti-Semitic rhetoric) and his beleaguered Brownshirts (breaking Communist, Jewish, and gay heads) involved in a valiant insurgency against the oppressive Weimar government. In mid-20th Century China, he’d pay homage to the downtrodden peasants, led by the brave Mao (mass murderer unparalleled), fighting against the corrupt Chinese regime. And in the early 1970s, our time-traveling Leftist would cheer on the Khmer Rouge in their underdog fight against a capitalist system dominated by glasses-wearing intellectuals.

Heck, I don’t even need to imagine some of these time-travel scenarios. We know for a fact that, a credulous, Leftist Western press carefully framed Mao’s underdog story for public consumption.    Likewise, you all know by now how the press in the 1930s, especially the New York Times, turned a blind eye to the worst Soviet depredations against the Russian people.

In the non-Leftist world, of course, in a world hewing to traditional Judeo-Christian moral standards, an underdog’s position is not validated simply because he’s at an economic or military disadvantage.  Instead, traditionally moral people focus on the nature of the cause.  A clear-eyed moralist, looking at words and acts, would know that Hitler, Lenin/Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were all utterly evil, regardless of their relative place in their societies.

So don’t be fooled into thinking that modern Liberals (or Leftists, or Progressives, or whatever self-identification idealogues choose) have no morals.  They are relentlessly moral.  It’s simply that they operate in a Marxist moral universe that gives a pre-emptive pass to anyone in the one-down position, regardless of that person’s beliefs or conduct. 

Understanding this allows you to appreciate why the Left will always be there for Islamist insurgents (Third World soldiers fighting America’s military might), the Stanley “Tookie” Williams of this world (economically oppressed products of American racism), and American and British Muslim who, despite all evidence to the contrary, have had the insight to position themselves as victims.  I don’t know how you feel about all this, but I can assure you that Big Brother would be proud of this morally inverse world. 

Post-traumatic Stress and the Democrat Base

Post-traumatic Stress and the Democrat Base
October 27th, 2006

Why do so many American Jews reflexively support Democrats? A Jewish liberal I know has a daughter who loves art history. She felt very  happy to be admitted to one of the best Art History graduate programs in the country. But after the first few weeks she left, because of the pervasive anti-Semitism she experienced there. And yet, her father is just as liberal as ever. Sure, he understands intellectually that the Left has spread anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism on US college campuses. But he cannot learn from his own experiences. Why?

A Jewish college friend told me once that his grandmother had been knouted to death in Poland. A knout is a thick bullwhip that can kill at a single stroke. Such a family trauma sends waves of pain down the generations. Polish Jews had many experiences like that, culminating with Auschwitz. At some point it no longer makes sense to talk about the pros and cons of politics; the pain imprinted  generations ago is too great.

Today’s Democrats make the right sounds for many Jews—they are rhetorically liberal, which sounds warm and reassuring. Historical family trauma makes many Jews vulnerable to con artists and demagogues. They don’t even bother to ask if they’ve chosen the right side. The ultimate irony is that the only source of publicly accepted anti-Semitism today comes from straight the Left, which is rarely challenged on liberal college campuses. In Europe, some socialists are now classic anti-Semites. The Left has flipped against Jews, but most Jews still haven’t caught on.

Many Jews (and African-Americans, too) are easily manipulated by the Left. Many Blacks have traumatic family histories. The NAACP smeared George W. Bush in 2004 by associating him with the murder of a Black man who was dragged to death by a pickup truck in Texas. The criminals were properly caught, prosecuted and convicted. But the NAACP had no interest in assuring its supporters that the time of the KKK is over. Democrat operatives have no guilt about associating a good and decent president with the worst kind of racist crime. The NAACP commercial worked, because the target audience has been so utterly burned by their family histories. Truth didn’t matter. Lies won.

Such trauma must command our respect and sympathy. And yet, if people live in the past they cannot make reasoned choices in the present. The idea that US conservatives resemble  Nazis is pathetic; it is only made possibly by sheer ignorance of  history. The formula “Bush = Hitler” is delusional to the point of madness; on the contrary, “Bush = FDR” or “Bush = Churchill” would be much, much closer to the truth. It is utterly despicable to use such lies to manipulate innocent people. And yet, the Left routinely propagates bizarre ideas with great success. If the Left could not lie through its megaphone of the media, it would lose all its power.

The massive irony is that the United States is as different from Poland sixty years ago as any place in the world could be.  No country in the world  has been kinder and more generous to history’s victims of all races and origins. We have immigrants, traumatized in their native lands, living in this country from Cuba, From Vietnam, from Africa, from Eastern Europe, from Cambodia and from China.  Among many others.

In the last fifty years America’s generosity has applied to Blacks as well. Yet many American Jews cling to their family fears from long ago. Political demagogues play upon that in the foulest way. What turned me against the Democrats more than anything else was the Party’s unbelievable manipulation of traumatized Jews and Blacks. This is as immoral, even evil, as political behavior gets. The demagogue wing of the Democratic Party stands convicted by its own behavior. Nothing the GOP has ever done even comes close.

