Anger

“Anger should be a universal feeling about a government and culture which is failing.” I watch Newt Gingrich’s speech at the American Enterprise Institute on CSPAN and next day go to his website to watch it again. The former Speaker of the House uses the word anger eighteen times in his speech. There is a lot of anger in the American public. I got me some too.

The speech is called The Obama Challenge, and the challenge is for adults to put politics aside and decide on what type of country we want the United States to be. It reflects Newt’s long time quip that “Real Change Requires Real Change”. We know what works to grow prosperity and we also know what doesn’t work. “But to find real solutions, I would argue, we have to have real honesty and a serious dialogue in which unpleasant facts are put on the table and bold proposals are discussed.”

There is zero chance that able yet McCain or the Clintons vs. the entire politicized federal bureaucracy will meaningfully change the status quo. Supporting either of them is like walking right back into the same stagnant swamp. They had their time and failed. I want them fired not promoted. The policies required to fix government will drive thousands of people off the public payroll, and if 1994 teaches anything, it is that persistent resistance and the temptations of power are powerful forces of inertia.

Now Barack Hussein Obama is no saint. I believe he is wrong in the majority of the approaches he advocates for governance. But he is still a newcomer and not fully vested in the abominable self nourishing slug that is our federal government. Of the options before us, he is the one with the most potential for major change of any kind. Sometimes the path to the goal moves away from the goal. I fully expect Obama will instantly find himself in over his head with the enormity of responsibly required by the Presidency. I expect he will make lots of mistakes. Yet it will be in those moments of his most severe self doubt that the opportunity for wise counsel to take root is appears.

Newt Hits A Nerve

Captain Ed is usually the epitome of sane rationalism, but in this instance he falls victim to the leftist predisposition of jumping to emotional conclusions based on emotionally written press reports. In our current age of faux journalism it is wise to remember: fact checking before fact reacting.

Gingrich: First Amendment Is Dispensable: However, if Gingrich believes that we can win the war by silencing American citizens, then he is fighting the wrong war on behalf of the wrong principles. All he is doing is replacing one bogeyman (political corruption) for another (terrorism); in essence, he's no different from McCain.

Newt Gingrich gives a speech at the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications in New Hampshire and directly addresses the fact that the war with Islamic Jihad has a propaganda component we must take seriously. A newspaper story interprets his remarks as an attack on First Amendment free speech and a great howl of predictable revulsion spews forth. Even Real Clear Politics feels shivers down the spine.

The Limits of Free Speech: The newspaper article didn't give much context to Gingrich's remarks, but I suppose you can conjure up scenarios where the public good would be served by abridging some free speech rights in certain instances. Still, the libertarian in me recoils at talk of "re-examining" the boundaries of freedom of speech.

Manipulation of emotion is the raison d'être of the mass media. If the defenders of liberty want to win the battle of public opinion they first need to understand the rules of the game, and then be willing to seriously compete against the combined forces of socialism and Islamic theocracy.

What did Newt really say? When the British this summer arrested people who were planning to blow up ten airliners in one day, they arrested a couple who were going to use their six month old baby in order to hide the bomb as baby milk.

Now, if I come to you tonight and said that there are people on the planet who hate you, and they are 15-25 year old males who are willing to die as long as they get to kill you, I’ve simply described the warrior culture which is ... true for 6 or 7 thousand years. But, if I come to you and say that there is a couple that hates you so much that they will kill their six month old baby in order to kill you, I am describing a level of ferocity, and a level of savagery beyond anything we have tried to handle. …

This is a serious long term war, and it will enviably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country, that will lead us to learn how to close down every website that is dangerous, and it will lead us to a very severe approach to people who advocate the killing of Americans and advocate the use of nuclear of biological weapons.

And, my prediction to you is that ether before we lose a city, or if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people before they get to reach out and convince young people to destroy their lives while destroying us.

This is a serious problem that will lead to a serious debate about the first amendment, but I think that the national security threat of losing an American city to a nuclear weapon, or losing several million Americans to a biological attack is so real that we need to proactively, now, develop the appropriate rules of engagement.

Newt is correct. The challenge before us is not ending free speech, but rather “to break up their capacity to use free speech” against us. How to achieve this goal is a debate that adults need to pursue with logic and not histrionics.

A Deep Breath

To paraphrase something I read somewhere today - Republicans: We may be bad but the Democrats would be worse. --- Public: OK, let’s call your bluff.

(*) “I believe the House and Senate Republicans and the White House need to take a deep breath and think very seriously about this election result because I think we’re at a very important turning point. This is either a temporary interruption of what has been a gradually consolidating center-right majority, or this is a breakdown of that center-right majority leading to a significant effort to establish a center-left government majority.”

I am a Republican because I value individual freedom more than the partial security of required subservience to human authority, yet I am under no illusion this desire for autonomy is a populist sentiment shared by millions yearning first for safety and comfort. America is unique, due to circumstances of history, in the degree individual liberty is believed to be the source of good in society, but fear and pain make liberty easy to trade back to authority.

Audio Link: “I think America is in more danger of loosing two or three cities now than any time during the cold war.”

The events of time are going to force more hard decisions upon this country. Because I do not trust politicians who believe it is the purpose of the State to bind citizens together, it is imperative we insure this election is only a temporary step back towards the flaws of socialism.

The Return of the Demonic Rebel

Newt Gingrich lead the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994 and was “demonized” by the Democrats for his success. The level of hatred Newt inspires in the left is wonderfully summarized in the Boot Newt Songbook. His sudden resignation from Congress in November 1998 prompted a wide range of responses including David Horowitz’s assessment that … “he's not really a politician. He's more of a rebel than a statesman. He is full of ideas and they pop out of him all the time.”

I have a fondness for rebels with ideas even if not every idea turns out to be brilliant. The old History Professor is currently out promoting his latest bound volume of collected musings and a few weeks ago Harvard actually allowed him onto campus to give a talk. People study the past because you can’t study the future. The transcript is from the “official site of the former Speaker of the House” and this small section caught my fancy.

Harvard Speech: “Here's my proposition to all of you. We are about to face the largest scale of challenge we have had since 1980. The political, governmental system in the United States is not capable of developing answers internally, and never has been. There's not a single major movement in American politics that starts in Washington. … Everyone one of them starts first in the countryside with people talking to each other. And mostly it's common sense.”