Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Stephen and Jamie's LiveJournal:

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Friday, November 7th, 2008
12:41 am	Everything You Need to Know is right here: http://onedotatatime.blogspot.com/ (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 25th, 2008
8:50 am	What Batman has in Common with George W. Bush By ANDREW KLAVAN July 25, 2008 A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . . Oh, wait a minute. That's not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a "W." There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past. And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell. "The Dark Knight," then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year's "300," "The Dark Knight" is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans. Conversely, time after time, left-wing films about the war on terror -- films like "In The Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and "Redacted" -- which preach moral equivalence and advocate surrender, that disrespect the military and their mission, that seem unable to distinguish the difference between America and Islamo-fascism, have bombed more spectacularly than Operation Shock and Awe. Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth? Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense -- values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right -- only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like "300," "Lord of the Rings," "Narnia," "Spiderman 3" and now "The Dark Knight"? The moment filmmakers take on the problem of Islamic terrorism in realistic films, suddenly those values vanish. The good guys become indistinguishable from the bad guys, and we end up denigrating the very heroes who defend us. Why should this be? The answers to these questions seem to me to be embedded in the story of "The Dark Knight" itself: Doing what's right is hard, and speaking the truth is dangerous. Many have been abhorred for it, some killed, one crucified. Leftists frequently complain that right-wing morality is simplistic. Morality is relative, they say; nuanced, complex. They're wrong, of course, even on their own terms. Left and right, all Americans know that freedom is better than slavery, that love is better than hate, kindness better than cruelty, tolerance better than bigotry. We don't always know how we know these things, and yet mysteriously we know them nonetheless. The true complexity arises when we must defend these values in a world that does not universally embrace them -- when we reach the place where we must be intolerant in order to defend tolerance, or unkind in order to defend kindness, or hateful in order to defend what we love. When heroes arise who take those difficult duties on themselves, it is tempting for the rest of us to turn our backs on them, to vilify them in order to protect our own appearance of righteousness. We prosecute and execrate the violent soldier or the cruel interrogator in order to parade ourselves as paragons of the peaceful values they preserve. As Gary Oldman's Commissioner Gordon says of the hated and hunted Batman, "He has to run away -- because we have to chase him." That's real moral complexity. And when our artistic community is ready to show that sometimes men must kill in order to preserve life; that sometimes they must violate their values in order to maintain those values; and that while movie stars may strut in the bright light of our adulation for pretending to be heroes, true heroes often must slink in the shadows, slump-shouldered and despised -- then and only then will we be able to pay President Bush his due and make good and true films about the war on terror. Perhaps that's when Hollywood conservatives will be able to take off their masks and speak plainly in the light of day. (Comment on this)
Friday, December 7th, 2007
3:39 pm	"Faith in America" by Mitt Romney Speaking at the George Bush Presidential Library, Gov. Mitt Romney addressed the American people about his views on religious liberty, our country grand tradition of religious tolerance and how faith would inform his presidency. "Thank you, Mr. President, for your kind introduction. "It is an honor to be here today. This is an inspiring place because of you and the First Lady and because of the film exhibited across the way in the Presidential library. For those who have not seen it, it shows the President as a young pilot, shot down during the Second World War, being rescued from his life-raft by the crew of an American submarine. It is a moving reminder that when America has faced challenge and peril, Americans rise to the occasion, willing to risk their very lives to defend freedom and preserve our nation. We are in your debt. Thank you, Mr. President. "Mr. President, your generation rose to the occasion, first to defeat Fascism and then to vanquish the Soviet Union. You left us, your children, a free and strong America. It is why we call yours the greatest generation. It is now my generation's turn. How we respond to today's challenges will define our generation. And it will determine what kind of America we will leave our children, and theirs. "America faces a new generation of challenges. Radical violent Islam seeks to destroy us. An emerging China endeavors to surpass our economic leadership. And we are troubled at home by government overspending, overuse of foreign oil, and the breakdown of the family. "Over the last year, we have embarked on a national debate on how best to preserve American leadership. Today, I wish to address a topic which I believe is fundamental to America's greatness: our religious liberty. I will also offer perspectives on how my own faith would inform my Presidency, if I were elected. "There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us. If so, they are at odds with the nation's founders, for they, when our nation faced its greatest peril, sought the blessings of the Creator. And further, they discovered the essential connection between the survival of a free land and the protection of religious freedom. In John Adams’ words: 'We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion... Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people.' "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone. "Given our grand tradition of religious tolerance and liberty, some wonder whether there are any questions regarding an aspiring candidate's religion that are appropriate. I believe there are. And I will answer them today. "Almost 50 years ago another candidate from Massachusetts explained that he was an American running for president, not a Catholic running for president. Like him, I am an American running for president. I do not define my candidacy by my religion. A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be rejected because of his faith. "Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions. Their authority is theirs, within the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin. "As governor, I tried to do the right as best I knew it, serving the law and answering to the Constitution. I did not confuse the particular teachings of my church with the obligations of the office and of the Constitution – and of course, I would not do so as President. I will put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the office and the sovereign authority of the law. "As a young man, Lincoln described what he called America's 'political religion' – the commitment to defend the rule of law and the Constitution. When I place my hand on the Bible and take the oath of office, that oath becomes my highest promise to God. If I am fortunate to become your president, I will serve no one religion, no one group, no one cause, and no one interest. A President must serve only the common cause of the people of the United States. "There are some for whom these commitments are not enough. They would prefer it if I would simply distance myself from my religion, say that it is more a tradition than my personal conviction, or disavow one or another of its precepts. That I will not do. I believe in my Mormon faith and I endeavor to live by it. My faith is the faith of my fathers – I will be true to them and to my beliefs. "Some believe that such a confession of my faith will sink my candidacy. If they are right, so be it. But I think they underestimate the American people. Americans do not respect believers of convenience. Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world. "There is one fundamental question about which I often am asked. What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind. My church's beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths. Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history. These are not bases for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance. Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree. "There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church's distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution. No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith. For if he becomes President he will need the prayers of the people of all faiths. "I believe that every faith I have encountered draws its adherents closer to God. And in every faith I have come to know, there are features I wish were in my own: I love the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass, the approachability of God in the prayers of the Evangelicals, the tenderness of spirit among the Pentecostals, the confident independence of the Lutherans, the ancient traditions of the Jews, unchanged through the ages, and the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims. As I travel across the country and see our towns and cities, I am always moved by the many houses of worship with their steeples, all pointing to heaven, reminding us of the source of life's blessings. "It is important to recognize that while differences in theology exist between the churches in America, we share a common creed of moral convictions. And where the affairs of our nation are concerned, it's usually a sound rule to focus on the latter – on the great moral principles that urge us all on a common course. Whether it was the cause of abolition, or civil rights, or the right to life itself, no movement of conscience can succeed in America that cannot speak to the convictions of religious people. "We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong. "The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation 'Under God' and in God, we do indeed trust. "We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders – in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history, and during the holiday season, nativity scenes and menorahs should be welcome in our public places. Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our constitution rests. I will take care to separate the affairs of government from any religion, but I will not separate us from 'the God who gave us liberty.' "Nor would I separate us from our religious heritage. Perhaps the most important question to ask a person of faith who seeks a political office, is this: does he share these American values: the equality of human kind, the obligation to serve one another, and a steadfast commitment to liberty? "They are not unique to any one denomination. They belong to the great moral inheritance we hold in common. They are the firm ground on which Americans of different faiths meet and stand as a nation, united. "We believe that every single human being is a child of God – we are all part of the human family. The conviction of the inherent and inalienable worth of every life is still the most revolutionary political proposition ever advanced. John Adams put it that we are 'thrown into the world all equal and alike.' "The consequence of our common humanity is our responsibility to one another, to our fellow Americans foremost, but also to every child of God. It is an obligation which is fulfilled by Americans every day, here and across the globe, without regard to creed or race or nationality. "Americans acknowledge that liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government. No people in the history of the world have sacrificed as much for liberty. The lives of hundreds of thousands of America's sons and daughters were laid down during the last century to preserve freedom, for us and for freedom loving people throughout the world. America took nothing from that Century's terrible wars -- no land from Germany or Japan or Korea; no treasure; no oath of fealty. America's resolve in the defense of liberty has been tested time and again. It has not been found wanting, nor must it ever be. America must never falter in holding high the banner of freedom. "These American values, this great moral heritage, is shared and lived in my religion as it is in yours. I was taught in my home to honor God and love my neighbor. I saw my father march with Martin Luther King. I saw my parents provide compassionate care to others, in personal ways to people nearby, and in just as consequential ways in leading national volunteer movements. I am moved by the Lord's words: 'For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me...' "My faith is grounded on these truths. You can witness them in Ann and my marriage and in our family. We are a long way from perfect and we have surely stumbled along the way, but our aspirations, our values, are the self-same as those from the other faiths that stand upon this common foundation. And these convictions will indeed inform my presidency. "Today's generations of Americans have always known religious liberty. Perhaps we forget the long and arduous path our nation's forbearers took to achieve it. They came here from England to seek freedom of religion. But upon finding it for themselves, they at first denied it to others. Because of their diverse beliefs, Ann Hutchinson was exiled from Massachusetts Bay, a banished Roger Williams founded Rhode Island, and two centuries later, Brigham Young set out for the West. Americans were unable to accommodate their commitment to their own faith with an appreciation for the convictions of others to different faiths. In this, they were very much like those of the European nations they had left. "It was in Philadelphia that our founding fathers defined a revolutionary vision of liberty, grounded on self evident truths about the equality of all, and the inalienable rights with which each is endowed by his Creator. "We cherish these sacred rights, and secure them in our Constitutional order. Foremost do we protect religious liberty, not as a matter of policy but as a matter of right. There will be no established church, and we are guaranteed the free exercise of our religion. "I'm not sure that we fully appreciate the profound implications of our tradition of religious liberty. I have visited many of the magnificent cathedrals in Europe. They are so inspired … so grand … so empty. Raised up over generations, long ago, so many of the cathedrals now stand as the postcard backdrop to societies just too busy or too 'enlightened' to venture inside and kneel in prayer. The establishment of state religions in Europe did no favor to Europe's churches. And though you will find many people of strong faith there, the churches themselves seem to be withering away. "Infinitely worse is the other extreme, the creed of conversion by conquest: violent Jihad, murder as martyrdom... killing Christians, Jews, and Muslims with equal indifference. These radical Islamists do their preaching not by reason or example, but in the coercion of minds and the shedding of blood. We face no greater danger today than theocratic tyranny, and the boundless suffering these states and groups could inflict if given the chance. "The diversity of our cultural expression, and the vibrancy of our religious dialogue, has kept America in the forefront of civilized nations even as others regard religious freedom as something to be destroyed. "In such a world, we can be deeply thankful that we live in a land where reason and religion are friends and allies in the cause of liberty, joined against the evils and dangers of the day. And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me. And so it is for hundreds of millions of our countrymen: we do not insist on a single strain of religion – rather, we welcome our nation's symphony of faith. "Recall the early days of the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, during the fall of 1774. With Boston occupied by British troops, there were rumors of imminent hostilities and fears of an impending war. In this time of peril, someone suggested that they pray. But there were objections. 'They were too divided in religious sentiments', what with Episcopalians and Quakers, Anabaptists and Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Catholics. "Then Sam Adams rose, and said he would hear a prayer from anyone of piety and good character, as long as they were a patriot. "And so together they prayed, and together they fought, and together, by the grace of God ... they founded this great nation. "In that spirit, let us give thanks to the divine 'author of liberty.' And together, let us pray that this land may always be blessed, 'with freedom's holy light.' "God bless the United States of America." (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 22nd, 2007
5:22 pm	Thanksgiving For What the Thanks By MARK STEYN November 19, 2007 Speaking as a misfit unassimilated foreigner, I think of Thanksgiving as the most American of holidays. Christmas is celebrated elsewhere, even if there are significant local variations: in Continental Europe, naughty children get left rods to be flayed with and lumps of coal; in Britain, Christmas lasts from December 22nd to mid-January and celebrates the ancient cultural traditions of massive alcohol intake and watching the telly till you pass out in a pool of your own vomit. All part of the rich diversity of our world. But Thanksgiving (excepting the premature and somewhat undernourished Canadian version) is unique to America. "What's it about?" an Irish visitor asked me a couple of years back. "Everyone sits around giving thanks all day? Thanks for what? George bloody Bush?" Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for. Europeans think of this country as "the New World" in part because it has an eternal newness which is noisy and distracting. Who would ever have thought you could have ready-to-eat pizza faxed directly to your iPod? And just when you think you're on top of the general trend of novelty, it veers off in an entirely different direction: Continentals who grew up on Hollywood movies where the guy tells the waitress "Gimme a cuppa joe" and slides over a nickel return to New York a year or two later and find the coffee now costs $5.75, takes 25 minutes and requires an agonizing choice between the cinnamon-gingerbread-persimmon latte with coxcomb sprinkles and the decaf venti pepperoni-Eurasian-milfoil macchiato. Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all and turn it into a kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius! But Americans aren't novelty junkies on the important things. "The New World" is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on earth, to a degree "the Old World" can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists. We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany's constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy's only to the 1940s, and Belgium's goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it's not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France's, Germany's, Italy's or Spain's constitution, it's older than all of them put together. Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent's governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of "the west"'s nation states have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they're so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas — Communism, Fascism, European Union. If you're going to be novelty-crazed, better the zebra-mussel cappuccino than the Third Reich. Even in a supposedly 50/50 nation, you're struck by the assumed stability underpinning even fundamental disputes. If you go into a bookstore, the display shelves offer a smorgasbord of leftist anti-Bush tracts claiming that he and Cheney have trashed, mangled, gutted, raped and tortured, sliced'n'diced the Constitution, put it in a cement overcoat and lowered it into the East River. Yet even this argument presupposes a shared veneration for tradition unknown to most western political cultures: When Tony Blair wanted to abolish in effect the upper house of the national legislature, he just got on and did it. I don't believe the U.S. Constitution includes a right to abortion or gay marriage or a zillion other things the left claims to detect emanating from the penumbra, but I find it sweetly touching that in America even political radicalism has to be framed as an appeal to constitutional tradition from the powdered-wig era. In Europe, by contrast, one reason why there's no politically significant pro-life movement is because, in a world where constitutions have the life expectancy of an Oldsmobile, great questions are just seen as part of the general tide, the way things are going, no sense trying to fight it. And, by the time you realize you have to, the tide's usually up to your neck. So Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation states. Because they've been so inept at exercising it, Europeans no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to the nation state underpins in turn Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the U.N. But on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens — a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan — the U.S. can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply. Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in — shoring up Afghanistan's fledgling post-Taliban democracy — most of them send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base. If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. It's not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans who owe a debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown plump and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most benign hegemon in history. That said, Thanksgiving isn't about the big geopolitical picture, but about the blessings closer to home. Last week, the state of Oklahoma celebrated its centennial, accompanied by rousing performances of Rodgers and Hammerstein's eponymous anthem: "We know we belong to the land And the land we belong to is grand!" Which isn't a bad theme song for the first Thanksgiving, either. Three hundred and eighty-six years ago, the pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and that too is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that united a baker's dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii. Americans should, as always, be thankful this Thanksgiving, but they should also understand just how rare in human history their blessings are. (Comment on this)
Monday, October 15th, 2007
