Rush Limbaugh To Colin Powell: 'Stuff It'

A lot has been made of Colin Powell's interview last week in which he called for wholesale changes in the Republican party. Of course, this comes from a man who has never really been a Republican. RINO/moderate Republican, maybe, but even then, has anyone ever heard him defend anything like a conservative principle? Apart from the fact that his career has been advanced by Republican Presidents--Reagan, Bush 41, Bush 43--he hasn't ever been politically conservative.

And really, folks, are you surprised that a liberal would want to change the Republican party--make it less conservative, make it more like the Democrat party? This surprises you? More importantly, does this really persuade anyone?

I intended to post something about this earlier, but American Thinker makes a persuasive case for Rush Limbaugh as a leading American intellectual--not the pseudo-intellectual that populates the places I frequent--but a genuine intellectual in the sense that he sorts through all of the crap and makes sense of and explains the world. (note: by "places I frequent" I mean higher education in general and not the specific universities I've attended and especially not the professors with whom I have worked.)

Rush Limbaugh is far closer to the great tradition of Western intellectuals than anybody in the celebrity freak-show of the Left. It is the Rush Limbaughs who became Socrates and Plato in the ancient world. They composed the Psalms and the Book of Proverbs. They were not professional scribblers. They did not found a revolutionary cult designed to overthrow all the good traditions. They were talented talkers, and even better listeners. All good thinking starts from dialogue.

Read the article, it's very good.

Back to Rush & Powell.

Powell says, essentially, get rid of the social cons, Sarah Palin, they're dragging down the party. Rush responds:

Here is Colin Powell telling the Republican Party what to do after he voted for Obama! [...] The Republican Party nominated Powell's perfect candidate. The guy's going after moderates, independents, Democrats, a guy who is not conservative at all, McCain, didn't stand up for much conservative [...]

Colin Powell ... insists that conservatives and Republicans support candidates who will appeal to minorities like I guess McCain who led the effort for amnesty. He insists that conservatives and Republicans move to the center like McCain, who calls himself a maverick for doing so. General Powell insists that conservatives and Republicans provide an open tent to different ideas and views, like I guess McCain, who repeatedly trashed Republicans and made nice with Democrats. I mean, their tent's big, they just don't want us in it. John McCain is and was Colin Powell's ideal candidate. All these moderates that crossed the aisle and voted for Obama, they got their ideal candidate, and they got their ideal campaign in McCain. Once McCain was nominated as the Republican candidate, largely by independents and Democrats voting in Republican primaries, Colin Powell waited 'til the last minute, when it would do the most damage to McCain and the Republicans and endorsed Obama.

So if we try to understand Powell's thinking, which is difficult since it's incoherent, we should have all voted for McCain in the primaries, and once he was nominated, we should have voted for Obama for president. [...]

What's going on here with this Colin Powell thing is that the Washington establishment -- Powell's not a Republican. McCain's not a Republican. These guys are not even mavericks. They are Washingtonians. Washingtonians have their own culture and their own desires, and it is to matter. They don't care who's in power, they just want to be closely associated with whoever is. That's the name of the game and they want press adulation. They want to be loved and adored by the media, they want fawning treatment, they want to be thought of as something special, unique, dignified and so forth, and that's the Washington establishment. [...]

As long as you are a Republican, but you buy into an endless array of liberal causes, global warming to amnesty for illegals, and somebody who has the same fetish for compromising principles that you do, then they are going to love you. Then you turn around and you stab this person in the back by endorsing the most liberal Democrat candidate ever nominated days before the election, General Powell? [...]

I also have to question something here. How can he say he's a Republican? He gets the perfect Republican nominee, exactly the kind of candidate he wants, it's McCain, and then he sabotages McCain a few weeks before the election by endorsing Obama. How can you even claim to be a Republican, General Powell? When have you ever stuck your neck out for Republicans and conservatives? Never. I mean sabotage George W. Bush with the Armitage leak and Scooter Libby, that's just one thing, but Ronald Reagan, Bush 41, Bush 43 all helped advance General Powell's career.

[...] I've noticed on the one hand General Powell claims to stand above politics as a big claim to fame. Yet, on the other hand, he jumps in from time to time, but only to attack the conservative base of the Republican Party. When's the last time, the first time, when is any time he has let loose or criticized a liberal Democrat on any issue? Now, here's the problem. General Powell, and folks, this problem I think is systemic in the Republican Party in Washington. People like General Powell seek to ingratiate themselves with the people who despise the Republican Party and despise the conservative movement. They're out there preaching moderation all along the way, when instead you should be preaching principle.