The irony is that today’s Democrats are using demagogy, guilt by association, and emotional manipulation in precisely the same way  Jim Crow demagogues used to. There is little difference between the race-baiting of the old Dixiecrats and the race-baiting of Al Sharpton or Louis Farrakhan. It’s not surprising: Sharpton learned his political gambits from the Jim Crow experience.  Only the victims have changed. Bill Clinton learned his sly good ole boy mannerisms from his mentor J. William Fulbright, and today’s liberals fall for them just as Southern whites used to. Only the sides have changed.

No doubt some liberals really believe “Bush = Hitler.” To them any slander is justified. Those people are delusional; they are not in touch with reality. They confuse friends and foes, and end up in effect supporting people like Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad . Such deluded people end up flipping right and wrong, moral and immoral, pro and con, reason and irrationality. Morally, they belong to the side they have chosen.

Many American Jews have a love for Israel, just as Irish-Americans have a special love for Ireland, and English-Americans for England. Before World War I and II, the British Foreign Office was accused of manipulating American public opinion on behalf of Britain. Today American Jews are accused of giving too much support to Israel. But there has never been any problem with American citizens advocating for countries in danger of being crushed by their enemies, especially when the moral differences are so crystal clear. Americans of English descent had the right to make Churchill’s case against Hitler. Jewish Americans should feel no guilt about making the case for Israel against the likes of Hamas and Hezb’allah. It is their right as citizens, and their duty morally.

Tenured professors at places like the Kennedy School of Government are now accusing American Jews of having too much influence on behalf of Israel. Notice well: it’s not the Republicans who are making those allegations. It’s the pervasive leftistists of  Kennedy School of Goverment ilk. But American Jews seem to live with a great blind spot, even when leftist betrayal of democratic and humane values happens over and over again over a hundred years. Jews on the Left end up taking the side of suicide killers in Tel Aviv.

There is no rational argument for such blindness.

The solution to trauma is compassionate therapy, but nobody can give therapy to millions of people living in the past. All we can do is remind them of the reality right in front of their eyes. Just look at reality, and think. Don’t be stuck in the past. Don’t be triggered by reflexes. Open your minds. Think, think, think.

Today’s Blacks are not living in the Jim Crow South, and Jews are not living in Poland. That was then. This is now. Think.

Living in the past means getting suckered by political con artists. It is hugely self destructive. Just think. Open your mind. Think.

James Lewis is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.

Lefties Gone Wild

Lefties Gone Wild
By Roberta Leguizamon
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 26, 2006

When the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) planned to bring “Catch an Illegal Immigrant” to the

University of
Michigan on Oct. 13, they expected resistance. The event, which has been held with varying degrees of success on other campuses across the country over the last few months, is purposefully offensive. Like the “Affirmative Action Bake Sale” which has also been held at numerous universities over the last few years, “Catch an Illegal Immigrant” is an event designed to create passion and dialogue about issues which sit at the heart of
America’s cultural landscape. This particular event also succeeded in exposing the Left’s predictable hypocrisy when it comes to the issue of free speech.

Andrew Boyd, Chairman of the U-Mich chapter of YAF, said, “YAF members all have very different opinions on the issue of immigration; this event was intended not to promote any one of them, but rather to get a dialogue going.   Political life here on campus has been dry, boring, and stagnant…someone had to stir things up, and we decided to be that someone.”

Predictably, the event was more successful at demonstrating the Left’s intolerance of views it finds distasteful than it was in provoking debate on the issue of illegal immigration. In fact, most of those gathered were there to protest the event. Andrew Grossman of the Michigan Daily reported:

 

“The protesters came from a wide range of campus organizations, including the Student of Color Coalition, La Voz Latina, Black Student Union and the undergraduate and law school chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union. Many wore yellow ‘Michigan Immigrant’ T-shirts, which the protesters had made specifically for the event.”

 

Boyd said he welcomed the peaceful protestors. “The majority of protestors were there to protest peacefully… I knew they would be there and I encouraged it because they were using their freedom of speech and exercising their individual rights just as I was.  These principles are something that YAF strongly believes in,” he said.

 

The event turned out to be anything but peaceful, however, when Leftist group By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) decided to make an appearance.  As Christopher Zbrozek explained in the Michigan Daily:

 

“Once YAF arrived, Boyd tried to announce the rules of the ‘game.’ He quickly found himself trying in vain to be heard over repeated chants of ‘No racist harassment on campus!’ A section of the protesters – led by BAMN members – decided Boyd’s allegedly racist message simply wasn’t fit to be heard.

“’We want to shut it down,’ explained Liana Mulholland, co-chair of the campus BAMN chapter. ‘They can’t have that game here.’”

 

Clearly Ms. Mulholland and her friends among BAMN believe they can determine unilaterally what kind of speech is permissible and what isn’t at U-Mich.