2:04 pm	Rush to Excellence (Part 1) Speech for WPHT-AM Philadelphia by Rush Limbaugh ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, give a City of Brotherly Love welcome to Rush Limbaugh! (wild cheers and applause) RUSH: Look at you in the front row! (more cheers and applause) RUSH: Keep it up! (even louder cheering) RUSH: Thank you all very much. Thank you. I have to tell you, I have never, ever, before been in a more beautiful place to speak than this. This is just absolutely gorgeous. (applause) RUSH: And that greeting you gave me was about the tenth best that I have ever had, so thank you so much. (laughter) RUSH: I flew in this afternoon. I flew in from Florida this afternoon. I left about two o'clock. I wanted to leave at two o'clock. It's a two-hour flight up here and I got to the airport and the pilot said, "We've got a 30-minute ground stop because the airport here got backed up" (because of all the weather you had, I guess, around noon). I said, "No, no, no, no. We gotta go. I can't wait here 30 minutes to go. I can't take the chance." So we played some games and got here, and we landed -- we had to come through, it must have been 20,000 feet of overcast. We didn't see the ground 'til about a thousand feet, and for our arrival route they took us right over The Linc [Lincoln Financial Field stadium]. (laughter) RUSH: And that giant picture of Donovan McNabb. (laughter and applause) RUSH: And I said, "I'm home!" (laughter and applause) RUSH: And when I got to the theater, we got here about 6:30 or so, unbeknownst to me as a pleasant surprise, Nick's Roast Beef had catered the greenroom back there. I come up to Pine Valley a lot. Last summer -- not this past summer but two summers ago -- a friend of mine took me over to Nick's Roast Beef, and I figured, "This is safe. I mean, nobody's going to know me in there." I'm wearing my golf shorts and so forth, had not taken a shower or anything. I got spotted right off. The guy behind the counter said, "Are you Rush?" "Shh! Shh! Shh!" I mean, I'm in Philadelphia. I don't know what's going to happen to me! (laughter) RUSH: Anyway, I'm looking around. They have all these pictures, you know, like a lot of restaurants. I saw all these pictures of athletes and so forth on the wall up there, and there wasn't one of Donovan McNabb, and I said, "You're missing the guy." "Nah, nah, nah. We'd rather have yours up there." So I sent them my picture and they catered the stuff and it's just delicious back there. You're all really great. I met some people backstage before going out. I just can't tell you how much I appreciate the greeting and the affection that you show me. I understand it. I'm worth it. (laughter) RUSH: Ahem, by the way, I know there are some liberals in the audience because I got a big bouquet of flowers back there. Whenever that happens, by the way, Secret Service is called. (laughing) RUSH: And there was a card, and whoever sent this, I had to search to find the name. The name is on an e-mail address, but I don't know if that's really the name. I think it's Emily. Is Emily here? (people calling out) RUSH: I had five answers: "I'm Emily." Well, anyway, Emily said that she brought ten of her liberal friends with her tonight. That's how I know that there are liberals in the audience, and I love it. I love it when liberals are in the audience, because liberals -- God love 'em, folks -- they just aren't enjoying life. (laughter) RUSH: They just aren't. They're irrationally deranged and angry over nothing. They hate people they've never met. It defies explanation. But tonight, any liberals in the audience, despite yourselves you're going to have a gas, and you're going to walk outta here dazed and confused and wonder what happened to you. Now, before we go to the speech, I got some news items here. I don't know if you noticed or not because, very oddly, it's not being reported: The National Enquirer hit with an exclusive on their website last night. I'm not kidding. John Edwards is supposedly having an affair. (groans and laughter) RUSH: You think I'm going to tell you a joke, but I'm not. It's true, and nobody's running it. Now, when the National Enquirer has news about me, the New York Times puts it on the front page, and they automatically become a credible source. The picture of a woman... Like the Huffington Post -- I'll throw that out to you libs in the crowd tonight: The Huffington Post is trying to get the Drive-By Media to cover it, and they won't. Nobody's picked it up, and it's kind of curious why not, because those kinds of things are résumé enhancements for Democrats. (laughter and applause) RUSH: Do you realize...? I mean, John Edwards is called "the Breck Girl" for a reason. (laughter) RUSH: If the news got out that he's actually having an affair with a good-looking woman, do you know what that might do to his poll numbers in the Democrat primaries? Democrats don't care about the morality of it, folks. So don't get confused. Other things: Algore, my co-nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. (cheers and applause) RUSH: Algore was supposed to attend a fundraiser for Barbara Boxer in California. Barbara Boxer issued a statement today saying that Algore called her and said he can't make it. He has an urgent foreign trip related to global warming -- which, of course, is to head over and get a peace prize for a movie about himself, narrated and starring himself, that has nothing to do with peace whatsoever, which is typical of what's happening to the Nobel awards of -- really not just recently. They've been polluted and corrupted for a long time. But it's interesting. This takes me to Mrs. Clinton. (laughter) RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, I, as you know, am literally 100%, totally deaf. I hear with a cochlear implant. Very briefly, the human ear has 35,000 hair cells in the inner ear, and they vibrate and they start the whole process of energy going through the audial nerve to the brain and the hearing process. Mine died because of an autoimmune attack, and the ones in my left have been replaced. This is a bionic ear. It has eight manmade electrodes. So I don't have nearly the frequency response that I used to have as one that can hear normally. Was that booing that I heard? (laughter) RUSH: Now, now, now. You know, I met Mrs. Clinton once. No, seriously, it was in Brooklyn. A friend of mine is the executive vice chairman of the -- it's a long name. It's the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. His name is Malcolm Hoenlein, and when I went to Israel in 1994, he arranged the trip in a four-day, whirlwind, meeting everybody that was anybody in the government, in the Mossad. I had special briefings, went up to the Golan Heights, and the Mossad. It was just unbelievable. Well, his daughter got married. This is about three or four years ago. His daughter got married at a hotel in Brooklyn. Now, Malcolm knows everybody, and when his daughter gets married and he sends out the invite, everybody shows up. All the elected officials in the city, the state, everybody in business, they were all there. This hotel, it took three floors for all of the goings-on to take place. At one point, Malcolm came up to me and said -- and I was told that Mrs. Clinton was going to be there, but three floors, and I was not going to make any effort to go meet her because I didn't want to cause a confrontation here. This is a blessed event, a wedding. Well, for some people it's been blessed. (laughter) RUSH: Sorry. (laughter) RUSH: So, anyway, Malcolm came up to me about ten minutes before I was thinking about leaving, and he said, "Would you pose for a picture with Hillary?" I said, "Malcolm, does she know you're asking me to do this?" "Yes, she's the one that wants it." "Malcolm, I do not believe that. I refuse to believe that Hillary Clinton wants her picture taken with me." Somebody pulled me aside and said, "Malcolm wants the picture so he can show it to people." (laughter) RUSH: So Malcolm had done some great things for me, so I relented, and I said yes. So Mrs. Clinton came up. She's very -- very -- short. (laughter) RUSH: She was wearing a floor-length gown, because you can't wear a pantsuit to a wedding. (laughter) RUSH: So Malcolm's got the photographers. Amazingly, ten or 12 photographers showed up and just people with their cameras (making shutter sounds) snapping pictures. I stood next to her, said a few words. She never looked at me. She just said, "Thank you," to whatever I said. "Thank yoooou. Thank yoooou," like a robot. "Thank you," like the woman who designed the Stepford Wives. So that picture, those pictures have never shown up. I've been convinced they're going to show up in a tabloid or something, and I'm going to have to deal with people saying, "What are you doing making nice with Hillary? What are you doing!" and I'll have to explain the story. But this is what was interesting about it. At that point that was my cue to leave -- and I didn't go in escorted. I was just there by myself. I walked, I got in the elevator, and as soon as the doors were starting to close, she got in. (laughter) RUSH: She gets in. She's alone, too. She hit the stop button on the elevator. (laughter) RUSH: Do you people...? (laughter) RUSH: She said, "I never thought I'd meet you like this." She said, "Do you know, Mr. Limbaugh, how long it's been since I have felt like a real woman?" (laughter) RUSH: I had you going, didn't I? Now, what am I going to do? I'm thinking to myself, "Damn right I know how long it's been." (laughter) RUSH: But I don't want to say that. So I said, "No, I don't." "Would you make me feel like a real woman?" I said, "Sure. In fact, I'd be honored to do that." So I started taking off my clothes." Remember she's hit the stop button. I stopped when I got to my underwear. She's just standing there watching me. I said, "Do you want to feel like a real woman?" "Yes!" "Okay, fold 'em." (groans and applause) RUSH: (laughing) I'll tell you another funny story, but this one is true. (laughter) RUSH: Everything up to the elevator in the Hillary story was true, too. The other was just a joke for -- Do you know how mad liberals in this crowd are right now? I have just made fun of the woman they think should be queen for life. At any rate, this next story is true. Early on in my career with this show -- I guess 1990 -- there's a group called Council on Foreign Policy. No, no, no. It's the conservative version of the Council on Foreign Relations. They're trying to do what the CFR does. I forget their acronym. I'm invited to speak by Paul Weyrich and a couple other people, to be the emcee their annual dinner. Bill Bennett is going to be honored for scholarly work and so forth. I'm supposed to be the emcee. So I said, "Sure, I'd be honored to speak to this group." It was at the Ritz-Carlton near the Pentagon, and it's a dinner. So it's in a hotel ballroom with circular tables of ten, and I told the following story, thinking, "This can't lose." You know, as the emcee, you're supposed to open up with a joke. But this was a true story. It goes back to the mid-eighties. Senator Kennedy was vacationing off the coast of the south of France with this nubile, young, scantily clad woman. We know it because tabloid photographers in helicopters were snapping pictures, and the pictures were published in the New York Daily News. They published three of them. The first picture showed the couple cavorting on the boat. In the next picture, the woman is in the water, swimming around and frolicking. Senator Kennedy -- in what had to be a first -- dove in after her to be with her. (laughter) RUSH: Then the third picture is of them back in the boat frolicking and cavorting, and those pictures made it around Washington, DC. So this was in the paper, and it got to Howell Heflin, who is now deceased, but was a big bear of a man, senator from Alabama, and he's looking at the pictures, and he said, "Well, I do declare! It look to me like the senator has done changed his position on offshore drillin'!" (laughter) RUSH: Folks, you're chuckling at this. The room that I was in was a bunch of conservatives. Half of them laughed nervously. The other half was dead silent, staring to me like I have just committed the biggest gaffe on the face of the earth -- and I'm looking out and I don't understand it. So I tried to cover for it. This was just the introduction of things before dinner. I got to my dinner table and I said, "What the hell happened?" "Well, that's the most tasteless joke anybody has ever told to our group." "It's a Ted Kennedy joke, for crying out loud! It's not even a joke. It's a true story! Howell Heflin said it and Ted Kennedy did all of that!" (laughing) Well, what I didn't know was that half of this group is evangelical, religious Christians, and the other half of the group academics, scholars, business people and so forth -- and they were the ones that were sort of nervously laughing, and it was explained to me that I had better apologize when I got back up there. I'm early on in my career. I can't afford blunders like this, even though I didn't think it was a blunder. So I apologized, and I was warmly embraced and accepted and after dinner, after the program, I'm walking out, and I saw Dr. James Dobson, and he was talking to a woman that looked to me exactly like Donna Rice, you know, who was out there cavorting in a boat with Gary Hart. So I'm saying, "She's here and I'm getting grief for a Ted Kennedy story?" I walked up, "Dr. Dobson?" I introduced myself to him, and he said, "Well, Mr. Limbaugh, it's been an interesting evening for you, I'm sure." "Yeah." I said, "Was that woman you were just talking to...? She looked just like Donna Rice." "Yes, sir, it was. She's found the Lord, something that you might look into." (laughing) RUSH: I said, "Whoa!" (laughing) RUSH: I want to tell you one more story. This actually happened on the radio. I want to tell you this because I can tell by the reception and the reaction that you are students at the Limbaugh Institute, that you -- (cheers and applause) RUSH: You have the program in context. But a lot of people still ask me, "Why do you do a show with no guests, and why do you try to be funny so much? Why don't you just get serious? I mean, these are really serious times. I mean, sometimes you get off the charts, and you lose focus and you should stick to the issues." Those are people that have not spent the requisite six weeks to figure out what all can possibly happen on the program. One of the things that I love to do is combine irreverent humor that has a political point to it, along with serious discussion, credibility, on both sides. For example, if on the old Nightline show, if Ted Koppel came out and did a ten-minute joke monologue, you'd go, "I'm not watching this show for that," and if Jay Leno came out and tried to get serious with political monologue before he went into his jokes, "Eh, it's not why I turned on The Tonight Show." Well, I want to do both and have credibility on both sides. There's a lot of radio competition; there's a lot of noise that you have to cut through, and I am trying to persuade. I passionately believe what I believe. I believe what I believe is right. I believe what I believe is best for preserving the traditions and institutions that made the country great. So, of course, I want people to agree with me, but not because they have to, or they've been forced to, but because their minds have been opened up and the conclusion came to them themselves. That's how you really persuade somebody. You're not going to persuade somebody wagging your finger under their nose and say, "You are wrong. You just don't understand." You've just gotta be patient; set up circumstances to which you know the conclusions are obvious. With some people, like liberals, that will scare 'em away even further, but the point is, that's how you persuade people. So I'll give you an illustration. Back in Sacramento when I was in that station, KFBK, this is 1986, a little story, one-paragraph story on the news wire, an Ohio minister has demanded that the Mister Ed TV show be canceled in syndication reruns because he found a Satanic message in the theme of the song when he played it backwards. What he said was that in the Mister Ed theme, "a horse is a horse, of course, of course," if you play it backwards at the right speed what you'll hear is "S-S-S-Satan." (laughter) RUSH: Now, I'm looking at this, and I coulda dealt with it on the air just as I dealt with it with you, but I'm thinking, "This is absurd. It is ridiculous, and this needs to be illustrated." I love to illustrate absurdity by being absurd. So I decided, because, at this time, I had been using Slim Whitman's Una Paloma Blanca as my great Peace Update Theme, because the Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament was going on at the time. So I went into the production room, and the production director there had a harmonizer, which changes your voice. You can set it so your voice can sound out of this world or chipmunk-y or whatever you want it to do. So I had him make it sound really low and out of this world, and I gave him text for what I wanted to record. Then I went on the air. I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know that I can continue to be your host on this station any longer. I have just learned, because of the great work of a ministry in Ohio, that I have been playing music to you that has Satanic messages in it. Now, I feel horrible about this. If I have been corrupted such as this once, how can I guarantee it won't happen again? I'm thinking very seriously about this. The song I'm talking about is Slim Whitman's Una Paloma Blanca. I don't want to talk any more about this. This has shattered me to my foundations. But I want you to know that it's happened, because I cannot, in good conscience, let you know that you have been exposed to Satanic messages at my expense, because of me. You should know this." So I'm thinking when we go to the phones, that people are going to be curious, and want to know more -- and I was right. "What's the message?" "No, I'm not going to play the message. I'm not going to play this song anymore, and I'm not going to talk about it." "But you can't tell us that we've been exposed to Satan and then not give us the details." "I'm doing it for you. I'm doing it for your own good. You don't think this has upset me?" This went on all morning for three hours. The general manager called me into his office after my show and said, "How long are you going to go with this?" I said, "I think I can get a week out of it." (laughter) RUSH: He said, "You're going to have to wrap it up." Ministers from all over town were calling, because their parishioners were saying, "KFBK is playing Satanic messages!" So the next day I explained to the audience that I was being forced -- forced by management powers greater than me, who I am now wondering if they have also perhaps been corrupted -- I'm being forced to play this Satanic message for you against every instinct I've got. So we've recorded the song backwards, and we've put this little message in it three times, as the song is playing backwards, and the message went: "Beeeeeeeelzebub! Yes, it's me, the old devil himself, lurking right here in the Slim Whitman record grooves! Tell me, how did you find a turntable to play this backwards like this?" Slim Whitman was in the background yodeling backwards. "My disciples and I would love to find out where you got these turntables so we can spread them around. Well, I've gotta be going. I gotta be going way down the line, if you know what I mean. See ya." It played two more times, and I'm sitting there, folks, and I'm thinking, "This is going to establish me as one of the great put-on artists of all time. What great creativity. I can't wait." I'm looking. The phones are going nuts. I'm laughing myself silly as this is playing. I'm imagining people in their cars listening to this stuff, thinking, "This Limbaugh guy is really sharp." The call screener has a look of horror on her face. I go to the phones. The first call says, "I have every Slim Whitman album. Do you think I should burn them? Are there more messages?" (laughter) RUSH: It taught me something. It really taught me. I said, "I don't think you have a choice." (laughter) RUSH: I had to carry it on! I had to switch gears right in the middle of this, now. Rather than people praising me for a brilliant bit, I've got people thinking this is really all true. A couple of other calls said, "Don't quit! You have saved yourself now, and you have saved us because you have exposed the devil." I'm scratching my head. So I had fun, but this one guy calls in -- you always get skeptics -- "I know what you're doing, and I'm not buying any of it. You can't fool me!" I said, "Sir, what are you talking about?" "Well, I have that album, and I don't have a turntable that plays backwards but I've been spinning it backwards like with my finger." (laughter) RUSH: "And there ain't no message in it!" I had to think fast. I said, "Sir, your turntable. What year did you buy it?" "A couple years ago, 1984." "Well, sir, that's the problem. You need a turntable made after 1985 that has disgronificator circuitry in it. What that does is suppresses the lows and highs, and expands the midrange, which is where Satanic messages are." (laughter) RUSH: "You mean if I go out and buy a new turntable and spin it backwards like that, I'll hear the message? "Yes, sir." (laughter) RUSH: Now, this taught me something. Now, these are callers. On a radio talk show, the calling universe of people that call, that statistical run we've got on this is less than 1%, one-tenth of 1%, that are trying to call. The numbers that get through are even fewer. So you can't extrapolate from what callers say or think to include the whole audience. But still, the fact that there were some people that believed this, letting me know that if I was going to do stuff like this, I was going to have to close the loop on it at the end to make sure because the idea is to be persuasive in this case, trying to make the point that it was absolutely absurd to think that an Ohio minister could get a turntable, play the Mister Ed theme backwards and find a Satanic message is absurd. Plus, I wanted to demonstrate my creativity. So all these things have culminated in learning a whole lot about how to relate to people and connect with you and everybody else in the audience. The reason I don't have guests is because they don't care about the success of my show, and I don't care what they have to say. I'm the expert on my show. (laughter) RUSH: Really. (applause) RUSH: Everybody else has them. Everybody else has guests, and I couldn't get any different ones than anybody else has, and I'm not that curious about talking to them for 30 minutes about what they think. There are rare occasions, exceptions to this, of course. I think it's boring, anyway. Everybody else is doing it. So I've always wanted to do things that stand apart, but I must be honest with you. I got into radio in 1967. I was 16, and I was a DJ. I had a two-hour show before school in the morning and a three-hour show afterwards. I just loved it. It was the first thing in my life I had never quit. It's the only reason my dad didn't make me quit, because he didn't understand the future opportunities and social relevance of playing Donny Osmond records on the radio. To him it didn't make sense. The family is all lawyers; I'm the first one in my family that does not have a college degree, but because I hadn't quit it... I was a tenderfoot, the Boy Scouts, for a year, and you're a tenderfoot just for joining. I just loved it, and I just pursued it, and I wanted to be the best at it, and my mother gave me a lot of support, told me I was special. Now, see, now you're laughing. She actually did. She's the one that had the performer's ego in our family. She used to be a big-band singer. I did a funny bit with Lily Tomlin when I was in Pittsburgh doing a morning show. Lily Tomlin was in town promoting some movie or something and her PR people were having her call all the