Principle is what got you where you are. Moderation is what keeps you where you are with this great reputation, great image but no substance, no principles, no core belief. If somebody had to tell you who Colin Powell is, what would they say? What does he stand for? What does General Powell stand for? ... You don't know. There aren't any core beliefs you can go rat-tat-tat down the list and say, yep, this is who they are. Was Abraham Lincoln great because he saw compromise during the Civil War or was he great because he insisted on total and complete victory? Great people take stands on principle, not moderation. Some of us think that individual liberty, limited constitutional government, and increased support for the military by civilians are principles worth defending. Maybe General Powell can enlighten us, since he's failed to do that so far on the great liberal or moderate Democrat principles that seem to intrigue him. What is it about Obama that intrigued him? What are these principles? Or was it the way Obama speaks?

[...] One of the things he said is he resents Sarah Palin because she kept talking about small towns. He said nobody lives in small towns and that's why they're small. "I'm from the Bronx. Something wrong with my values?" he asked. What is this hatred for conservatives and small town people and Sarah Palin? It's because they are effective. They represent challenges to the Washingtonians' control of the Republican Party. I know a lot of people that are from the Bronx, General Powell, and if you think the values there in the Bronx today reflect the ones you grew up with, take a trip back and see if the street corners and the activities there are the same as when you were growing up, General Powell.

(emphasis added)

There's a lot more there, I just quoted (generously. fair use, right? right.) from some of the best stuff. I can see why the left hates this guy so much. He is smart and persuasive and very, very good at deconstructing the elaborate myths of the left and laying them bare for all to see.


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Oil Prices Fall & Other Good News

This is the good news, the silver lining, coming out of yesterday's precipitous market drop. Oil prices fell by over $10. And, the dollar had its biggest gain against the British pound in something like 15 years (so Drudge tells me).

Considering that Americans consume roughly 20.73 bbl/day, a $10/bbl savings means [open "Calculator," punch in a bunch of numbers, 20 mins. later ...] that Americans will save $207 million per day. A few more days like yesterday will go a long way towards covering the cost of the Paulson Plan!

American Thinker has an article about the current state of the oil game here in the United States. Janet Levy's section on "current supply estimates" is particularly instructive.

Although Congress has not authorized a thorough inventory of offshore resources for over 30 years, the American Petroleum Institute estimates recoverable U.S. oil resources at about 86 billion barrels offshore and 32 billion barrels onshore.[7] This estimate doesn't take into consideration technological advancements, unconventional sources and recent discoveries.

Currently, the United States is the only industrialized country in the world not actively seeking to explore new offshore resources. In fact, offshore drilling is allowed in most of the Gulf of Mexico but prohibited on the East Coast, West Coast and Alaska. Only 17% of non-park, non-wilderness federal land is open to energy development and 85% of coastal waters are off limits. Further, since 1983, the amount of federal land available for development has decreased by more than 60%.

Recent assessments of the extent of economically recoverable, conventional oil in two important locations -- the Bakken Formation and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) -- could increase these estimates considerably.

First discovered in 1953, the Bakken Formation covers part of Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan. In April of 2008, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimated that Bakken contains 3 to 4 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, a 25-fold increase from the agency's 1995 estimate. Market conditions and drilling and production advances could transform Bakken, the largest continuous oil accumulation in the lower 48 states, into one of the largest producing oil fields in the world.

Meanwhile, petroleum experts have estimated that ANWR contains anywhere from 9 to 16 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil and could prove to be one of the largest oil fields yet in North America. Since current USGS estimates are based on the petroleum geology of adjacent lands, the true potential for oil recovery is uncertain.

Environmental arguments about risks to wildlife and pristine forests have kept ANWR off limits to energy development, even though such risks are unfounded. Drilling in the region would cover a mere tenth of one percent of its 19 million acres. Plus, ANWR is a flat, treeless plain with temperatures inhospitable for most animal species. The area is already home to a village of Native Americans, who support its development. It currently contains an airstrip, power lines, an oil well and a military radar site. Two decades of drilling in the North Slope area has had no negative effects on the ecology of the area and, during that time, the caribou population actually increased sevenfold.

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The Flip-Flop: An Exhaustive Examination

Though not by me.

No, this in depth analysis is provided courtesy of American Thinker's Paul Shlichta. He's very good.