 

In an interesting twist to the game at U-Mich, the YAF dressed their “illegal immigrant” as Christopher Columbus, and their American citizen as a Native American. Boyd tried to pose numerous questions to the crowd. “Was
Columbus an illegal alien?   Should the Native Americans have sent him packing along with all the rest of the settlers to come?   Was the relationship between the natives and the immigrants beneficial at all?   What things went wrong in the eventual blending of cultures that could perhaps be avoided in future cross-cultural interactions?”

 

However, several reports on the event mentioned the BAMN group, which consisted of both students and imported protestors from other parts of the state, including 17 high school students from
Ann Arbor, chanted so loudly they drowned Boyd out as he tried to speak. So rather than participating in a reasoned, respectable debate on the issue of illegal immigration, BAMN turned the event into a spectacle of Leftist intolerance and militancy.

 

BAMN, which considers itself a leading voice in the “new civil rights movement,” is actually a front group for the Revolutionary Workers League, of which its co-chair, Luke Massie, is an active and influential member. The RWL describes itself as a “
U.S. sympathizing section of the International Trotskyist Committee.” 

 

BAMN has a long history of abhorrent behavior, much of it extremely counterproductive to the Civil Rights cause. For example, this November,
Michigan residents will be voting on an amendment “to ban affirmative action programs that give preferential treatment to groups or individuals based on their race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin for public employment, education or contracting purposes.” As such, BAMN, whose full, pretentious name is the “Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights, and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary,” has been spearheading the campaign against the amendment.

 

When numerous lawsuits filed by BAMN and other Leftist groups failed to stop the initiative from being placed on the ballot this November, BAMN resorted to violence and intimidation. On December 14, 2005, BAMN disrupted a
Michigan Board of Canvasser’s meeting, shouting obscenities and even flipping over a table.

 

Chetly Zarko is the treasurer of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative Committee, which created the ballot initiative. Zarko described the events of that night as follows:

 

“At almost precisely 10am, with what appeared to be two (chartered) buses BAMN arrived with what I estimate to be 120-150 members, mostly high school students taken from classes in Detroit Public Schools. Media estimates were as high as 250, but photographic evidence and common sense (the buses) suggest the number was slightly smaller…

 

“Following the voluminous testimony, at around 12:30pm, Canvasser Lynn Bankes read into the record a motion to certify the initiative pursuant to the Court ruling. As she read, BAMN leaders Luke Massie and Shanta Driver began to yell a slogan, started clapping, and the noise level in the room quickly drowned out the Board and any other conversation in the room became impossible…

 

“Several minutes passed inside as the chanting continued, and BAMN members began jumping on chairs, moving around, and flailing. The situation was becoming more frenzied…”

 

Eventually police had to be brought in to reestablish order at the meeting.

 The fact is, the civil rights movement, and the progressive moment in general, would be far better off without extremist groups like BAMN, which would use noise, violence and intimidation to silence their political opponents. As a matter of fact, the NAACP at U-Mich denounced BAMN in Oct. 2005, after BAMN bused in hundreds of students for an anti-MRCI rally. According to Donn M. Fresard of the
Michigan Daily:“During the rally against the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, a proposal that could ban the use of affirmative action by the University and the state if it is approved by voters next year, the Detroit students were given microphones and could be heard yelling profanities and slurs at anti-affirmative action protesters at the back of the crowd…

Alex Moffett, who was vice president of the NAACP’s campus chapter at the time, publicly denounced them for perpetuating negative stereotypes of African American youths. She wrote in an email which was published in the Michigan Daily:

 

“I want to send out a special thank you to those gagged students that were present during the foolishness that was the bamn [sic] rally today. For those of you that broke your silence in an attempt to give guidance and direction to the young black students (because they obviously had not been given any by the rally organizers). I would personally like to thank you. It broke many of our hearts to see those young black students tokenized and made a fool of in the way that they were. The fact that the bamn [sic] organizers would allow those students to come to campus with no prior preparation or supervision was reprehensible. All that bamn [sic] was successful in doing today was perpetuating untruths about todays [sic] black youth.

 

“The U of M Chapter of the NAACP is publicly denouncing bamn and their actions today. As an organization we believe that bamn’s behavior has been unacceptable and as a community we will not allow our people to be represented in such a fashion.”

 In fact, most of the groups which peacefully protested the YAF’s “Catch an Illegal Immigrant” event were displeased that BAMN showed up as well, acknowledging that such groups make a mockery of free speech and Leftist activism. During his speech—which was “heard” best by lip-readers- Boyd said, “It was hilarious to see how all the forces of political correctness descended upon U of M once we dared to announce an event that doesn’t have a ‘PC’ title… it’s good to keep the forces who would stifle debate, dialogue and intellectual stimulation on their toes.”As Zbrozek bemoaned in the Michigan Daily:

“YAF pulled off a brilliant success yesterday [Oct. 13] – but it had an awful lot of help from BAMN organizer Luke Massie and his friends.”