radio stations. I said, "Look, what I'd like to do is I'm going to call a grocery store. You be Ernestine the phone operator, and I'm going to ask the grocery store if they've got any frozen raccoon TV dinners, and you can then interrupt and tell me you're going to turn me in to the ASPCA, that the phone company has been monitoring people." So she did. [My mother] said, "That was really funny. Did you improv that?" "Yeah. I didn't do anything. She did." "You made it happen, son. You made it happen." So that's when she was an expert. I got fired seven or eight times, and we all in this business have been told by people that fire us: "You don't have what it takes." Some are trying to be helpful. Some are trying to be mean. We've all heard it, and I remain dedicated to my desires because I loved it and I wanted to succeed in it, and I knew, I just had a feeling that when it was all said and done, that I knew I was going to be in the top-five that had ever done this. I didn't know what that would mean, I didn't know how it would manifest itself -- and I certainly never, ever, considered, at any point, that the Democrat Party would be running against me (laughter) instead of the Republican presidential candidates. (cheers and applause) RUSH: Never did I think that the words I said on the radio would be purposely twisted, taken out of context, lied about, broadcast over lots of other media -- on purpose, purposely lying -- knowing full-well that that would lead to the majority leader in the United States Senate demanding that my syndication partner, Clear Channel, spank me and make me apologize. I wish my dad were alive. He would not believe this about his son. That whole experience is, I have to tell you, in this case, these things started happening long ago. When the president of the United States tries to blame you for the Oklahoma City bombing -- which he did me -- that's when all this began. I understand why it's happening, but still the fact that it is, is just neo-Stalinist. When you have the Senate majority leader for ten minutes denouncing you on the floor, first off, you can't ask for anything better in terms of my career. (applause) RUSH: I'm a private citizen. I'm not running for anything. They must think it's I who stand in their way, and, in a way, they're right, because you know what's happened? What's happened is, before 1988 -- and I don't mean to make this about me. As you know, I don't like discussing myself much. (laughter) RUSH: In 1988 when I started -- think back, that's almost 20 years ago -- what did we have? We had CNN. We had the three broadcast networks: C-BS, N-BS, A-BS. We had the New York Times. We had the Washington Post. We had the news magazines. That's it. They got to determine what was news and what wasn't news. They got to determine the commentary. There was no alternative media -- not broadcast, not print, not national -- and, as such, they had a monopoly, and the media back then was just as sycophantic to them as they are today. I think one of the reasons the Democrats do not get it, is they really do not get how most people in this country are repulsed by the way they've been behaving the last four years. They do not get it. (cheers and applause) RUSH: Here's why. In the first place, they're arrogant and cocky to begin with. In the second place, the Drive-By Media does nothing but write puff pieces about them -- and people who believe their own press clippings are... You put a Democrat and a bag of manure in front of a Democrat like Harry Reid, he's going to step in it. They do it, but they don't think they stink afterwards because the Drive-By Media is telling them they don't. So they live in this little alternative universe, but they know now. See, folks, liberalism can only survive when they have monopolistic control over the dissemination of news. In that way, they can hide who they really are; they can mask it; they can camouflage it. But now the masks have been raised and the camouflage is gone, and more and more Americans are finding out exactly what Democrats today stand for, particularly liberals stand for, and they're in a panic over it. They've lost that monopoly, and they can't bear to have to operate that way, because they don't think that there's a legitimate alternative point of view. They don't want to come in here tonight, for example, and have a debate on anything. What they would hope to do -- and this is what the Reid business was about, what this smear was all about -- was to discredit me, among people like you, and people who don't listen to me, so that whatever I say nobody believes or listens to or pays any attention. That's what they're trying to do, and this is just the latest. It's not the first. It's the first of this cycle, and it's only going to get worse. I mean, Henry Waxman -- (boos) RUSH: There are those boos again. Henry Waxman, the American Spectator reports that he is -- and this guy has got 50 staff investigators, the House government oversight committee. Fifty investigators. And the American Spectator quoted a bunch of House staff members, not necessarily Waxman's, that he had authorized a number of those 50 to begin investigations of me and Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, monitoring our shows. "Hey, Congressman, it's simple, just turn on the radio! Why don't you try it for once instead of listening to a bunch of left-wing watchdogs?" (applause) RUSH: Investigate the show! It's like you all have super-secret radios available only for me on a super-secret frequency that nobody but Dittoheads can hear. So Waxman has to send out these investigators to search for "irregularities." You know what amazed me about this smear? This is illustrative of the Drive-By Media. I have a radio show. It is by far the most-listened to radio show in the country. It is on radio. (applause) RUSH: Thank you. As Babe Ruth said, "It ain't bragging if it's true." That's my point. Radios are free. You can turn one on. In Washington, the station's WMAL. It's on from noon to three, just like it is here. Turn it on and listen. You know what else I have? I have a website. It's very extensive. At the end of the day, by six o'clock Eastern, the vast majority of what I have discussed is there, audio and transcript. Just go there. Do they do that? No! They go to this front group for Hillary, Media Matters for America, and they get their news of what I say from other people taking it out of context. They could listen. They have no desire to listen because they don't want to be confronted. They don't want to face the fact of how wrong they are. People ask me, "How do you explain a liberal?" It's a psychological exercise, and I'm not formally trained there. But I've come up with a number of theories, and it doesn't make any sense, folks. There's such an alternative universe. I was reading some idiot who posted something on the Huffington Post, which is operated by a deranged Greek woman, and this guy wrote this long piece about how I have the longest history of trashing veterans who disagree with the war. He read the transcript. (doing impression) "I read the transcript. There's no other way to read this than Limbaugh was saying those soldiers that oppose the Iraq war were the phony soldiers." It's just not true. In the Wall Street Journal today, a column by Dan Henninger: "I read the transcripts. It's inarguable that Limbaugh was referring to phony soldiers who aren't soldiers and never were in the first place," which is absolutely right. So how do we get this divide? Well, the divide is that liberals don't want the truth. They can't face the truth. This is a manufactured incident waiting to happen. (applause) RUSH: I'll tell you what gives me the strength, because a lot of people ask, "How do you put up with it?" I mean, it was tough at first. In all candor, nobody is raised wanting to be hated and disliked. We all want to be loved, appreciated. I started this radio show in 1988 and in six months I was called a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, all these clichés. Nobody who's ever known me thinks I hate anybody, that I've been a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe. But yet, that's what's being reported, simply because I'm a conservative. I called my mother every night before she died just to see how she was doing. She said, "How are you doing?" "Mom, I had a hell of a day. Thirty percent of the people that heard my show hate my guts." That was a tough psychological thing to have to adjust to, because we don't want to be hated. I didn't get into this just to be loved, don't misunderstand, but to learn to take that kind of thing as a measure of success was a tough thing for me to do because I wasn't raised that way. I don't think too many people are. Maybe Hitler, but certainly not too many others. Now it's a badge of honor, and I get a kick out of it, especially with the things like this that's happened with Reid and Waxman, which I'm going to get back to here in just a second. The thing about explaining liberals: I think what they really fear is people who have faith in something beyond earth, something beyond humanity, things larger than themselves. Liberals, there's nothing larger than them. They are the center of the universe. They are the smart ones. They want to be thought of as the ones who should run everybody's life, whether you should eat trans fat, whether you should drive a hybrid, when you can smoke, where you can smoke, when you can't smoke, how much you're going to pay for it when you buy it. That's them. (applause) RUSH: It's absurd. They are challenged by people who, A, don't need them. That really makes them mad and frightened, but they're also challenged by the fact that people have faith in God, something larger than this life, means that they are aware that there are things larger than themselves and that gives them a core value. That's why I think they've come up with global warming. I don't want to waste your time, because you've heard this on the radio, but it's got every tenet of every major religion, starting with the Garden of Eden all the way to the Apocalypse. The only difference is that the god in global warming is tangible. It's the Earth, and we can "save" it, because we're destroying it -- which we're not doing, and it's an opportunity for them to ladle everybody with guilt. I think they're frightened of losing their monopoly. They're frightened of losing the ability to control people who are learning above and beyond what liberals have always said, and the faith thing. Waxman, with this investigation business, has denied the Spectator story. He said, "There's no investigation. The Spectator's wrong, and I demand a retraction," and my reaction to that was, "Well, Congressman, I remember what you guys did to Clarence Thomas when Anita Hill came forth at the last moment after years and years and years of silence with the ridiculous charges. The line you used then was, 'It's not the nature of the evidence here that counts. It's the seriousness of the charge. We must look into this.' Well, Congressman Waxman, your denial is not the point here. The seriousness of the charge by the Spectator that you want to investigate three private citizens from your government committee is the way I choose to look at this, and I'm going to." (applause) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
2:01 pm	Rush to Excellence (Part 2) Speech for WPHT-AM Philadelphia (continued) by Rush Limbaugh RUSH: Now, I'm going to announce something. Stalin, are you back there? This is my security guy. (laughter and applause) RUSH: Face the audience please. His name is Larry. I hired him because he looks just like Stalin, which just irritates the hell out of the libs. (laughter) RUSH: As you can see, this is a titanium briefcase. He has it handcuffed to himself. Ladies and gentlemen, I am holding here the original letter Harry Reid sent to the CEO of Clear Channel. (cheers and applause) RUSH: Here are the signatures of 41 Democrat senators. Hillary Clinton is on this page, the first page. People are asking, "How come Hillary didn't weigh in on the Limbaugh controversy?" She has. She's recommended that a private citizen be censured, or whatever, by his own corporate partner, and she wants to be president of the United States. Screw that! (booing, cheering, and applause.) RUSH: The CEO of Clear Channel, since they are my syndication partner, is a friend of mine. He gave me the letter. Here is what we are going to do with Senator Reid's letter. Tomorrow at 1:30 in the afternoon on my award-winning program, I am going to announce that we are auctioning this letter on eBay. (cheers and applause) RUSH: The proceeds of this letter will go to a charity, for which I am a board member and have raised a lot of money for and have contributed, the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation. (cheers and applause) RUSH: Thank you. (cheers) RUSH: I can think of no better end result for this glittering jewel of colossal ignorance to generate needed funds for a charity that does this. It provides college scholarships for the children of Marines killed in action. (applause) RUSH: Harry Reid and his cohorts, Tom Harkin, all the people that signed this -- by the way, it was a Reid failure. Just like those resolutions to get us out of Iraq -- he couldn't get enough votes to pass that -- he couldn't even get all his Democrats to pass this piece of garbage. Nevertheless, Harry Reid, despite years and years of my public expressions of love, and admiration, and support for the U.S. military, tried to convince the people of this country that I was critical of the military and that I had a long history of it -- and his cohorts are doing so. It's the same thing in the House of Representatives. On one hand, it's funny and it's great in terms of a professional thing, but it offended the hell out of me because these are the people who have been trying to demoralize our troops, not me, and not you. Harry Reid... (cheers and applause) RUSH: Harry Reid, John Kerry -- (yelling in audience) remember my implant. I just take that as a cheer and an attaboy. John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, the list goes on. Folks, they have been attempting to secure defeat for the United States military for the last four years. They've been trying to hang defeat around the head of George W. Bush. It is they who impugn the military. It is they who say of the men and women who serve, "They only joined because they can't get jobs in Bush's America. They only joined because they can't get an education. They're just a bunch of hayseed hicks from the South." They impugn 'em. They demoralize 'em. Murtha calls 'em rapists and murderers -- and they have the audacity to try to convince people that I am out criticizing the troops? They do not know what fools they make of themselves. So, I cannot wait to announce this tomorrow. (applause) RUSH: I cannot wait for Harry Reid and everybody who signed this to learn that his letter is generating tens of thousands of dollars for a military charitable foundation. (applause) RUSH: In fact, I might suggest to Senator Reid that he try to win his letter back. (laughter) RUSH: I have no doubt the operatives in the Democratic National Committee will be logging onto eBay and trying to buy this thing. We will find out who they are. We know. We have our ways. I can't wait for this to start. By the way, a couple other things before I get to something very important that I want to talk to you about. I don't know if you heard this or not today. It's more about liberals than Democrats, Democrat congressional staffers -- there's a big NASCAR race down at Charlotte this weekend. (applause) RUSH: Like NASCAR? Absolutely. Get this. Democrat staffers have been told by somebody, other Democrats, that if they're going to the NASCAR event this weekend, to get vaccinated and inoculated for hepatitis A, hepatitis B, diphtheria, and the flu. It wasn't that long ago, Democrats were trying to portray themselves at attractive to "NASCAR Dads" and now they're out…? What a bunch of snobs. You've got a NASCAR spokesman saying, "No diseases are spread at our events. We thought you had to get inoculated when you went over to places like Ethiopia and Africa, but not NASCAR." Democrats are advising their own people! Why would they even go if they think they're going to get hepatitis A and hepatitis B. I made this point on the radio, but I want to make it again because it's crucial. That's this whole S-CHIP thing. You have to really pop your P's with it. It's like I remember my show got thrown off WLS in Chicago for 45 minutes back in 1989 or '90 because I was discussing a very serious issue, highway safety, a lot of traffic accidents, road rage. I said, "It's simple. The way you solve this is to just mandate women stop farding in their cars." Think Slim Whitman here, folks. So the general manager at WLS said, "We're not carrying this. You keep talking about that, and we're not putting it on." I said, "What are you worried about?" "What am I worried about? What the hell are you talking about?" Phone calls on the air said the same thing. "What do you mean, women farting in their cars? How do you know?" I said, "You can see it!" "But what about men?" "Men do not do it." See, the word is "fard." F-A-R-D. It's French. It means "to apply makeup." Let me just go through it real quick. It's the same thing with this S-CHIP program. It's dangerous. You gotta be a highly trained specialist to pop that P. But here's another thing. It's about this family down in Maryland, the Frost family with two kids in an auto accident. One of them was used by the Democrats as they constantly use people, try to make 'em victims, exploit them to show that George Bush and the Republicans don't care about the children, because this young man only was able to get the health care he needed after his accident because of this S-CHIP program -- and George Bush, of course, was going to veto an EXPANSION of the program. This kid is on TV, and he's 12 years old, he doesn't know what he's saying -- they wrote it out for him -- he's reading it in a prompter or whatever. "I want other kids my age to be able to get the same health care I got and President Bush is trying to stop that." It's all a flat-out lie, and I'm not talking about the financial circumstances of the Frost family. That's a whole 'nother argument, and it's a serious one. These people could have afforded health insurance, and they chose to buy other things. There's something about health insurance that's taken over way too many of these people in this country who think it's somebody else's responsibility to get for them. It doesn't make sense. (applause) RUSH: They go out and buy a plasma TV or whatever. They go into debt. By God, it's going to be somebody else's job to get 'em health care because they're Americans and they're entitled to it -- and it's "in the Constitution." No, it's not in the Constitution. "It's not?" "Nope. Why don't you go walk down your neighborhood street, knock on the door and say, 'My kid doesn't have health insurance. I need a hundred bucks from you,' and see how far you get." "Well, I would never do that." "You are doing it, by demanding that they pay for it. You're just not going to them personally because you don't have the guts. You're voting for a bunch of thieves that will steal it from them." (cheers and applause) RUSH: It's a matter of simple responsibility. We're getting to the point of mob rule. You get to the point where 55% or 60% of the American people think that other people -- the government, whoever -- should be buying their health care, it's essentially mob rule. Unless, if the elected representatives -- we know Mrs. Clinton wants to do this, SCHIP is her plan. It's an expansion, and it's a stealth mechanism to put the tentacles of socialized medicine even deeper into society. Under the expansion of SCHIP -- by the way, President Bush voted to expand it for $4 billion to include poor kids only. The Senate version, the House version, the Mrs. Clinton version, defines a child as anybody 25 years or younger. I'm not making this up. A family earning $83,000, family of four, would qualify for the health insurance program provided by this program. Now, $83,000 is not poverty. In addition to that, you could have a circumstance where you have a young husband and wife, a 24-year-old husband, 23-year-old wife. If they got into action early, they have two and three-year-old kids, the family of four qualifies as "kids" under this program! (laughter) RUSH: It's patently absurd. But it's "for the children." When you hear any Democrat from Fast Eddie here to anybody nationally -- (cheers and applause) RUSH: When you hear Democrats say, "It's for the children," know this: To them, we are all children. We don't know what to do. We don't know what to think. We don't know how to make decisions. So they want us as victims. Why do you think they are so hell-bent on illegal immigration? The reason, folks, is that they are running out of victims. Despite what they say, we're in a thriving, robust, and great economy. Wages are up. The opportunities for affluence in this country have never, ever, been better, and the Democrats are trying to convince everybody it's just the opposite. Hillary actually said the other day out in Iowa (paraphrased), "Most of us are just a pink slip away from homelessness, or losing our job, or losing our health care." What an absolute crock. They want to control as much as possible because power is what they are all about, and so this is just a stealth little program. They look at all of us as kids, incapable and incompetent. So the fact is, more and more people are becoming more and more self-reliant, and they're discovering the great things that you feel when you achieve something. They're understanding what it is to meet high expectations, that you either have of yourself or somebody else sets for you. They understand more and more people are actually getting a thrill out of discovering how good they can be, what their potential really is. Most people never know. We can all fall. You can't go to the library and find a book How to Fail, because we all know how. But how-to-succeed books? The people that write 'em make millions, because it takes work. It's the same thing about thinking positively. You will not go to the library and find a book on how to be depressed. We're born that way. But the people that write how to think positively are making gazillions of dollars because it takes work, it takes application, it takes understanding. You should not give other people the power to offend you. You shouldn't give other people the power to affect how you feel about yourself, or your beliefs. (applause) RUSH: So the illegal immigrants serve a whole host of purposes, but what are they first and foremost? They're poor, uneducated. They're perfect candidates for Democrats -- and then get 'em in the public school system where they're not going to learn diddly-squat! So they'll stay uneducated. They'll graduate half of them who won't even be able to read the diploma. The other half will drop out. As such, they'll always remain poor, and in need of Democrats, and the Democrats will be telling them all this happened to them because of Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and who else in the Republican Party -- and that's how they operate. That's what illegal immigration is about. It's about voters. It's about continually having people in a state of dependence. If I were a member of a Democrat constituency group -- like let's say I was a feminazi. (laughter) RUSH: The Democrats have been promising me all these things