I highly recommend you peruse American Thinker daily. The blog--with all its writers--is thoughtful, intelligent, and incisive.

A selection from the post:

"Flip-flop" is usually just a politician's way of saying that an opponent has changed sides on an issue. But in fact, such a change can be good or bad. The primary index of infamy is not the degree or frequency of change but rather the motive for doing so. I therefore propose that we to define flip-flopping as "changing sides in a political issue for a dishonest or deceptive motive".

Flip-flopping probably hit its peak during the 2004 campaign when Kerry was successfully pegged as king flip-flopper by the Bush campaign. It will be interesting to see the degree of prominence it attains in the coming, final months of the 2008 Presidential campaign.


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Obama Slanders Clarence Thomas (UPDATE)

If you've been reading for the last 9 months or so, you know that Clarence Thomas is one of my heroes. His memoir--'My Grandfather's Son'--was the OL&L book of the year in 2007.

Tonight, at the Saddleback Q&A sesh (transcript here) Barack Obama* hypocritically disparaged my favorite Supreme Court justice. Watch the video and see for yourself.



Mid-way through saying that Thomas didn't have enough experi..., Obama stops himself and performs a bit of the verbal acrobatics for which he is famous. He instead attacks his qualifications.

Obama doesn't know what he's talking about.

Though Obama was editor of the Harvard Law Review, as American Thinker points out, he never published any of his own work. In 12 years of whatever affiliation he had with University of Chicago Law School, he published nothing. This is rare in the academy that typically requires that professors 'publish or perish.'

When it comes to memoir writing, Obama is definitely more qualified than Thomas. After 47 years of life, the incredibly narcissistic and self reverential Obama has written two memoirs--'Audacity' & 'Dreams.'

Thomas, 60, just wrote his after 17 years on the Supreme Court, a year on the DC Appeals Court, 9 years as Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a year as Assistant Secretary of Education Office of Civil Rights, 3 years as Legislative Assistant for Senator Danforth, 4 years as an attourney for Monsanto, and 4 years as Assistant Atourney General of Missouri (see wikipedia for more).

If Clarence Thomas wasn't qualified to be one of 9 Supreme Court Justices, what does that say of Barack Obama's qualifications for President? Grossly unqualified?

*UPDATE 18 August 6:58pm PST: The WSJ follows my lead. So does Doug Ross.


*Over-the-top performance, no real skill or experience.


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Environmental Apocalyptus for the Rest of US

In case you missed the link from yesterday, here's where we got that clever title!

A Necessary Apocalypse
By J.R. Dunn

A man who ceases to believe in God does not believe in nothing; he believes in anything.
- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

The apocalyptic vision of global warming serves a deep need of the environmentalist credo, the dominant pseudo-religious tendency of our age in the prosperous West.

For good or ill, human beings are constructed to believe, and faith has its demands.. Along with the concrete elements that demand belief (that fire burns and that it's not wise to walk off cliffs, for example) there exists an apparent necessity for a belief in "the rock higher than I" - a belief in a superior entity that can inspire awe and gratitude, that can be turned to in hard times, that can act as witness to injustice and dispenser of mercy.

Despite the claims of our current crop of militant atheists such as Dawkins and Harris, this is not simply brain-dead foolishness. Religious belief is hard-wired into human beings, by what means and for what purposes we don't yet understand. (A much wiser atheist, the biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote in On Human Nature that he intended to demonstrate that religious belief played an evolutionary role and could thus be explained by Darwinism. That was thirty years ago - if he ever succeeded, I haven't heard about it.)

When religious belief is subverted, it does not, as Chesterton implied, simply vanish. It is almost immediately replaced by another set of beliefs on a similar level of abstraction and serving the same purpose. Sometimes it's an import, such as Buddhism or TM. Sometimes it's a creed deliberately created to serve a political agenda, as we see in Nazism and Communism. Sometimes it's the goofy SoCal syncretism currently expressed in Wicca and Neopaganism. ("If people seriously want to be pagans," the late Joe Myers, a Christian brother of my acquaintance once said. "They'd become Roman Catholics.") And sometimes they're a combination, a weird melange of ideas picked up from various sources that (and usually not coincidentally) also serve a political purpose. Which brings us to environmentalism.

That environmentalism is in fact a pseudo-religion goes without saying. Like all such, it possesses every element of contemporary legitimate belief. It has a deity, in this case the goddess Gaia, the personification of the living Earth, (first envisioned by James Lovelock, whom we can slot in as high priest). It has its holy books, most changing with the seasons, and most, as is true of the Bible with many convinced Christians, utterly unread. It has its saints, its prophets, its commandments, religious rituals (be sure to recycle that bottle), a large gallery of sins, mortal and otherwise, and an even larger horde of devils. (Let me pause here to sharpen a horn.)

Another item that a pseudo-religion must have is an apocalypse - and that's what global warming is all about.

In fact, the apocalyptic is the major fulcrum of environmentalism, the axis around which everything else turns. It's environmentalism's major element of concern, its chief attraction, and the center of discussion and speculation, in much the same way that some Protestant variants of Christianity are obsessed above all with sin. So crucial is the apocalypse to environmentalism that there has been a whole string of them, one after the other, covering every last aspect of the natural world. If one don't git ya, the next one will.

Green emphasis on the apocalyptic appeared early, accompanying the introduction of mass environmental awareness itself. Silent Spring, published in 1962, represents the first environmentalist scripture -- nothing other than a modern book of Revelations. Rachel Carson, a popular nature writer, was dying of cancer while writing the book, and Silent Spring became an outlet for her rage and grief. Carson predicted the imminent coming of a stricken world, a world poisoned by the synthetic products of the chemical industry, in which no birds sang and human children would not be immune. The early 60s were marked by fears of the consequences of atmospheric nuclear tests, and the suggestion that chemicals were just as deadly found a willing audience.

Pollution - a word that itself bears many religious connotations -- became a byword of the era. That fact that the phenomenon encompassed virtually every aspect of technical civilization including car exhausts, household plastics, and power generation, guaranteed it a good long run. Truly grotesque stories, ranging from dioxins eating sneakers from children's feet to hushed-up epidemics of cancer, made the rounds. None were anything more than grist for Snopes.com, and the promised chemical doomsday never arrived. But Carson's work set the pattern for all the environmental apocalypses to come.

The next example was overpopulation, its prophet the notorious Paul Ehrlich. His set of tablets was titled The Population Bomb and if anything, it was even more popular than Silent Spring. Ehrlich's thesis was that relentlessly burgeoning population would overstress the earth's "carrying capacity", use up all available resources, and lead to the collapse of civilization before the 20th century was out. The argument seemed irrefutable to those not familiar with the uncertainties surrounding demography (Thomas Malthus had made similar series of predictions early in the 19th century).

Countless offshoots of Ehrlich's book appeared, and overpopulation became one of the standard ideas of the late 60s, embraced by the counterculture, policymakers, academics, and the media. Even today, an era in which deflating national populations are the problem, it's by no means unusual to come across people still living in Ehrlich's nightmare world, much the same as the Amish or Mennonites have preserved their far more pleasant way of life into modern times. Ehrlich became quite wealthy, and the master of his own foundation devoted to the study of the "overpopulation threat". To this day, he contends that his thesis is correct. The whole episode is begging for a detailed historical study.

A variant combining aspects of both theories had a brief run in the early to mid 70s: the doctrine of universal famine. Pollution would poison croplands and stunt agricultural production, and overpopulation would do the rest. The problem here was the fact that proponents insisted that doom was imminent, with famine appearing as early as 1975 or 1980 at the latest. The experience taught the Greens to be a little more vague with dates.

The early 1980s saw a reprise of earlier fears of nuclear destruction (a workable definition of an "advanced civilization" could well read "one in which there is sufficient leisure time for large numbers of people to worry about doomsday"). The nuclear freeze campaign, largely engineered by the KGB, took up much of the public attention devoted to environmental crises. But even this effort was given an environmental gloss when scientific impresario Carl Sagan put together a road show of "mainstream scientists" to promote the concept of a "nuclear winter".

The firestorms generated by a nuclear strike would generate smoke so thick as to block out the sun across much of the northern hemisphere, causing a collapse of the terrestrial ecology. Nuclear winter never quite caught on outside of certain elite circles, in part due to flaws in the theory. Sagan's specialty was exobiology, the study of possible extraterrestrial life-forms, and it developed that the climate model he'd used was based on the atmosphere of Mars, a planet locked in an ice age for the past billion years. Nuclear winter faded with the nuclear freeze movement. All the same, just before his death Sagan made it known that he'd willingly accept a Nobel for his role in preventing World War III.