for all these years. They're going to get rid of the glass ceiling; they're going to get rid of the glass slipper; they're going to get rid of predatory men; women are going to rule the world, all this sort of stuff. We're still at a point where Mrs. Clinton cannot even be opposed by male candidates because they're afraid you can't attack the women so they have to send their wives out there to criticize Hillary, which is really -- how gutless is that? The women that have made real progress are the ones who gave up the feminist prescription to screw families, screw relationships. You don't need a man to make you happy. What you need is to fulfill your potential in the corporate world. Take a job from a man. Go do it. They tried to be like men. Too many of them ended up looking like one. (laughter) RUSH: Now all those women -- from the late sixties, seventies, on -- who bought into that, all of a sudden there's this thing called, what? The ticking time bomb as you hit 40? I don't have kids, what is it? The biological clock! Sorry. It's a time bomb for me. I'm one of these guys: "Sow your wild oats; pray for crop failure the next day." That's an old Missouri saying. (laughter) RUSH: You know, to show you how square I am, I just heard a joke at a golf course two days ago and I think this joke has been around longer than I've alive, but I had never heard it. That's how clean and pure I am. I was telling somebody, "Air America has just started a new program for atheists in attempt to broaden their reach." The guy said to me, "You know what the worst thing about being an atheist is? You got nobody to talk to during sex." (laughter) RUSH: I had never heard that. (applause) RUSH: I know you're thinking I lost my place, but I haven't. (laughter) RUSH: Thank you, God. Back to the S-CHIP. Aside from all these things the Democrats are trying to do to create more dependence, get more people depending on their needs from the government, like health care, rather than assume responsibility for it. This commercial with this 12-year-old little boy and his family full of not accurately reported upon financial circumstances, the dirty little secret is that this kid and his sister got the health care they needed from the existing version of the program. They did a commercial saying kids like them wouldn't get what they needed because George Bush was going to veto the program. This is so classic. They cannot, Democrats cannot, tell the truth and win. There's this crisis and politics of fear. (applause) RUSH: You know, I sit around -- I don't mean this as an ego statement. I sit around; I watched the presidential debates. Why aren't any of them saying these things? Do you realize one of them out of the whole pack could run away with the whole thing if they would just explain this. It's the reason my show is successful. The Democrats think that I've created a bunch of mind-numbed robots. You people can't think for yourselves, don't have the brains to, and so I'm your Svengali; I'm the pied piper, and you get your marching orders from me every day. That's how they look at virtually everybody else. The fact is, you're here tonight because finally there's somebody nationally that says and thinks what you've always said and thought. You've been validated. (cheers and applause) RUSH: So people like me who are creating mind-numbed robots out of you have to be dealt with, because if it weren't for me, in their minds, you wouldn't think and say what you think and say, and you wouldn't be voting the way you're voting. That's what they don't understand. It's their side that are the mind-numbed robots. I sometimes have conversations with liberals -- (checking the clock) let me check the time. Oooh, I better do this fast. Well, they give me a limit. No, folks, look. There's a creed here: always leave them wanting more. I talk to liberals sometimes, because I find it -- well, not the robots. There's some you can talk to. I have friends that are liberals. Most of them are women, proving that -- well, you figure it out. I was in a conversation with one about a month ago, and I said, "Have you ever stopped to think?" I think about this all the time. I saw the other day that some scientist group said that the farthest point in the universe is still going, is eight billion light years away. When you look out the window of an airplane, when you look at an animal, how can you not believe there's a God?" (applause) RUSH: I have such an awe of what this country is, what it's become in such a short time. I also know that, as human beings, we are no different in intellect -- we have better life expectancy, we're healthier -- but we're no better genetically or any other way than any other human anywhere on the planet at any other time. So I asked this little liberal babe, "Did you ever stop to ask yourself how it is in less than 230 years a collection of just under 300 million people have set a standard for human existence the likes of which the world has never seen? You ever wonder how this happened?" (applause) RUSH: She said, "Well, sometimes I do, but we're not leading the world by invading Iraq." "Would you forget Iraq for a minute? Would you people put it out of your mind? I'll tell you what: I will stipulate for you that we shouldn't have invaded." "You will?" "Yes, I will stipulate that we botched it after we invaded." "You will?" "Yes, and I will stipulate that Bush is a moron." "You will?" "Yes." "Now, will you forget it? I'll explain to you later why it's important. I just want to ask you one question, even if all that stuff..." I was just trying to get her to shut up about it. I don't really believe all that. (laughter) RUSH: "Do you think we should give up? Do you think we should just surrender and get out? Do you have any idea what will happen?" "I don't like what the world thinks of us." I said, "BS! How do you know what the world thinks of us? Have you been out there and asked them? Look at how many of them are trying to get in here. You gotta stop..." (cheers and applause) RUSH: "Why do you care about our image anyway? You're not the state department. You work in Hollywood. What difference does it make? It's not going to affect your life one way or the other. Why do you want to believe the worst about your country? This is what I don't understand. Why can't you look around you and see absolute magnificence? Why do you have to focus on the flaws, like Columbus killed the Indians and brought sickness, or whatever other multicultural BS you want to buy into? Why in the world don't you see the goodness of this nation, the greatness of our people, the sense of achievement? Have you ever stopped to think how we did it?" "Well, yeah, but I think we're blowing it." "No, no, I'm not arguing with you. I'm trying to learn from you. I want to understand how it is you think, if you're thinking and not feeling. Do you ever wonder about this?" "Well, yeah." "Do you realize what a miracle took place right here in Philadelphia in 1776? Do you realize what a miracle it was?" (applause) RUSH: She said, "Well, yeah, but those men were inspired by ideas much more important than them." "What, are they a bunch of dead white guys to you who embraced slavery? What the hell do you mean by that? Why do you need to diminish them? For you to diminish them, what kind of guilt do you have?" I said, "But you don't know how close to being right you are. When you said that the ideas they have were more important than the men they were. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself where the ideas came from?" She hadn't. Most people don't. I mean, you're born here. You take it for granted because that's all you know. I just marvel at this, because I travel. I did a troop visit to Afghanistan. Afghanistan has been in existence gazillions of years beyond us, and you would not believe how people live there. They're tough people, but it's sad. The places in Europe that I've been with some of the finest architecture and so forth, but the standard of living is not there. We've been around thousands of years less than the Brits and the Italians. They still can't make a toilet that makes sense and that works. (laughter) RUSH: They all drive around in their little bubble cars on streets that are no wider than this podium because they are that old. They were made for horses and buggies and so forth. Come to this country. We feed the world. We clothe the world. We liberate the oppressed of the world. We defend the world as well as ourselves until Democrats get in power, and then we may be screwed. But, nevertheless, look at the greatness. Look at the inventions. Look at what happened to the world in the 20th century because most of it happened in this country. The level of achievement, human achievement that advanced lifestyles, extended life spans, unknown in the hundreds of years prior. My grandfather was born in 1893: no electricity, no running water when he was born, no television. He and my grandmother read to each other on Sunday afternoons. They really got to know each other, and they loved each other. He saw the airplane, he saw the phone, he saw computers, and all of it. To hear him talk about it was fascinating, and it's partly what got me thinking about all this. So I asked these people, the liberal I was talking to, "Do you agree with my premise here, and could you just suspend your guilt for a second over the fact that it's happened?" See, one of the problems with these people is they live with constant guilt and envy, and they have this guilt that we are so great, so advanced, that in order for them to share it and enjoy it, they have to tell themselves that we stole it from the rest of the world, that we are but what, one-tenth of the world's population, using 25% of the world's resources or whatever the cliché is. They have to believe their nation is evil for it to be this big. Nothing this great can happen without people scheming and cheating and taking from others -- which is why they're so much in favor of foreign aid to all parts of the world because they think we create poverty and maintain it around the world to make ourselves rich. What they don't understand is the answer to my question. We're no different than anybody else in the world, but look at us! A group people, look at what this country is, and there is a reason for it -- and we are in the process of attempting to export this. One of the president's policies in Iraq is this presumption made by our Founding Fathers, codified in founding documents, that we're all created by God -- equal, with certainly unalienable rights, "among them, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness." All three are currently under assault by the left wing of the Democratic Party: Abortion; you can't smoke; you can't buy the kind of car you want to buy. You can't do this, you can't do that. You can't eat trans fats. You can't drive in this lane. You can't do whatever. Pursuit of happiness, they're trying to make everybody as miserable as they can on a daily basis, with their buddies in the media, so that they will vote for change in Washington. We're trying to export this because the president understand -- it may not be possible, I'm not endorsing his policy here -- but every human being is created with the natural yearning to be free. We don't like being put in cages. We don't like being put in jails. We don't like being constrained in any way. We like being able to go where we want to go, when we want to go, if we can afford, if we can't, we'll go somewhere else, but we want to go. We want to move, we want to be free, and we're born to it. We're not trying to oppress the rest of the world. The rest of the world suffers from an unfair and unequal distribution of capitalism, and way too much socialism, and communism, and tyranny that keeps people from reaching life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. (applause) RUSH: So I told this little liberal this really important question. Why has this happened? How has it happened? It's not an accident. It's a miracle, and the miracle is that these evil white guys, as you've been taught to believe about the Founding Fathers, were, in my estimation, divinely inspired, to codify (applause) in our founding documents the existence of God, as Creator, and the fundamental state of the human being, free. That freedom is what has allowed people in this country, ordinary people doing extraordinary things, because they have the freedom to do it. They had the freedom and ambition. They have the opportunities. They have the motivation. They have the risk-reward system. The things that allow the best of humanity to exist, exist in this country because our Founding Fathers conceived of them and built the nation around them. Now, one of the reasons this is important to me is because this next election -- and I don't want to be too dramatic -- but you just don't have listen to me. Listen to what the Democrats are saying they're going to do. I don't know how many times Mrs. Clinton has now raised taxes on the rich to pay for whatever program, the 401(k) for everybody, the $5,000 check for everybody. They're looking at Big Oil profits. "I'm going to take those profits and I'm going to put 'em into alternative energy." You're going to what, madam? It's not your money. Keep your hands off of it! You had nothing to do with producing it. (applause) RUSH: I know that there's a lot of disgust and a lot of anger in health care, and a lot of people's disgust stems from the fact that doctors aren't making the decision. How come my insurance company has to dictate what my doctor can and can't do? Excellent question. So why in the name of Sam Hill -- and there was Sam Hill -- would anybody want to give Hillary Clinton or any other elected official that power? What the hell is it about elected officials that makes them think they are the experts in the oil business, in the retail business, in the health care business? Who the hell do they think they are? Would you hire any of those people to run your health care personally? (audience yells, "No!") Of course not. This notion that the government can make these businesses run better than they are is, frankly, scary. Look at the Democrat Party's enemies list, folks. Look at the enemies list: Big Oil. I'm sorry, oil is the fuel of the engine of freedom. There's no other way around it. You may not like it, and you may wish you could drive around with a windmill on your car, but it's not here yet, and we're a growing economy. We need to continue to grow. We need output. Oil is the fuel, and there is plenty of it -- don't believe the smoke screen -- and we have shown that we clean up our messes as free people a lot better than the oppressed can in other parts of the world far more polluted. We're doing fine in all this. We're as clean as hell. (applause) RUSH: You live next to a refinery here and you're alive. I don't know about a refinery, but you've got those storage tanks out there. Wal-Mart! They want to shut down Wal-Mart, for God's sake. What does Wal-Mart do? Wal-Mart enables Democrat constituents to be able to afford things! Well, they're the party of the poor and the little guy. (applause) RUSH: And so why do the Democrats want to shut 'em down? Because they're better at providing things Democrats can afford than the Democrat Party is, that's why. Wal-Mart is a threat. To show you how stupid they are... The Wal-Mart people are very smart. They were told in Chicago, "You're not going to put Wal-Marts in the city limits of Chicago." The Board of Aldermen told them, "You're not going to do that." Wal-Mart said, "Why not?" "You don't pay decent wages. You don't provide health care, and you're nonunion." Wal-Mart said, "Okay." They ring the city [encircle the city outside the city limits]. In the process of ringing the city, the first two are up and Chicagoans are leaving the city limits to work at Wal-Mart and to shop at Wal-Mart, and the city is getting no tax revenue from any of this. You can't stop a stampede with a bunch of stupid liberals standing up for whoever is in their constituency group rather than the people of the country. Their enemies list includes Big Drug, Big Pharma -- why target these? -- Big Oil, Big Food. Oh, yeah, the trans fat bunch, fast food bunch. Did you see, this is funny as hell. Taco Bell is opening a restaurant in Mexico City? (laughter) RUSH: I think that's the third liberal leaving. I have noticed. (laughter) RUSH: Frankly, they lasted longer than I thought. Don't worry. They'll be fretting over this all night and into tomorrow. My point is, these people are telegraphing what they want to do. They are so cocky. They think the election is over. Mrs. Clinton is their inevitable nominee, and they are convinced that she's the next president. This is actually good for us because they're finally stripping away some more of this camouflage. This is the most amazing thing today. The deficit is down again; tax cuts are creating so much revenue to the Treasury that the deficit's coming way, way down. (applause) RUSH: I have people say, "Rush, Democrats want all this money to spend. Why don't they just agree here that this is working?" It's not about money; it's about control. They want to be able to tax you and certain other parts of society for social architecture. They want to prevent the creation of wealth. They want to do everything they can to keep as many people dependent and in control. That's what it's about. That's who they are, because they need to get their power back. They're not going to lose their monopoly if they get it back again. They're out there cussing the fact that we even have to have elections. It's the most amazing thing, they lose an election, obviously it was stolen from them. They win an election, and look at how smart the voters became! I was watching on the airplane coming up here on the Fox News Channel. Neil Cavuto had Senator Al D'Amato speaking for the concept of tax cuts, and somebody, some aged lieutenant to Howard Dean for the DNC, was speaking against tax cuts. They have not learned. Remember Walter Mondull in 1984? "I will raise your taxes." What did he win, two states? (laughter) RUSH: I'm listening to this -- and, folks, this is not arguable. The tax rate reductions have raised revenue because it's expanded the economy. There are more people working than ever before, meaning there are more of what? Taxpayers! It's simply the volume discount business in action, and all this wealth and prosperity is creating a lot of consumption, which is creating manufacturing and services. It's working exactly as it should, and D'Amato is doing a halfway decent job explaining this. This woman from the DNC, Cavuto says, asks, "How in the world can you deny that the tax cuts have led to this? The capital gains rate..." "This country is in debt like it's never been because of George Bush!" Cavuto says, "What do you mean?" "Look at our collective debt! He can't take credit for the deficit dropping." "Wait a minute, ma'am. The national debt is the sum total of all deficits, but the deficit's coming down, which is what everybody wants." "It's not coming down. If we have all this revenue rolling in, then George Bush wouldn't have vetoed the health bill, the S-CHIP bill." They cannot stand for the truth about Economics 101 to get out. That's why they constantly had to revise the eighties and what happened with Reagan's tax cuts. (applause) RUSH: Charlie Rangel can't wait 'til the Democrats win the White House. He's got this plan to raise taxes a trillion dollars. They're telling everybody what they're going to do. Mrs. Clinton is telling everybody. They're telegraphing it. If I were in the Democrat Party today, if I were a member, I'd be embarrassed to wake up and have this little maniacal runt who needs a stool to get to the urinal, named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to come to Columbia University and sound just like a damn Democrat! (laughter) RUSH: Talking about Hurricane Katrina? Talking about the gap between the rich and the poor? The Democrat talking points -- and it's not only Ahmadinejad. It is Bin Laden when he releases a tape. He sounds just like the Democrats. If I'm all these Democrats, I gotta ask myself, "Do I really want to say things that get parroted back to me by this guy?" The other day three Islamist jihadists, terror masterminds, wrote a book urging the American people to elect Democrats, specifically Hillary Clinton. I talked about it yesterday on the program. It's an honest-to-God book. If I were a Democrat, this would bother me. These are people that want to kill us, to put it mildly. I guess the Democrats are happy for the endorsement. (laughter) RUSH: I said earlier in the year, I think there was an 80% chance at the time that Hillary Clinton will be the next president. I don't know. (booing) There's a little method to my madness there. The more I see her, this conventional wisdom, this inevitability, this "the-election-is-over" stuff, I just have a sneaking sense that this is the Democrats walking right into a closed door again and bloodying their nose. (applause) RUSH: This kind of arrogance, they don't understand how they come off to people. They just don't understand it, because, as I said earlier, the Drive-By Media is shielding them, and not being hard on them, and not being critical. It's going to be an interesting next 12 or 13 months, but I want to thank you all before I go here because I meant to get into this earlier, but it's actually a good way to finish. I interrupted myself, and only now remembered it. (laughter) RUSH: People do ask me, "How do you deal with things like Reid and Waxman, these guys in the Senate taking official action against you, a private citizen? Distorting the Michael J. Fox thing? Distorting the McNabb thing? And they seem to be systematic. They seem to be well coordinated events. They start up in a certain place. They end up in a certain place, and the path is always the same." I always tell people that what sustains me -- and I really wish I had an accurate, better way of expressing it here than I'm going to -- but what sustains me is my faith and knowledge that you don't buy any of it, and that you're listening and hearing it for exactly what it is, and that you're not going to believe it and run away. In none of these instances have we lost a radio station. We have not lost an advertiser, and we have not lost audience. Just the opposite, and that's all because of you, and I can't thank you enough for that, because throughout all of these controversial things -- and, sometimes, to be honest, it hurts sometimes, makes me mad. I don't want to spend my whole life fighting these people. I like to have fun in life. I don't want to just get up every day and figure out how I've gotta deal with them, but I'm willing to do it because that's what life has presented to me. But you're right there with me, and, if you weren't, I wouldn't last. So people tell me all the time how much the radio show means to them and what they learned from it, and I appreciate that more than you'll ever know. But you all will never know, and I will never be able to express, just what you being in the audience, giving me this welcome like you did tonight, you will never know how much it means to me and my family, and you just will never know. It's a debt I'm probably never going to have the ability to accurately and properly repay. But I want to thank you so much for it. You are just great and tremendous. (cheers and applause) END TRANSCRIPT (Comment on this)
Sunday, September 9th, 2007
11:28 pm	Profane None the Wise . You saw the vain in my eyes. The pain in disguise. Disdain and Demise. A Champagne full of lies. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 25th, 2007