Ozone depletion, the next environmentalist flurry, was a little too esoteric to generate the uncritical devotion accorded to pollution and overpopulation. It involved arcane chemical reactions, took place in the stratosphere, and seemed to be confined to Antarctica. (Although the northern hemisphere was home to the bulk of the offending chlorofluorocarbons, the Arctic didn't seem to have the same problem.) But ozone depletion did serve a useful Green purpose in drawing public attention to the atmosphere, and confusing people as to exactly what the problem was all about. (I would guess that something like two-thirds of the people in this country believe that ozone depletion and global warming are part of the same phenomenon.)

But in fact, global warming has actually adapted elements of all previous environmental crazes. It holds that carbon dioxide (a naturally-occurring compound that comprises a large portion of the atmosphere) is a form of pollution, the same as Carson's detested synthetic chemicals. Like that involving overpopulation, the threatened catastrophe is universal, and implicated in everyday practices and institutions. As with the universal famine, the effects are concrete and horrifying, though the dates have been left vague - ‘in the coming century', rather than in a year or two. As with the nuclear freeze, the human villains are easily identified, their actions, which place all human life in jeopardy, beyond redemption. As with ozone depletion, mainstream scientists have a remedy - even if it's unproven and unnecessary.

The lessons of previous environmental panics have been carefully applied to global warming No other environmentalist program has been prepared with such detail, purpose, and conviction. A skilled cadre of scientists, activists, and publicists exist who have devoted entire careers to nothing else. A vast literature has appeared analyzing not climate as a whole, not the interactions of the entire system, but solely and uniquely global warming. In many ways, warming has become both more and less than an ideology: it has become an industry, one that with such financial elements as carbon offsets can easily support itself.

The global warming program has been in play for a quarter of a century. It has been quite successful, convincing a small majority of the population that such warming is in fact occurring and is caused by manmade emissions. It is not a fad of the decade like overpopulation or nuclear winter. Nothing, not scientific evidence, not common sense, not the fact that much of the United States is basking in subfreezing temperatures as I write this, will be allowed to overturn it. The environmentalist movement has staked everything on this program. Not for the sake of science; most of the science is wrong or fabricated. (This week's IPCC report marks no change in this regard.) Not for humanity; they have never cared for humanity. Not to alter the climate itself; no such program has been suggested, and in any case the earth's climate, an unstable planet-wide chaotic system, will go its own way no matter what we do. But for one reason: to make environmentalism a basic element of millennial society.

And that's where the danger arises. The problem with this type of pseudo-religion is that they're essentially heresies, and like most heresies far more bloodyminded than the parent religions that they otherwise mirror. This is obvious when we examine Nazism and communism. The same strain in environmentalism may be hidden, but it's there. This creed has killed massive numbers and forthrightly contemplated death on an even larger scale.

The banning of DDT in 1971 resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people in the developing world, most of them children, from insect-borne diseases such as malaria. (This despite the fact that the use of DDT to fumigate homes could have no serious effect on the environment.) Yet no environmental group has ever made note of the fact, and all oppose the reintroduction of DDT for any purpose. The DDT ban places Rachel Carson in an exclusive circle shared only by Karl Marx as a writer whose work alone caused vast amounts of human misery. (Adolf Hitler was, of course, more man of action than writer. It's doubtful that Mein Kampf in and of itself could have triggered the same upheavals as Hitler's actions.)

Death on a scale beyond even Mao was something openly contemplated in respectable circles of the cult. One byproduct of the universal famine panic was a concept called "triage". Adapted from the emergency medical technique in which the dying are put to one side while the less injured receive priority treatment, triage advocates suggested that certain "failed" nations be completely isolated from the rest of the world to bring about a "die-off" of their "excess" population, a process that would have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions. This was not a crackpot notion; it was presented as a serious policy issue and discussed as such in outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. The particular "failed" nation always suggested by these people was India, one of our epoch's economic powerhouses.

For a third example of bloodymindedness we need only mention the environmentalist and animal rights "direct-action" groups that have utilized terrorism, sabotage, arson, assault, everything short of murder in their campaigns against offending companies and even innocent third parties.

Increasingly strident rhetoric of the kind being heard from public figures such as Heidi Cullen and even Prince Charles may well result in a vicious circle in which public frustration leads to violent action leading to more frustration and on to the inevitable climax. Up to this point, environmentalist violence has been held in check by force of law - and only by force of law. How long this will remain the case depends on how much power the Greens are allowed to accrue.

True believers, a millennial creed, and easy targets - these have always and forever made for an unholy mix. Nothing about environmentalism suggests that it won't follow the same ugly path.

J.R. Dunn is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.


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