6:28 pm	The Book of the Law Aleister Crowley wrote The Book of the Law on April 8, 9, and 10, between the hours of noon and 1:00 pm. The place was the flat where he and his new wife were staying for their honeymoon, which he described as being near the Boulak Museum in a fashionable European quarter of Cairo. The apartment was on the ground floor, and the "temple" was the drawing room. Crowley described the encounter in detail in The Equinox of the Gods, saying that as he sat at his desk in Cairo, the voice of Aiwass came from over his left shoulder in the furthest corner of the room. This voice is described as passionate and hurried, and was "of deep timbre, musical and expressive, its tones solemn, voluptuous, tender, fierce or aught else as suited the moods of the message. Not bass—perhaps a rich tenor or baritone."[6] Further, the voice was devoid of "native or foreign accent," perhaps meaning that it was similar to his own (as in British). Crowley also got a "strong impression" of the speaker's general appearance. Aiwass had a body composed of "fine matter," which had a gauze-like transparency. Further, he "seemed to be a tall, dark man in his thirties, well-knit, active and strong, with the face of a savage king, and eyes veiled lest their gaze should destroy what they saw. The dress was not Arab; it suggested Assyria or Persia, but very vaguely."[7] Crowley also makes it very clear that it was not "automatic writing," but that the experience was exactly like an actual voice speaking to him. This is evidenced by several errors that the scribe actually had to inquire about. He does admit to the possibility that Aiwass was a manifestation of his own subconscious, although he thought this was unlikely. The following are the three chapters of the Book of the Law and the Comment. What could it all mean? Chapter I: 1. Had! The manifestation of Nuit. 2. The unveiling of the company of heaven. 3. Every man and every woman is a star. 4. Every number is infinite; there is no difference. 5. Help me, o warrior lord of Thebes, in my unveiling before the Children of men! 6. Be thou Hadit, my secret centre, my heart & my tongue! 7. Behold! it is revealed by Aiwass the minister of Hoor-paar-kraat. 8. The Khabs is in the Khu, not the Khu in the Khabs. 9. Worship then the Khabs, and behold my light shed over you! 10. Let my servants be few & secret: they shall rule the many & the known. 11. These are fools that men adore; both their Gods & their men are fools. 12. Come forth, o children, under the stars, & take your fill of love! 13. I am above you and in you. My ecstasy is in yours. My joy is to see your joy. 14. Above, the gemmed azure is The naked splendour of Nuit; She bends in ecstasy to kiss The secret ardours of Hadit. The winged globe, the starry blue, Are mine, O Ankh-af-na-khonsu! 15. Now ye shall know that the chosen priest & apostle of infinite space is the prince-priest the Beast; and in his woman called the Scarlet Woman is all power given. They shall gather my children into their fold: they shall bring the glory of the stars into the hearts of men. 16. For he is ever a sun, and she a moon. But to him is the winged secret flame, and to her the stooping starlight. 17. But ye are not so chosen. 18. Burn upon their brows, o splendrous serpent! 19. O azure-lidded woman, bend upon them! 20. The key of the rituals is in the secret word which I have given unto him. 21. With the God & the Adorer I am nothing: they do not see me. They are as upon the earth; I am Heaven, and there is no other God than me, and my lord Hadit. 22. Now, therefore, I am known to ye by my name Nuit, and to him by a secret name which I will give him when at last he knoweth me. Since I am Infinite Space, and the Infinite Stars thereof, do ye also thus. Bind nothing! Let there be no difference made among you between any one thing & any other thing; for thereby there cometh hurt. 23. But whoso availeth in this, let him be the chief of all! 24. I am Nuit, and my word is six and fifty. 25. Divide, add, multiply, and understand. 26. Then saith the prophet and slave of the beauteous one: Who am I, and what shall be the sign? So she answered him, bendingdown, a lambent flame of blue, all-touching, all penetrant, her lovely hands upon the black earth, & her lithe body arched for love, and her soft feet not hurting the little flowers: Thou knowest! And the sign shall be my ecstasy, the consciousness of the continuity of existence, the omnipresence of my body. 27. Then the priest answered & said unto the Queen of Space, kissing her lovely brows, and the dew of her light bathing his whole body in a sweet-smelling perfume of sweat: O Nuit, continuous one of Heaven, let it be ever thus; that men speak not of Thee as One but as None; and let them speak not of thee at all, since thou art continuous! 28. None, breathed the light, faint & faery, of the stars, and two. 29. For I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union. 30. This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all. 31. For these fools of men and their woes care not thou at all! They feel little; what is, is balanced by weak joys; but ye are my chosen ones. 32. Obey my prophet! follow out the ordeals of my knowledge! seek me only! Then the joys of my love will redeem ye from all pain. This is so: I swear it by the vault of my body; by my sacred heart and tongue; by all I can give, by all I desire of ye all. 33. Then the priest fell into a deep trance or swoon, & said unto the Queen of Heaven; Write unto us the ordeals; write unto us the rituals; write unto us the law! 34. But she said: the ordeals I write not: the rituals shall be half known and half concealed: the Law is for all. 35. This that thou writest is the threefold book of Law. 36. My scribe Ankh-af-na-khonsu, the priest of the princes, shall not in one letter change this book; but lest there be folly, he shall comment thereupon by the wisdom of Ra-Hoor-Khuit. 37. Also the mantras and spells; the obeah and the wanga; the work of the wand and the work of the sword; these he shall learn and teach. 38. He must teach; but he may make severe the ordeals. 39. The word of the Law is THELEMA. 40. Who calls us Thelemites will do no wrong, if he look but close into the word. For there are therein Three Grades, the Hermit, and the Lover, and the man of Earth. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. 41. The word of Sin is Restriction. O man! refuse not thy wife, if she will! O lover, if thou wilt, depart! There is no bond that can unite the divided but love: all else is a curse. Accursed! Accursed be it to the aeons! Hell. 42. Let it be that state of manyhood bound and loathing. So with thy all; thou hast no right but to do thy will. 43. Do that, and no other shall say nay. 44. For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect. 45. The Perfect and the Perfect are one Perfect and not two; nay, are none! 46. Nothing is a secret key of this law. Sixty-one the Jews call it; I call it eight, eighty, four hundred & eighteen. 47. But they have the half: unite by thine art so that all disappear. 48. My prophet is a fool with his one, one, one; are not they the Ox, and none by the Book? 49. Abrogate are all rituals, all ordeals, all words and signs. Ra-Hoor-Khuit hath taken his seat in the East at the Equinox of the Gods; and let Asar be with Isa, who also are one. But they are not of me. Let Asar be the adorant, Isa the sufferer; Hoor in his secret name and splendour is the Lord initiating. 50. There is a word to say about the Hierophantic task. Behold! there are three ordeals in one, and it may be given in three ways. The gross must pass through fire; let the fine be tried in intellect, and the lofty chosen ones in the highest. Thus ye have star & star, system & system; let not one know well the other! 51. There are four gates to one palace; the floor of that palace is of silver and gold; lapis lazuli & jasper are there; and all rare scents; jasmine & rose, and the emblems of death. Let him enter in turn or at once the four gates; let him stand on the floor of the palace. Will he not sink? Amn. Ho! warrior, if thy servant sink? But there are means and means. Be goodly therefore: dress ye all in fine apparel; eat rich foods and drink sweet wines and wines that foam! Also, take your fill and will of love as ye will, when, where and with whom ye will! But always unto me. 52. If this be not aright; if ye confound the space-marks, saying: They are one; or saying, They are many; if the ritual be not ever unto me: then expect the direful judgments of Ra Hoor Khuit! 53. This shall regenerate the world, the little world my sister, my heart & my tongue, unto whom I send this kiss. Also, o scribe and prophet, though thou be of the princes, it shall not assuage thee nor absolve thee. But ecstasy be thine and joy of earth: ever To me! To me! 54. Change not as much as the style of a letter; for behold! thou, o prophet, shalt not behold all these mysteries hidden therein. 55. The child of thy bowels, he shall behold them. 56. Expect him not from the East, nor from the West; for from no expected house cometh that child. Aum! All words are sacred and all prophets true; save only that they understand a little; solve the first half of the equation, leave the second unattacked. But thou hast all in the clear light, and some, though not all, in the dark. 57. Invoke me under my stars! Love is the law, love under will. Nor let the fools mistake love; for there are love and love. There is the dove, and there is the serpent. Choose ye well! He, my prophet, hath chosen, knowing the law of the fortress, and the great mystery of the House of God. All these old letters of my Book are aright; but [Tzaddi] is not the Star. This also is secret: my prophet shall reveal it to the wise. 58. I give unimaginable joys on earth: certainty, not faith, while in life, upon death; peace unutterable, rest, ecstasy; nor do I demand aught in sacrifice. 59. My incense is of resinous woods & gums; and there is no blood therein: because of my hair the trees of Eternity. 60. My number is 11, as all their numbers who are of us. The Five Pointed Star, with a Circle in the Middle, & the circle is Red. My colour is black to the blind, but the blue & gold are seen of the seeing. Also I have asecret glory for them that love me. 61. But to love me is better than all things: if under the night stars in the desert thou presently burnest mine incense before me, invoking me with a pure heart, and the Serpent flame therein, thou shalt come a little to lie in my bosom. For one kiss wilt thou then be willing to give all; but whoso gives one particle of dust shall lose all in that hour. Ye shall gather goods and store of women and spices; ye shall wear rich jewels; ye shall exceed the nations of the earth in spendour & pride; but always in the love of me, and so shall ye come to my joy. I charge you earnestly to come before me in a single robe, and covered with a rich headdress. I love you! I yearn to you! Pale or purple, veiled or voluptuous, I who am all pleasure and purple, and drunkenness of the innermost sense, desire you. Put on the wings, and arouse the coiled splendour within you: come unto me! 62. At all my meetings with you shall the priestess say -- and her eyes shall burn with desire as she stands bare and rejoicing in my secret temple -- To me! To me! calling forth the flame of the hearts of all in her love-chant. 63. Sing the rapturous love-song unto me! Burn to me perfumes! Wear to me jewels! Drink to me, for I love you! I love you! 64. I am the blue-lidded daughter of Sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky. 65. To me! To me! 66. The Manifestation of Nuit is at an end. Chapter II: 1. Nu! the hiding of Hadit. 2. Come! all ye, and learn the secret that hath not yet been revealed. I, Hadit, am the complement of Nu, my bride. I am not extended, and Khabs is the name of my House. 3. In the sphere I am everywhere the centre, as she, the circumference, is nowhere found. 4. Yet she shall be known & I never. 5. Behold! the rituals of the old time are black. Let the evil ones be cast away; let the good ones be purged by the prophet! Then shall this Knowledge go aright. 6. I am the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star. I am Life, and the giver of Life, yet therefore is theknowledge of me the knowledge of death. 7. I am the Magician and the Exorcist. I am the axle of the wheel, and the cube in the circle. "Come unto me" is a foolish word: for it is I that go. 8. Who worshipped Heru-pa-kraath have worshipped me; ill, for I am the worshipper. 9. Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains. 10. O prophet! thou hast ill will to learn this writing. 11. I see thee hate the hand & the pen; but I am stronger. 12. Because of me in Thee which thou knewest not. 13. for why? Because thou wast the knower, and me. 14. Now let there be a veiling of this shrine: now let the light devour men and eat them up with blindness! 15. For I am perfect, being Not; and my number is nine by the fools; but with the just I am eight, and one in eight: Which is vital, for I am none indeed. The Empress and the King are not of me; for there is a further secret. 16. I am The Empress & the Hierophant. Thus eleven, as my bride is eleven. 17. Hear me, ye people of sighing! The sorrows of pain and regret Are left to the dead and the dying, The folk that not know me as yet. 18. These are dead, these fellows; they feel not. We are not for the poor and sad: the lords of the earth are our kinsfolk. 19. Is a God to live in a dog? No! but the highest are of us. They shall rejoice, our chosen: who sorroweth is not of us. 20. Beauty and strength, leaping laughter and delicious languor, force and fire, are of us. 21. We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit: let them die in their misery. For they feel not. Compassion is the vice of kings: stamp down the wretched & the weak: this is the law of the strong: this is our law and the joy of the world. Think not, o king, upon that lie: That Thou Must Die: verily thou shalt not die, but live. Now let it be understood: If the body of the King dissolve, he shall remain in pure ecstasy for ever. Nuit! Hadit! Ra-Hoor-Khuit! The Sun, Strength & Sight, Light; these are for the servants of the Star & the Snake. 22. I am the Snake that giveth Knowledge & Delight and bright glory, and stir the hearts of men with drunkenness. To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, & be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all. It is a lie, this folly against self. The exposure of innocence is a lie. Be strong, o man! lust, enjoy all things of sense and rapture: fear not that any God shall deny thee for this. 23. I am alone: there is no God where I am. 24. Behold! these be grave mysteries; for there are also of my friends who be hermits. Now think not to find them in the forest or on the mountain; but in beds of purple, caressed by magnificent beasts of women with large limbs, and fire and light in their eyes, and masses of flaming hair about them; there shall ye find them. Ye shall see them at rule, at victorious armies, at all the joy; and there shall be in them a joy a million times greater than this. Beware lest any force another, King against King! Love one another with burning hearts; on the low men trample in the fierce lust of your pride, in the day of your wrath. 25. Ye are against the people, O my chosen! 26. I am the secret Serpent coiled about to spring: in my coiling there is joy. If I lift up my head, I and my Nuit are one. If I droop down mine head, and shoot forth venom, then is rapture of the earth, and I and the earth are one. 27. There is great danger in me; for who doth not understand these runes shall make a great miss. He shall fall down into the pit called Because, and there he shall perish with the dogs of Reason. 28. Now a curse upon Because and his kin! 29. May Because be accursed for ever! 30. If Will stops and cries Why, invoking Because, then Will stops & does nought. 31. If Power asks why, then is Power weakness. 32. Also reason is a lie; for there is a factor infinite & unknown; & all their words are skew-wise. 33. Enough of Because! Be he damned for a dog! 34. But ye, o my people, rise up & awake! 35. Let the rituals be rightly performed with joy & beauty! 36. There are rituals of the elements and feasts of the times. 37. A feast for the first night of the Prophet and his Bride! 38. A feast for the three days of the writing of the Book of the Law. 39. A feast for Tahuti and the child of the Prophet--secret, O Prophet! 40. A feast for the Supreme Ritual, and a feast for the Equinox of the Gods. 41. A feast for fire and a feast for water; a feast for life and a greater feast for death! 42. A feast every day in your hearts in the joy of my rapture! 43. A feast every night unto Nu, and the pleasure of uttermost delight! 44. Aye! feast! rejoice! there is no dread hereafter. There is the dissolution, and eternal ecstasy in the kisses of Nu. 45. There is death for the dogs. 46. Dost thou fail? Art thou sorry? Is fear in thine heart? 47. Where I am these are not. 48. Pity not the fallen! I never knew them. I am not for them. I console not: I hate the consoled & the consoler. 49. I am unique & conqueror. I am not of the slaves that perish. Be they damned & dead! Amen. (This is of the 4: there is a fifth who is invisible, & therein am I as a babe in an egg. ) 50. Blue am I and gold in the light of my bride: but the red gleam is in my eyes; & my spangles are purple & green. 51. Purple beyond purple: it is the light higher than eyesight. 52. There is a veil: that veil is black. It is the veil of the modest woman; it is the veil of sorrow, & the pall of death: this is none of me. Tear down that lying spectre of the centuries: veil not your vices in virtuous words: these vices are my service; ye do well, & I will reward you here and hereafter. 53. Fear not, o prophet, when these words are said, thou shalt not be sorry. Thou art emphatically my chosen; and blessed are the eyes that thou shalt look upon with gladness. But I will hide thee in a mask of sorrow: they that see thee shall fear thou art fallen: but I lift thee up. 54. Nor shall they who cry aloud their folly that thou meanest nought avail; thou shall reveal it: thou availest: they are the slaves of because: They are not of me. The stops as thou wilt; the letters? change them not in style or value! 55. Thou shalt obtain the order & value of the English Alphabet; thou shalt find new symbols to attribute them unto. 56. Begone! ye mockers; even though ye laugh in my honour ye shall laugh not long: then when ye are sad know that I have forsaken you. 57. He that is righteous shall be righteous still; he that is filthy shall be filthy still. 58. Yea! deem not of change: ye shall be as ye are, & not other. Therefore the kings of the earth shall be Kings for ever: the slaves shall serve. There is none that shall be cast down or lifted up: all is ever as it was. Yet there are masked ones my servants: it may be that yonder beggar is a King. A King may choose his garment as he will: there is no certain test: but a beggar cannot hide his poverty. 59. Beware therefore! Love all, lest perchance is a King concealed! Say you so? Fool! If he be a King, thou canst not hurt him. 60. Therefore strike hard & low, and to hell with them, master! 61. There is a light before thine eyes, o prophet, a light undesired, most desirable. 62. I am uplifted in thine heart; and the kisses of the stars rain hard upon thy body. 63. Thou art exhaust in the voluptuous fullness of the inspiration; the expiration is sweeter than death, more rapid and laughterful than a caress of Hell's own worm. 64. Oh! thou art overcome: we are upon thee; our delight is all over thee: hail! hail: prophet of Nu! prophet of Had! prophet of Ra-Hoor-Khu! Now rejoice! now come in our splendour & rapture! Come in our passionate peace, & write sweet words for the Kings. 65. I am the Master: thou art the Holy Chosen One. 66. Write, & find ecstasy in writing! Work, & be our bed in working! Thrill with the joy of life & death! Ah! thy death shall be lovely: whososeeth it shall be glad. Thy death shall be the seal of the promise of our age long love. Come! lift up thine heart & rejoice! We are one; we are none. 67. Hold! Hold! Bear up in thy rapture; fall not in swoon of the excellent kisses! 68. Harder! Hold up thyself! Lift thine head! breathe not so deep -- die! 69. Ah! Ah! What do I feel? Is the word exhausted? 70. There is help & hope in other spells. Wisdom says: be strong! Then canst thou bear more joy. Be not animal; refine thy rapture! If thou drink, drink by the eight and ninety rules of art: if thou love, exceed by delicacy; and if thou do aught joyous, let there be subtlety therein! 71. But exceed! exceed! 72. Strive ever to more! and if thou art truly mine -- and doubt it not, an if thou art ever joyous! -- death is the crown of all. 73. Ah! Ah! Death! Death! thou shalt long for death. Death is forbidden, o man, unto thee. 74. The length of thy longing shall be the strength of its glory. He that lives long & desires death much is ever the King among the Kings. 75. Aye! listen to the numbers & the words: 76. 4 6 3 8 A B K 2 4 A L G M O R 3 Y X 24 89 R P S T O V A L. What meaneth this, o prophet? Thou knowest not; nor shalt thou know ever. There cometh one to follow thee: he shall expound it. But remember, o chose none, to be me; to follow the love of Nu in the star-lit heaven; to look forth upon men, to tell them this glad word. 77. O be thou proud and mighty among men! 78. Lift up thyself! for there is none like unto thee among men or among Gods! Lift up thyself, o my prophet, thy stature shall surpass the stars. They shall worship thy name, foursquare, mystic, wonderful, the number of the man; and the name of thy house 418. 79. The end of the hiding of Hadit; and blessing & worship to the prophet of the lovely Star! Chapter III: 1. Abrahadabra; the reward of Ra Hoor Khut. 2. There is division hither homeward; there is a word not known. Spelling is defunct; all is not aught. Beware! Hold! Raise the spell of Ra-Hoor-Khuit! 3. Now let it be first understood that I am a god of War and of Vengeance. I shall deal hardly with them. 4. Choose ye an island! 5. Fortify it! 6. Dung it about with enginery of war! 7. I will give you a war-engine. 8. With it ye shall smite the peoples; and none shall stand before you. 9. Lurk! Withdraw! Upon them! this is the Law of the Battle of Conquest: thus shall my worship be about my secret house. 10. Get the stele of revealing itself; set it in thy secret temple -- and that temple is already aright disposed -- & it shall be your Kiblah for ever. It shall not fade, but miraculous colour shall come back to it day after day. Close it in locked glass for a proof to the world. 11. This shall be your only proof. I forbid argument. Conquer! That is enough. I will make easy to you the abstruction from the ill-ordered house in the Victorious City. Thou shalt thyself convey it with worship, o prophet, though thou likest it not. Thou shalt have danger & trouble. Ra-Hoor-Khu is with thee. Worship me with fire & blood; worship me with swords & with spears. Let the woman be girt with a sword before me: let blood flow to my name. Trample down the Heathen; be upon them, o warrior, I will give you of their flesh to eat! 12. Sacrifice cattle, little and big: after a child. 13. But not now. 14. Ye shall see that hour, o blessed Beast, and thou the Scarlet Concubine of his desire! 15. Ye shall be sad thereof. 16. Deem not too eagerly to catch the promises; fear not to undergo the curses. Ye, even ye, know not this meaning all. 17. Fear not at all; fear neither men nor Fates, nor gods, nor anything. Money fear not, nor laughter of the folk folly, nor any other power in heaven or upon the earth or under the earth. Nu is your refuge as Hadit your light; and I am the strength, force, vigour, of your arms. 18. Mercy let be off; damn them who pity! Kill and torture; spare not; be upon them! 19. That stele they shall call the Abomination of Desolation; count well its name, & it shall be to you as 718. 20. Why? Because of the fall of Because, that he is not there again. 21. Set up my image in the East: thou shalt buy thee an image which I will show thee, especial, not unlike the one thou knowest. And it shall be suddenly easy for thee to do this. 22. The other images group around me to support me: let all be worshipped, for they shall cluster to exalt me. I am the visible object of worship; the others are secret; for the Beast & his Bride are they: and for the winners of the Ordeal x. What is this? Thou shalt know. 23. For perfume mix meal & honey & thick leavings of red wine: then oil of Abramelin and olive oil, and afterward soften & smooth down with rich fresh blood. 24. The best blood is of the moon, monthly: then the fresh blood of a child, or dropping from the host of heaven: then of enemies; then of the priest or of the worshippers: last of some beast, no matter what. 25. This burn: of this make cakes & eat unto me. This hath also another use; let it be laid before me, and kept thick with perfumes of your orison: it shall become full of beetles as it were and creeping things sacred unto me. 26. These slay, naming your enemies; & they shall fall before you. 27. Also these shall breed lust & power of lust in you at the eating thereof. 28. Also ye shall be strong in war. 29. Moreover, be they long kept, it is better; for they swell with my force. All before me. 30. My altar is of open brass work: burn thereon in silver or gold! 31. There cometh a rich man from the West who shall pour his gold upon thee. 32. From gold forge steel! 33. Be ready to fly or to smite! 34. But your holy place shall be untouched throughout the centuries: though with fire and sword it be burnt down & shattered, yet an invisible house there standeth, and shall stand until the fall of the Great Equinox; when Hrumachis shall arise and the double-wanded one assume my throne and place. Another prophet shall arise, and bring fresh fever from the skies; another woman shall awakethe lust & worship of the Snake; another soul of God and beast shall mingle in the globed priest; another sacrifice shall stain the tomb; another king shall reign; and blessing no longer be poured To the Hawk-headed mystical Lord! 35. The half of the word of Heru-ra-ha, called Hoor-pa-kraat and Ra-Hoor-Khut. 36. Then said the prophet unto the God: 37. I adore thee in the song -- I am the Lord of Thebes, and I The inspired forth-speaker of Mentu; For me unveils the veiled sky, The self-slain Ankh-af-na-khonsu Whose words are truth. I invoke, I greet Thy presence, O Ra-Hoor-Khuit! Unity uttermost showed! I adore the might of Thy breath, Supreme and terrible God, Who makest the gods and death To tremble before Thee: -- I, I adore thee! Appear on the throne of Ra! Open the ways of the Khu! Lighten the ways of the Ka! The ways of the Khabs run through To stir me or still me! Aum! let it fill me! 38. So that thy light is in me; & its red flame is as a sword in my hand to push thy order. There is a secret door that I shall make to establish thy way in all the quarters, (these are the adorations, as thou hast written), as it is said: The light is mine; its rays consume Me: I have made a secret door Into the House of Ra and Tum, Of Khephra and of Ahathoor. I am thy Theban, O Mentu, The prophet Ankh-af-na-khonsu! By Bes-na-Maut my breast I beat; By wise Ta-Nech I weave my spell. Show thy star-splendour, O Nuit! Bid me within thine House to dwell, O winged snake of light, Hadit! Abide with me, Ra-Hoor-Khuit! 39. All this and a book to say how thou didst come hither and a reproduction of this ink and paper for ever -- for in it is the word secret & not only in the English -- and thy comment upon this the Book of the Law shall be printed beautifully in red ink and black upon beautiful paper made by hand; and to each man and woman that thou meetest, were it but to dine or to drink at them, it is the Law to give. Then they shall chance to abide in this bliss or no; it is no odds. Do this quickly! 40. But the work of the comment? That is easy; and Hadit burning in thy heart shall make swift and secure thy pen. 41. Establish at thy Kaaba a clerk-house: all must be done well and with business way. 42. The ordeals thou shalt oversee thyself, save only the blind ones. Refuse none, but thou shalt know & destroy the traitors. I am Ra-Hoor-Khuit; and I am powerful to protect my servant. Success is thy proof: argue not; convert not; talk not over much! Them that seek to entrap thee, to overthrow thee, them attack without pity or quarter; & destroy them utterly. Swift as a trodden serpent turn and strike! Be thou yet deadlier than he! Drag down their souls to awful torment: laugh at their fear: spit upon them! 43. Let the Scarlet Woman beware! If pity and compassion and tenderness visit her heart; if she leave my work to toy with old sweetnesses; then shall my vengeance be known. I will slay me her child: I will alienate her heart: I will cast her out from men: as a shrinking and despised harlot shall she crawl through dusk wet streets, and die cold and an-hungered. 44. But let her raise herself in pride! Let her follow me in my way! Let her work the work of wickedness! Let her kill her heart! Let her be loud and adulterous! Let her be covered with jewels, and rich garments, and let her be shameless before all men! 45. Then will I lift her to pinnacles of power: then will I breed from her a child mightier than all the kings of the earth. I will fill her with joy: with my force shall she see & strike at the worship of Nu: she shall achieve Hadit. 46. I am the warrior Lord of the Forties: the Eighties cower before me, & are abased. I will bring you to victory & joy: I will be at your arms in battle & ye shall delight to slay. Success is your proof; courage is your armour; go on, go on, in my strength; & ye shall turn not back for any! 47. This book shall be translated into all tongues: but always with the original in the writing of the Beast; for in the chance shape of the letters and their position to one another: in these are mysteries that no Beast shall divine. Let him not seek to try: but one cometh after him, whence I say not, who shall discover the Key of it all. Then this line drawn is a key: then this circle squared in its failure is a key also. And Abrahadabra. It shall be his child & that strangely. Let him not seek after this; for thereby alone can he fall from it. 48. Now this mystery of the letters is done, and I want to go on to the holier place. 49. I am in a secret fourfold word, the blasphemy against all gods of men. 50. Curse them! Curse them! Curse them! 51. With my Hawk's head I peck at the eyes of Jesus as he hangs upon the cross. 52. I flap my wings in the face of Mohammed & blind him. 53. With my claws I tear out the flesh of the Indian and the Buddhist, Mongol and Din. 54. Bahlasti! Ompehda! I spit on your crapulous creeds. 55. Let Mary inviolate be torn upon wheels: for her sake let all chaste women be utterly despised among you! 56. Also for beauty's sake and love's! 57. Despise also all cowards; professional soldiers who dare not fight, but play; all fools despise! 58. But the keen and the proud, the royal and the lofty; ye are brothers! 59. As brothers fight ye! 60. There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt. 61. There is an end of the word of the God enthroned in Ra's seat, lightening the girders of the soul. 62. To Me do ye reverence! to me come ye through tribulation of ordeal, which is bliss. 63. The fool readeth this Book of the Law, and its comment; & he understandeth it not. 64. Let him come through the first ordeal, & it will be to him as silver. 65. Through the second, gold. 66. Through the third, stones of precious water. 67. Through the fourth, ultimate sparks of the intimate fire. 68. Yet to all it shall seem beautiful. Its enemies who say not so, are mere liars. 69. There is success. 70. I am the Hawk-Headed Lord of Silence & of Strength; my nemyss shrouds the night-blue sky. 71. Hail! ye twin warriors about the pillars of the world! for your time is nigh at hand. 72. I am the Lord of the Double Wand of Power; the wand of the Force of Coph Nia--but my left hand is empty, for I have crushed an Universe; & nought remains. 73. Paste the sheets from right to left and from top to bottom: then behold! 74. There is a splendour in my name hidden and glorious, as the sun of midnight is ever the son. 75. The ending of the words is the Word Abrahadabra. The Book of the Law is Written and Concealed. Aum. Ha. THE COMMENT: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. The study of this Book is forbidden. It is wise to destroy this copy after the first reading. Whosoever disregards this does so at his own risk and peril. These are most dire. Those who discuss the contents of this Book are to be shunned by all, as centres of pestilence. All questions of the Law are to be decided only by appeal to my writings, each for himself. There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt. Love is the law, love under will. The priest of the princes, Ankh-f-n-khonsu (Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 14th, 2007
3:56 pm	Dealing with China The following is adapted from remarks delivered on February 13, 2007 in Fort Myers, Florida, on the topic, “National Security: Short- and Long-Term Assessments,” by Ross Terrill: How should we deal with China in the coming years? Do we oppose China, or can we coax it into the so-called international community? Simply put, we should stand up for freedom. The United States represents a beacon of hope to a new generation of Chinese who live in a Leninist regime supervising a semi-capitalist society—an arrangement that so far has never lasted for a sustained period. If we are going to deal with China properly in the coming years, we have to confront this contradiction. Whether desirable or not, China is rising: Try to spend a day shopping without coming home with Chinese-made products. Adopt a baby and it may well be from China. Asian-American students comprise 50 percent or more of the student body at numerous American colleges. China’s GDP quadrupled in Deng Xiaoping’s two decades from 1978 to 1992. Since then it has been growing even faster at 10-11 percent per year. Foreign trade increased tenfold during Deng’s reign. China’s economic advance has led to military expansion, diplomatic sophistication, a relentless quest for markets, enormous oil consumption, an enhanced capacity to import and swelling nationalism. What is China trying to do and to be? As a free society, America trumpets its goals. By contrast, China tends to hide its goals. Its stated aims are peace and development. Its real aims are to sustain its economic growth, have a tranquil set of borders for that purpose (China has 14 borders), eclipse the United States in East Asia and regain “lost” territory. (Taiwan is only one of the territories that, because the Chinese emperor once possessed it, the Chinese government believes should return to China.) While Beijing does enormous business with us, it regularly launches anti-American diatribes. And while it advocates a world free of arms, it has lined up 800 missiles opposite Taiwan. The prospect of China achieving its international aims—especially outstripping the U.S. and expanding its territory—depends on two things: the future of its political system and whether the United States and other countries acquiesce in China’s rise. The popular idea is that China is in transition from communism to freedom, as we heard when President Clinton went to China in 1998 and said, “China is moving to join the thriving community of free democracies.” Others say that communism hasn’t yet been abandoned in China, but a seamless transition is in the works: As long as China continues its reforms, lets the private sector grow, fulfills its pledges to the World Trade Organization and replaces the whim of a single leader with general rules and regulations, then the world will wake up one morning and see that China, like Poland or Mongolia, has truly ended communist rule. But reform can be illusory. The Hungarian reformers of the late 1960s believed in open-ended reform, and ultimately that led to the collapse of socialism. But communist reform can be intended merely to streamline socialism. I think this is the view of the Chinese communist party. We might think or hope that such reforms will undermine communism. Certainly many Chinese privately hope for this. But in and of themselves, reforms could for a time strengthen the system. There are three possibilities for China’s next quarter- century. One is that there will be no transition to a different political system. What we see now— commercialized Leninism—is what we will see in another 25 years. The communist party will buy off the Chinese people with a better material way of life. There will be no rule of law if this happens, but rather continued repression. The second possibility is democracy. According to this view, the new society and the new economy will produce a new liberalized politics. The third possibility is that the contradictions of China today mean that the country is headed for fracture. An authoritarian state and a free economy are simply incompatible in this view, and explosion lies down the road. The argument that commercialized Leninism will continue goes something like this: First, the communist leaders have no plans to abandon it, since they profit from it. Second, Beijing—which wants economic but not political change—has learned from Mikhail Gorbachev’s mistake. Gorbachev tried to start with political change and then did not deliver the economic goods to the Soviet people. Third, China now has the economic muscle to pacify the losers of its reform era, such as farmers and a massive army of unemployed workers. Fourth, the Chinese state is more resourceful because of its long tradition of domestic imperial rule. Fifth, there is a lack of fanaticism: Chinese dictatorships have never been theocratic, and still have a pragmatic streak today. Finally, the leadership is more than willing to play the national glory card: space missions, the Olympic games, and communist archaeologists’ attempts to prove that China is 5,000 years old (which it isn’t), thus older than India. The regime thinks these achievements will keep the Chinese people happy. The main reason to doubt that commercialized Leninism will survive is simple: It has never survived before. And besides, success is not solely in the Chinese leadership’s hands. They have unleashed forces which may deny them their goal. For example, entry into the World Trade Organization is a very complicated step. As American banks start to lend Chinese currency to Chinese citizens at rates different from Chinese communist banks, what will be the effects? China has promised to allow foreign banks to expand this policy, but will it? And how will Chinese banks manage with the resulting hugely reduced deposits? Another factor to consider: Last year, 57 percent of China’s exports were produced by joint-venture enterprises, which means foreign money is behind this boom. What will be the implications of that? Will foreign investment continue at a high level? There are other reasons to doubt that the current system will last. Since Beijing has told its people that economic success is now the measure of communism’s success, one severe recession might be enough to finish it off. And do not forget that the loss of the American market, due to any Sino-American rupture, would mean the loss of 30 percent of China’s exports, and that would probably end the regime. Finally, economic freedom and political freedom cannot be separated for long. It was not for nothing that Adam Smith described his ideas about the free economy as a system of natural liberty, or that Friedrich Hayek called his book about the futility of centralized economic planning The Road to Serfdom. What are the reasons for thinking that China will transform itself into a democracy? There are some hopeful signs: Other former Leninist states have adopted some form of democracy. In fact, against the predictions of many, democracy has also taken root in parts of Chinese civilization, in Taiwan and to a degree in Hong Kong. Nor is this unprecedented. There were flickers of democracy in early 20th century China, but they were overwhelmed by warlordism and the second Sino- Japanese war. Certain preconditions of democracy do exist in China: One can buy a house (though not the land it stands on); education is at respectable levels; there is limited diversification of information; and professionals such as lawyers and journalists are pushing for autonomy. Several factors, however, oppose a transition to democracy. Rural hinterland China is a world away from the new economy of eastern, coastal, urban China. An ingrained respect for hierarchy dominates society. Village elections have been tried, but people often don’t vote for what they want—rather they vote as the communist party secretary or the clan powerholders tell them. Furthermore, it is very hard to envision national democracy in China. For example, an attempt to found a farmers party in China would in fact lead to multiple farmers parties in the 28 provinces (some of these with more than 100 million people). Political pluralism would bring out the astonishing and potentially dangerous diversity among the Chinese people, which authoritarianism holds in check. Another barrier to effective democracy is the fact that 250 million Chinese are illiterate, as measured by a very low government standard that requires knowledge of a mere 400 Chinese characters. Also, there is no national spoken language. Those who speak Mandarin can’t be understood in south China. The Cantonese of south China is as different from Mandarin as Swedish is from English. Non-Chinese tongues dominate the western half of China: Turkic tongues to the west, Tibetan to the southwest, Mongol to the northwest. In sum, an attempt at democracy in China could initially produce a mess, and many bright Chinese bureaucrats know that to be true. What is the possibility of fracture, of China breaking into pieces? The problem of governance looms large. Take the population of the United States and add that of Russia, Indonesia, Japan, Brazil and all of Western Europe, and this is still well short of China’s population of 1.3 billion. Historically, the western half of the country is not Chinese at all. It has been at various times a Tibetan kingdom, part of Mongolia and a Turkic state linked with what we now call Central Asia. Economic development in Tibet and the Muslim west could embolden these minority peoples; cell phones make it easier for them to organize; plane tickets to Mecca come within reach for devout Muslims. Indeed, Chinese leaders have often talked among themselves about the dangers of civil war or fracture. What mitigates against fracture? Most important is the fact that China’s population is 92 percent Chinese. By contrast, the Soviet Union was only 50 percent Russian. Furthermore, China experienced disunity in the past, and its people as well as its government are more wary of disunity than is true in most other countries. How and why would the political system change? There has to be a trigger in the form of a crisis in at least two of three areas: society at large, the communist party leadership and international relations. The current regime has lasted as long as it has because it hasn’t had such a crisis in decades. Chinese society may experience a crisis due to the substantial and ongoing religious revival or because of the undoubted high level of farmer dissatisfaction. But even taking social upheaval as a given, there is no split at the top of the communist party at the moment, nor does a grave international challenge loom. This is not to say that there have not been horrendous splits in the party in the past: When Mao died in 1976, his widow intended to succeed him, but so did Deng Xiaoping, who was under house arrest. Meanwhile, the politburo was split pretty much down the middle. Two rival coups d’etat were planned, and eventually Deng triumphed. The Chinese public did not know of this struggle until it was over. Had this power struggle occurred in public in the context of social turbulence and an international challenge, things might well have turned out differently in the late 1970s. However, if the military, which is not friendly to the United States, triggered some kind of dislocation in Chinese–U.S. relations, then there would be an interaction between all three of the spheres I mentioned. The Chinese economy (and therefore the society) would be affected, and some members of the Chinese leadership would oppose this rupture with Washington. This would lead to an interaction between an international crisis, social turbulence and a major disagreement at the top of the Chinese government. The confluence of all three, or even two, would almost certainly cause political change. I don’t think the communist party’s monopoly on power will last beyond 20 years. But neither do I think China will break up into pieces. The communist party may itself break up, which would lead to political competition between the different pieces. I think there will be a somewhat freer political order over this time frame, but not democracy. The United States should do two main things in dealing with China: First, seek full engagement, especially with China’s private sector. Second, seek to preserve an equilibrium in East Asia that discourages Beijing from expansionism. No contradiction exists between these two policies. Opposing authoritarianism on principle and yet engaging with an emerging China is a contradiction we can and should live with. China’s rise is to be welcomed in many ways. It is a market for our products. It is culturally enriching for China and America to interact. What is more, if China did break up into pieces, it would benefit Russia and Japan, not the United States. What would not be good for us is a China that keeps on rising but remains a dictatorship with unending territorial claims—including parts of Siberia and many southern islands stretching to Indonesia—makes a vassal out of Burma, threatens Tibet, represses religion, arrests people for what they write on the Internet and locks up pro-democracy leaders. This kind of China, if it still exists in 20 years, would not be stable or a friend to the United States. We do want an accommodating relationship with China, if we can have it. But because of the political nature of China, tomorrow is unknown. We have to engage fully but keep ourselves and our allies strong. The United States should not allow China to become the number one power in the world, and indeed, President Bush has welcomed Japan’s new assertiveness and held out a hand to India precisely in order to signal that stance. Alas, some people are so hostile to President Bush—and to America—that they hope China will become the world’s leading power. Many think we have become unworthy of the role. Of course, this has been said before. It was said after our withdrawal from Vietnam. But within five years we elected Ronald Reagan, who didn’t think we were unworthy at all. It was predicted in the 1980s when Japan was supposed to become the world’s leading economy. Paul Kennedy, in his much-acclaimed book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, said we were suffering from “imperial overstretch” and predicted we would decline. Well, what fell down was not the United States but the Soviet Union, and there is no comparison between America’s economy today and Japan’s. Some said the collapse of the Soviet Union would end any American need for global strength. But this never happened, and there is no sign that it will. Of course, China would fill the vacuum if the U.S. ever left East Asia. But otherwise, China’s rise will be limited. The Chinese leaders—who are not reckless people—can count the numbers. They observed the Gulf War and saw our military technology. I think they are aware of the large gap between American power and their own. However, I do worry at times that authoritarian China has an advantage over the U.S. It can take the long view, hiding its aims; it can pull the strings of Chinese public opinion; it can set the agenda of international organizations with an eye to weakening the U.S., while doing nothing itself to implement the resulting policies. It has access to an open American society that far outstrips our access to Chinese society. But, in the final analysis, no dictatorship is strong if the U.S. retains the will to stand against it, as we did against the Soviet Union. The average lifespan of the Leninist regimes in Europe was 27 years. The Chinese communist regime is 57 years old, 17 years short of the lifespan of the Soviet Union. We should talk back to the Chinese when they question our open society, and openly criticize Chinese repression. Above all, we should continue to be a beacon for freedom, with dignity and patience, but also with tenacity and with no apologies. (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 12th, 2007
2:59 pm	The Pit of Ain . You saw the vain in my eyes. The pain in disguise. Disdain and demise. A champagne full of lies. (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 21st, 2007
2:44 pm	The Fingerprints of the Gods All at once they bowed All at once they sang All at once they vowed All at once they came They traveled from afar Oh so long ago Descended from a star On Satan's U. F. O. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 6th, 2007
3:20 pm	To Hell with Global Warming "They Call this a Consensus?" by Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post Published: Saturday, June 02, 2007 "Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled." So said Al Gore ... in 1992. Amazingly, he made his claims despite much evidence of their falsity. A Gallup poll at the time reported that 53% of scientists actively involved in global climate research did not believe global warming had occurred; 30% weren't sure; and only 17% believed global warming had begun. Even a Greenpeace poll showed 47% of climatologists didn't think a runaway greenhouse effect was imminent; only 36% thought it possible and a mere 13% thought it probable. Today, Al Gore is making the same claims of a scientific consensus, as do the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of government agencies and environmental groups around the world. But the claims of a scientific consensus remain unsubstantiated. They have only become louder and more frequent. Al Gore's views have credible dissenters. More than six months ago, I began writing this series, The Deniers. When I began, I accepted the prevailing view that scientists overwhelmingly believe that climate change threatens the planet. I doubted only claims that the dissenters were either kooks on the margins of science or sell-outs in the pockets of the oil companies. My series set out to profile the dissenters -- those who deny that the science is settled on climate change -- and to have their views heard. To demonstrate that dissent is credible, I chose high-ranking scientists at the world's premier scientific establishments. I considered stopping after writing six profiles, thinking I had made my point, but continued the series due to feedback from readers. I next planned to stop writing after 10 profiles, then 12, but the feedback increased. Now, after profiling more than 20 deniers, I do not know when I will stop -- the list of distinguished scientists who question the IPCC grows daily, as does the number of emails I receive, many from scientists who express gratitude for my series. Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists -- the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects -- and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction. Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC, many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility. In one case, a top scientist told me that, to his knowledge, no respected scientist in his field accepts the IPCC position. What of the one claim that we hear over and over again, that 2,000 or 2,500 of the world's top scientists endorse the IPCC position? I asked the IPCC for their names, to gauge their views. "The 2,500 or so scientists you are referring to are reviewers from countries all over the world," the IPCC Secretariat responded. "The list with their names and contacts will be attached to future IPCC publications, which will hopefully be on-line in the second half of 2007." An IPCC reviewer does not assess the IPCC's comprehensive findings. He might only review one small part of one study that later becomes one small input to the published IPCC report. Far from endorsing the IPCC reports, some reviewers, offended at what they considered a sham review process, have demanded that the IPCC remove their names from the list of reviewers. One even threatened legal action when the IPCC refused. A great many scientists, without doubt, are four-square in their support of the IPCC. A great many others are not. A petition organized by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine between 1999 and 2001 claimed some 17,800 scientists in opposition to the Kyoto Protocol. A more recent indicator comes from the U.S.-based National Registry of Environmental Professionals, an accrediting organization whose 12,000 environmental practitioners have standing with U.S. government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. In a November, 2006, survey of its members, it found that only 59% think human activities are largely responsible for the warming that has occurred, and only 39% make their priority the curbing of carbon emissions. And 71% believe the increase in hurricanes is likely natural, not easily attributed to human activities. Such diversity of views is also present in the wider scientific community, as seen in the World Federation of Scientists, an organization formed during the Cold War to encourage dialogue among scientists to prevent nuclear catastrophe. The federation, which encompasses many of the world's most eminent scientists and today represents more than 10,000 scientists, now focuses on 15 "planetary emergencies," among them water, soil, food, medicine and biotechnology, and climatic changes. Within climatic changes, there are eight priorities, one being "Possible human influences on climate and on atmospheric composition and chemistry (e.g. increased greenhouse gases and tropospheric ozone)." Man-made global warming deserves study, the World Federation of Scientists believes, but so do other serious climatic concerns. So do 14 other planetary emergencies. That seems about right. - Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation. Email: LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com. http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=22003a0d-37cc-4399-8bcc-39cd20bed2f6&k=0 http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=1d78fc67-3784-4542-a07c-e7eeec46d1fc&k=0 http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=ae9b984d-4a1c-45c0-af24-031a1380121a&k=0 http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=b228f4b0-a869-4f85-ba08-902b95c45dcf&k=0 http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=63ab844f-8c55-4059-9ad8-89de085af353&k=0 http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=fee9a01f-3627-4b01-9222-bf60aa332f1f&k=0 http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=17fad0e2-6f6b-41f3-bdd8-8e9eeb015777&k=0 http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=9bc9a7c6-2729-4d07-9629-807f1dee479f&k=0 http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=edae9952-3c3e-47ba-913f-7359a5c7f723&k=0 http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=069cb5b2-7d81-4a8e-825d-56e0f112aeb5&k=0 http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/archives/story.html?id=216ca730-10f0-4614-9692-fc37d99cbac3 http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/archives/story.html?id=975f250d-ca5d-4f40-b687-a1672ed1f684 http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=2f4cc62e-5b0d-4b59-8705-fc28f14da388 http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=67ac2d90-ec56-4460-a831-75aacc20670d http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=0ea8dc23-ad1a-440f-a8dd-1e3ff42df34f http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=94b7d021-c5da-4e82-b37f-53d338709fb1 http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=985641c9-8594-43c2-802d-947d65555e8e http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=5b824408-9df0-4189-86fc-cf6465bf0aa8 http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=58e0c50c-1631-46ca-8719-778c0973526e http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=25526754-e53a-4899-84af-5d9089a5dcb6 http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=121163d6-d6b9-45bb-830c-5d27f88f899a http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=7bd269b6-b2e7-44d2-85e0-e7749714ba34 (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 4th, 2007
12:21 am	Married Couple Glances . Jamie: You can't rape the willing Stephen: Oh yes I can! (Comment on this)
Monday, April 23rd, 2007
11:11 am	“Let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage” Exactly one week ago Cho Seung-Hui walked into his Virginia Tech campus and brutally murdered 32 of his fellow classmates and seriously injured several others. And I have to tell you, when I first heard the news I wasn’t too surprised. Part of me expects things like this to happen in our society. Let me tell you what did surprise me. What did surprise me was the lack of effort from the students to stop this man from murdering more people. After the first bullet took his first victim, students should have banded together and rushed him. They should have tried to throw a desk at him or take his weapon. Something. Anything. Unfortunately, these students only had the courage to jump out of windows and run away. Some of them only had the courage to put their hands in front of the faces as their classmate blew their brains out. There was one man who manifested what the true meaning of courage is last Monday. A humble 76 year old math lecturer named Joe Librescu. The Holocaust survivor barricaded the doorway of his Virginia Tech classroom and saved their lives at the cost of his own. The following is adapted from a speech delivered to an assembly of students and guests at Hillsdale College on January 30, 2007 by Michael Flaherty. "At the end of C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy assume their rightful thrones as Kings and Queens of Narnia. Lewis dedicates only one sentence to describing how they governed during the Golden Age of Narnia, but it is interesting to hear his summary of their most important accomplishments. Lewis tells us that they “made good laws and kept the peace and saved good trees from being cut down and liberated young dwarfs and young satyrs from being sent to school and generally stopped busybodies and interferers and encouraged ordinary people who wanted to live and let live.” It is interesting to note that the first item of business after keeping the peace and protecting the environment was abolishing school! Narnia is thus the first kingdom where home-schooling is not only encouraged, it is required! But I think Lewis was talking less about the institution of school and more about what was being taught there. And when it came to what was being taught, Lewis thought that stories made all of the difference. Lewis begins The Voyage of the Dawn Treader with a memorable introduction of a new character: “There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubbs, and he almost deserved it.” In introducing us to Eustace, Lewis believes the best way for the reader to understand him is to know the kinds of books he read. “He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.” In other words, he didn’t have time for the types of stories that Lewis adored—stories about heroism, knights and talking animals. As a result, Eustace is at a significant disadvantage when he first arrives in Narnia and finds himself in a dragon’s lair. “Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair,” Lewis writes, “but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.” The situation worsens when the dragon begins to stir: “Something was crawling. Worse still, something was coming out of the cave. Edmund or Lucy or you would have recognized it at once, but Eustace had read none of the right books.” Reviving Literary Reading Clearly Lewis is telling us something about more than dragons and talking mice. He is giving us a simple instruction: You are what you read. We are shaped and influenced by the books that we read. They prepare us for more than interesting conversations—they actually prepare us to face real crises that we encounter in life. Few people would dispute this simple statement, so let’s ask a simple related question: What are we reading today? The short answer is: Not much. A few years ago, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report entitled “Reading at Risk.” Many people here are probably familiar with its findings, but allow me to repeat the headline: For the first time in modern history, less than half of the adult population now reads literature. The decline is across all races, all education levels, and all age groups. While this may come as a surprise to Hillsdale College students, the decline is the most pronounced in their age group. In just twenty years, young adults have declined from being those most likely to read literature to those least likely. The report went on to show that the decline in literary reading strongly correlates to a decline in cultural and civic participation. Literary readers are more than twice as likely as non-literary readers to perform volunteer and charity work, nearly three times as likely to attend performing arts events, and nearly four times as likely to visit art museums. Before you begin to think that this is limited to highbrow events, literary readers are even substantially more likely to attend sporting events than non-literary readers. And before you begin to think that the group of people making up literary readers is a group of Luddites that has sworn off electronic media, the report found that literature readers still managed to watch close to three hours of television each day! In other words, people who find time for Law and Order can still find time for Crime and Punishment. The report concludes on a rather somber note: at the current rate of loss, literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century. This decline will not be reversed by any one solution. In fact, it will require a number of innovative ones from a number of different groups. Cultural restoration, Russell Kirk said, begins at home. Certainly the same is true of literacy. And in today’s media saturated culture, I dare to say that it may also begin at the movie theater. Walden Media was started several years ago by myself, Cary Granat, and Phil Anschutz. We wanted to create a company dedicated to recapturing imagination, rekindling curiosity, and demonstrating the rewards of knowledge and virtue. All of our films would be based on great books, great people, and great historical events. They would be made by the best talent in entertainment and they would all be linked to educational materials developed by some of the best talent in education. We were taking Henry David Thoreau’s famous advice—to march to the beat of a different drummer—to Hollywood, which is why we decided to name our company after Thoreau’s most famous book, Walden. In launching Walden Media, our greatest challenge was in identifying the stories that we wanted to bring to the screen. We did not want to waste our time making films out of “the wrong books” that Eustace Scrubbs wasted his time reading. So rather than turn to the usual parade of agents and Hollywood producers, we launched an unusual campaign that continues to this day. We enrolled in as many educational conferences as we could find. We spoke to tens of thousands of teachers and librarians and asked them what books they most enjoyed teaching and recommending. After seven years, the only thing that seems odd about this strategy is the fact that our company is the only one doing it. After all, who knows stories better than teachers and librarians? I still remember when we first received a letter from a teacher in Philadelphia recommending a book called Holes. We paid little attention to it until the following week, when we received dozens more like it. It seems the teacher decided that she wanted to lead the class in an exercise of persuasive writing, and they decided that they would attempt to persuade us to make a film out of their favorite book. The students were quite persuasive, and we went on to make Holes as our first feature film. It became a great commercial and critical success. Our teacher and librarian friends introduced us to a whole new world of authors and books that publishers like to classify as “young adult” literature. But we were surprised to see that the books—while accessible to a younger audience—were every bit as profound and meaningful as the books I had read as a literature major in college. The books deal with real issues—death, racism, divorce, alcoholism, alienation, war. But similarly they all deal with the common theme of redemption. And many deal with faith respectfully, as a critical and transformational force in people’s lives. Holes took place in a juvenile detention center—the perfect setting for a redemptive story. Our next film, Because of Winn Dixie, told the story of a young girl dealing with her mother’s abandonment, adults struggling with alcoholism, and the lasting sting of racism. Our upcoming film, Bridge to Terabithia, will deal with the toughest issue haunting parents—the death of a child. Our project has opened up a fair debate about whether children should read books that have such frightening content. C. S. Lewis tackled this issue head-on and offered some good advice that informs how we select our projects: Those who say that children must not be frightened may mean two things. They may mean (1) that we must not do anything likely to give the child those haunting, disabling, pathological fears against which ordinary courage is helpless: in fact, phobias. His mind must, if possible, be kept clear of things he can’t bear to think of. Or they may mean (2) that we must try to keep out of his mind the knowledge that he is born into a world of death, violence, wounds, adventure, heroism and cowardice, good and evil. If they mean the first I agree with them: but not if they mean the second. The second would indeed be to give children a false impression and feed them on escapism in the bad sense. There is something ludicrous in the idea of so educating a generation which is born to the…atomic bomb. Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker. In conjunction with every film, we launch an ambitious educational campaign that places the book at its center. Since starting Walden, we have distributed hundreds of thousands of books, mostly to Title One Schools that are not able to afford them. When we released Winn Dixie, we also launched a program in conjunction with the Girl Scouts of America and Sunrise Assisted Living Centers to draw attention to the “Reading at Risk” report. Girl Scouts across the country volunteered to read Winn Dixie at different Sunrise Centers. In doing this, we were showing one way to reverse the decline in reading and volunteerism at the same time. Recently, with the release of Charlotte’s Web, we invited teachers and students to read a section from E. B. White’s classic to break the Guinness World Record for most people reading simultaneously. The previous record was 133,000. At last count, more than 500,000 people participated in all 50 states and 28 countries. While it is virtually impossible for us to determine if our efforts have made any kind of dent in the decline in reading, there is overwhelming evidence that we have exponentially increased the book sales of the books we have adapted into feature films. The Narnia books saw an increase in sales that was several multiples. In fact, because of the increased focus on C. S. Lewis, sales of his other books increased by several multiples as well. Amazing Grace In February we release two films. Our first, Bridge to Terabithia, follows our traditional model of a film based on a popular book—in this case Katherine Paterson’s Newbery Award Winner. And the following week we are releasing Amazing Grace, a film based on a great man—William Wilberforce—and a great event—the abolition of the slave trade in Great Britain. After a powerful conversion experience, William Wilberforce dedicated himself to what he called his two great objectives—the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of society. In pursuing the first, he was challenging a mindset that had existed for centuries. Wilberforce recognized that if he wanted to change the law, he needed to change peoples’ hearts and minds. And he also knew that none of this was possible until his own heart experienced a radical transformation. Wilberforce’s childhood preacher, John Newton, experienced an even more dramatic conversion than Wilberforce. In a graceless world, absent of God’s mercy, Newton should have rotted in the bowels of a slave ship or been tossed in the sea. Yet God, in his providence, saved this wretch and gave him something he didn’t deserve, a prominent role in the story of freedom. And Newton went on to pen one of the most redemptive songs in human history—“Amazing Grace.” Wilberforce and Newton both understood that they could not accomplish great change alone. It required friends—people from all walks of life and from both sides of the political aisle. Wilberforce called them his “co-belligerents”—people who had many differences but were united in their commitment to end the slave trade and improve British society. Despite decades of defeat, ridicule, and treachery, they were companions for the common good. This March, we will celebrate the 200-year anniversary of their greatest victory—the abolition of the British slave trade. After decades of defeat, through faith and perseverance, Wilberforce and his friends of the Clapham Sect accomplished what everybody thought was impossible. But their story did not end there. It was said of Wilberforce that good causes stuck to him like pins. Over his lifetime, he launched more than 65 social initiatives, including the first animal welfare society, the first Bible Society and the first National Gallery of Art. He also helped reform penal laws and child welfare laws. Today we desperately need more leaders like William Wilberforce and the Kings and Queens of Narnia who will fight to make good laws, keep the peace, save good trees from being cut down, and encourage ordinary people who want to live and let live. We are all familiar with the problems that good people face, both nationally and globally. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. Martin Luther King wrote that we have two options when faced with such problems. We can act like a thermometer and merely make a record. Or we can act like a thermostat and correct what is wrong. Let us accept Dr. King’s challenge to help correct what ails us. Whether we fight against illiteracy, poverty, racism, AIDS, or hunger, let’s dedicate ourselves to making the types of sweeping changes that William Wilberforce and his colleagues accomplished. And let’s work in their same spirit of cooperation—finding “co-belligerents” from all types of backgrounds and beliefs. Let us play a role in creating our own great stories of bravery and heroism to give hope and joy to our children. And then we can all take comfort in the fact that we have lived according to the spirit of the prayer that was written in the Bible placed inside the 1853 cornerstone at Central Hall here on your campus: “May earth be better and heaven be richer because of the life and labor of Hillsdale College.” (Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 13th, 2006
1:15 pm	Unity Isn't Everything "Doctrine? You've got to be kidding me! You want me to study doctrine? That's boring! That's only for ministers, right? It has nothing to do with me. After all, I'm only a layman. Why in the world should I have to study doctrine?" Statements like this, if not spoken out loud, have been expressed silently by many people in the church at one time or another. Strangely enough, many of the same people who would never set out to study "doctrine" usually hold strong views pertaining to what they believe, or at least what they say they believe. For instance, it's very common to find people who will say something like, "Of course I believe in the Trinity." However, when asked to "prove" that statement from the Bible or to offer any Bible verse in support of that, they cannot. Such people are "tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming." (Ephesians 4:14). In other words, they become easy prey to false teachings from cults and others who teach things contrary to the Bible. Doctrine is the anchor that keeps us from being wrecked on the rocks of doubt, deceit, and the endeavors of non-Biblical religions. Why do so many who call themselves "Christian" continually argue among themselves and with others about doctrine? Are not all who confess Christ united by the Holy Spirit into Christ's body? Doesn't every church teach the same basic doctrine? If this were so there would have been no need for Paul to admonish young pastor Timothy "Watch your life and doctrine closely" (1 Timothy 4:16), or for the Councils of the early church to define the creeds and oppose false teachings, for Martin Luther's 95 Theses, the Westminster Confession or, in fact, for the Reformation as a whole. Christian doctrine has undergone continuous assaults since it was first defined. Attacked from both inside and outside the church, challengers have attempted to lead astray those whose faith is not firmly grounded in Christ and sound doctrine. The church has attempted to deal with this by writing creeds and confessions, teaching catechisms and requiring pastors to be trained by approved institutions. Unfortunately, much of the American church has been caught up in a form of revivalism that replaces creeds with personal testimonies, catechism classes with Youth Group Pizza Nites, and the theological training of pastors with church growth seminars. Most laymen, and many preachers, have a difficult time putting into words exactly what they believe and, of the few who can make a statement of doctrine, fewer still can cite the scriptural basis, history, or even make a logical defense of said doctrine. Such is the logical conclusion of a theology based upon feelings and experience rather than on the word of God. Sola Scriptura. Better to tolerate heresy than to risk looking unloving to the world, right? I think not. The attitude of the reformers would tell us that no one ever made it to heaven simply because he was loving. If one wishes to get to heaven, then truth is needed. The reformers, I believe would also warn us against any unity that is based on error. Why do we find it so hard to say that some religious views are wrong? Why do we allow false teachers and false prophets to flourish without warning them of God's wrath? In evangelical churches and circles we often hear, "Who are you to judge? You have no right to say this is heresy. You have no right to say that this preacher is a false teacher." Since the protestant reformation began over a disagreement in doctrine, it seems preposterous that some are telling us that truth must be minimized for the sake of unity. We live in a world where truth is seen as the enemy of unity. To draw a line and say, "This is where we stand," is to further divide and fracture the church. Of course, people only believe that because they are told that it is better to tolerate error than to look ugly defending the truth. Biblical unity can only be achieved through Biblical truth. All too often people confuse Biblical unity with compromise. They are too willing to compromise their beliefs if it means being united. Unity at all costs, right? Not even close. It is better to be divided in truth, than united in error. Am I saying that we, as Christians, are to divide over any and all issues? Many will argue over food or drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or Sabbaths. And while such issues may have legitimacy in regard to physical health or preferences in forms, the dividing line should be drawn over much more substantial criteria. John Stott says, "Truth becomes hard if it is not softened by love. But love becomes soft if it is not strengthened by truth." I first started writing essays in response to an argument that I had with my brother concerning a certain doctrinal issue. Our disagreement was so sharp that it inspired me to write a whole essay on the matter. After that, I learned that I like to write. Why not write on what interests me? My brother has more than once challenged my beliefs. Virtually every Christian doctrine I profess has been debated by him at one time or another. The best thing about people that are willing to argue over doctrine is that, at the very least, it shows they take what they believe seriously. I believe we need more of it in evangelical circles. Many professing Christians today regard theological matters as having little or no importance. Some even regard theological debate and the refutation of false teaching as unloving, arrogant and insulting to brothers and sisters of different theological persuasions. Some believers make comments such as: “Should we not be building bridges rather than erecting walls and fortresses?” While there is no question that theological debate and refutation must be conducted in a spirit of Christian love and concern for professing Christians of different theological opinions, the idea that theological precision, debate and refutation are somehow bad or unworthy of our time is blatantly unbiblical for a number of reasons. First, every Christian has a moral obligation to defend the truth, to contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3) and to convict those who contradict (Titus 1:9). In a world full of heresy, apostasy and wolves in sheep’s clothing, a lack of theological precision and an unwillingness to defend the truth on the part of ministers is sad and inexcusable. Martin Luther once said: “If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, then I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Him. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battlefront besides is merely flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point." Second, one of the great lessons of church history is that God has used heresy and theological controversy to corporately sanctify his church. Enemies of the truth, heretics and theological perverts have arisen and assaulted the church from within. Yet God, in his infinite kindness and wisdom, has used such occasions to advance his own cause and kingdom. Many crucial doctrines have been clarified and purified in the flames of controversy and persecution. Should we expect our times to be any different? At this point I expect many Christians raise their flags and protest that Jesus and the apostles never went out of their way to argue. Apparently these skeptics have skipped over the part in Acts 17 where Paul disputed with the Epicurean and stoic philosophers in Athens. Since the Bible uses the word "disputed", I think it's safe to say that Paul wasn't too worried about offending his opponents. Third, the only basis for true Biblical unity is not to ignore truth or theology, but to vigorously study it, adhere to it, advocate it, and defend it. Any type of “Christian” union or corporation that ignores, downplays or alters the truth is destructive of the faith. Such a union arises not from the bedrock of Scripture but from the shifting sand of backslidden and apostate bureaucrats. The purpose in arguing is not to argue. The purpose in arguing is to discover the truth. It's all about the truth. We need the truth to build our foundation upon the rock instead of on the sand. We know the Bible doesn't just contain the truth inside its pages, but that the Bible is, itself, actual truth. Our Biblical challenge is not to avoid truth, which may be controversial but, rather, to speak the truth in love as instructed in Ephesians 4:14-15. This makes it all the more critical to be certain of interpretation of scripture. It is not something to be taken lightly. "I urge you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned. Keep away from them. For such people are not serving our Lord Christ, but their own appetites. By smooth talk and flattery they deceive the minds of naive people." Romans 16:17-18 Paul, the apostle, was adamant on the subject of doctrine. His admonition quoted from the Epistle to the Romans was not to avoid the issue of doctrine, but rather to mark those who teach doctrine contrary to that which was once for all delivered to the saints. Jude agrees that Christian doctrine was settled at the time of the writing of his Epistle, but that heresy was creeping into the church. "Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt I had to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints. For certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are Godless men, who change the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord." Jude 1:3-4 The point is made clear throughout scripture. It is not enough to be one in heart. Acts 4:32 states that all the believers were "one in heart and mind". Is it not common sense that they were one in heart because they were one in mind? Don't forget that even the apostle Paul had a sharp disagreement with Barnabus. Acts 15:39 says that the disagreement was so sharp that it caused them to part company. This is by no means an example of Paul and Barnabus acting outside of the will of God. It's a fine example, however, of Paul and Barnabus being completely logical. Anyone who thinks that denominations are somehow wrong, or that the ecumenical church needs to lay down its differences and just be one is not looking at the big picture. I find it completely repulsive that such evangelicals as Charles Colson, Bill Bright, J. I. Packer, Richard Mouw, Os Guiness, Pat Robertson, and Mark Noll would come together and sign the ECT contract in 1994. That's like taking one step forward and two steps back. I say again, since the protestant reformation began over a disagreement in doctrine, it seems preposterous that some are telling us that truth must be minimized for the sake of unity. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 11th, 2006
1:30 am	"We Didn't Start the Fire" . "We didn't start the fire It was always burning since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire No, we didn't light it But we tried to fight it" -Billy Joel (Copyright 1989 Sony Music Entertainment) (Comment on this)
Monday, August 28th, 2006
7:01 pm	"Others May - You May Not" by G. D. Watson If God has called you to be really like Christ in all your spirit, He will draw you into a life of crucifixion and humility and put on you such demands of obedience, that He will not allow you to follow other Christians, and in many ways He will seem to let other good people do things which He will not let you do. Others can brag on themselves, and their work, on their success, on their writings, but the Holy Spirit will not allow you to do any such thing, and if you begin it, He will lead you into some deep mortification that will make you despise yourself and all your good works. The Lord will let others be honored and put forward, and keep you hid away in obscurity because He wants to produce some choice fragrant fruit for His glory, which can be produced only in the shade. Others will be allowed to succeed in making money, but it is likely God will keep you poor because he wants you to have something far better than gold and that is a helpless dependence on Him; that He may have the privilege of supplying your needs day by day - out of an unseen treasury. God will let others be great, but He will keep you small. He will let others do a great work for Him and get credit for it, but He will make you work and toil on without knowing how much you are doing; and then to make your work still more precious, He will let others get the credit for the work you have done, and this will make your reward ten times greater when He comes. The Holy Spirit will put strict watch over you, with a jealous love, and will rebuke you for little words and feelings, or for wasting your time, which other Christians never seem distressed over. So make up your mind that God is an infinite Sovereign, and has a right to do what He pleases with His own, and He will not explain to you a thousand things which may puzzle you in His dealing with you. He will wrap you up in a jealous love, and let other people say and do many things that you cannot do or say. Settle it forever, that you are to deal directly with the Holy Spirit, and that He is to have the privilege of tying your tongue, or chaining your hand, or closing your eyes, in ways that others are not dealt with. Now, when you are so possessed with the Living God that you are, in your secret heart, pleased and delighted over this particular personal, private, jealous guardianship and management of the Holy Spirit over your life, you will have found the vestibule of heaven. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 20th, 2006
8:29 am	My Brother's Blog . http://www.notconformedthoughts.com/index.cfm?pagenum=0 very good stuff here (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 13th, 2006
4:23 am	Screw the Media! . The following is adapted from a speech delivered in Palm Beach, Florida, on February 22, 2006 by Fred Barnes: Let me begin by defining three terms that are thrown around in debates about the media today. The first is objectivity, which means reporting the news with none of your own political views or instincts slanting the story one way or another. Perfect objectivity is pretty hard for anyone to attain, but it can be approximated. Then there's fairness. Fairness concedes that there may be some slant in a news story, but requires that a reporter will be honest and not misleading with regard to those with whom he disagrees. And finally there's balance, which means that both sides on an issue or on politics in general—or more than two sides, when there are more than two—get a hearing. My topic today is how the mainstream media—meaning nationally influential newspapers like the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today; influential regional papers like the Miami Herald, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times; the broadcast networks and cable news stations like CNN; and the wire services, which now are pretty much reduced to the Associated Press—stacks up in terms of the latter two journalistic standards, fairness and balance. In my opinion, they don't stack up very well. Twenty years ago I wrote a piece in The New Republic entitled “Media Realignment,” and the thrust of it was that the mainstream media was shedding some of its liberal slant and moving more to the center. This was in the Reagan years, and I pointed to things like USA Today, which was then about five years old and was a champion of the Reagan economic recovery. CNN was younger then, too, and quite different from the way it is now; Ted Turner owned it, but he wasn't manipulating it the way he did later, which turned it into something quite different. Financial news was suddenly very big in the midst of the 401 (k) revolution, and the stock market boom was getting a lot of coverage. The New Republic, where I worked, had been pro-Stalin in the 1930s, but by the 1980s had become very pro-Reagan and anti-communist on foreign policy. I also cited a rise of new conservative columnists like George Will. But looking back on that piece now, I see that I couldn't have been more wrong. The idea that the mainstream media was moving to the center was a mirage. In fact, I would say that compared to what I was writing about back in the 1980s, the mainstream media today is more liberal, more elitist, more secular, more biased, more hostile to conservatives and Republicans, and more self-righteous. Liberalism is endemic in the mainstream media today. Evan Thomas—the deputy editor of Newsweek and one of the honest liberals in the media—noted this very thing with regard to coverage of the 2004 presidential race, which I'll discuss later. It was obvious, he said, that the large majority in the media wanted John Kerry to win and that this bias slanted their coverage. And indeed, every poll of the media—and there have been a lot of them—shows that they're liberal, secular and so on. Polls of the Washington press corps, for instance, about who they voted for in 2004 always show that nine-to-one or ten-to-one of them voted Democratic. Peter Brown, a columnist who just recently left the Orlando Sentinel, conducted a poll a few years ago of newspaper staffs all around the country—not just at the big papers, but midsize papers and even some small papers—and found that this disparity existed everywhere. Nor is this likely to change. Hugh Hewitt, the California lawyer and blogger and talk radio host, spent a few days recently at the Columbia Journalism School, supposedly the premiere journalism school in America. He spoke to a couple of classes there and polled them on who they had voted for. He found only one Bush voter in all the classes he spoke to. Steve Hayes, a fine young writer and reporter at The Weekly Standard, went to Columbia Journalism School and says that during his time there he was one of only two or three conservative students out of hundreds. This is not to say that there aren't many fine young conservative journalists. But they aren't likely to be hired in the mainstream media. When I was at The New Republic for ten years—and The New Republic was quite liberal, despite its hawkish foreign policy—any young person who joined the staff and wrote stories that were interesting and demonstrated that he or she could write well was grabbed immediately by the New York Times or other big newspapers, Newsweek, Time or the networks. But that doesn't happen at The Weekly Standard, where I work now. Some of our young writers are the most talented I have ever met in my 30-plus years in journalism. But they don't get those phone calls. Why? Because they're with a conservative magazine. Of course there has been one famous exception—David Brooks, who is now the conservative columnist with the New York Times. But he was probably the least conservative person at The Weekly Standard. Conservatives are tokens on most editorial pages, just as they are on the broadcast networks and on cable news stations like CNN and MSNBC. Of course, I have a vested interest, since I work for FOX News; but if you compare the number of liberal commentators on FOX—and there are a lot of them—with the number of conservatives on those other stations, you'll see what I mean. The fact is that the mainstream media doesn't want conservatives. It doesn't matter whether they're good reporters or writers. They go out of their way not to hire them. This was true 20 years ago, and it's true today. This impenetrability is why conservatives have had to erect the alternative media—talk radio, the blogs, conservative magazines and FOX News. Together, these form a real infrastructure that's an alternative to the mainstream media. But it's still a lot smaller, it's not as influential and it's largely reactive. It's not the equal of the mainstream media, that's for sure. One way to see the unequaled power of the mainstream media is in how it is able to shape and create the stories that we're stuck talking about in America. A good example is Cindy Sheehan last summer. The Sheehan story was a total creation of the mainstream media. And in creating the story, the media shamelessly mischaracterized Sheehan. It portrayed her as simply a poor woman who wanted to see President Bush because her son had been killed in Iraq. Well, in the first place, she had already seen President Bush once. Also, though you would never know it from the dominant coverage, she was in favor of the Iraqi insurgency—the beheaders, the killers of innocent women and children. She was on their side, and she said so. She was also filled with a deep hatred of Israel. Yet the media treated her in a completely sympathetic manner, failing to report the beliefs that she made little attempt to hide. In any case, the Cindy Sheehan story came to dominate the news for the latter part of the summer; only the mainstream media still has the power to make stories big. To see how distorted the mainstream media's view of the world can be, one need only compare its coverage of the Valerie Plame “leak” story with its coverage of the NSA surveillance leak story. Plame is the CIA agent whose name was written about by reporter Robert Novak in a column, following which the media portrayed her as having been outed as an undercover CIA agent. The simple facts from the beginning were that she was not an undercover agent any more; she was not even overseas. The story had no national security repercussions at all—none. But that didn't stop the media, which built the story up to great heights—apparently in the groundless hope that it would lead to an indictment of Karl Rove—and kept it front page news, at least intermittently, for what seemed like forever. The NSA surveillance story, on the other hand, also created by the media—this time pursuant to a real leak, and one that was clearly in violation of the law—had tremendous national security implications. After all, it revealed a secret and crucial program that was being used to uncover plots to bomb and massacre Americans and probably rendered that program no longer effective. Not only was this important story treated on an equal basis with the non-story of Valerie Plame, but the media was not interested, for the most part, in its national security repercussions. Instead the media mischaracterized the story as a “domestic spying scandal,” suggesting constitutional overreach by the Bush administration. Well, a domestic spying story is exactly what the story was not. Those being spied on were Al-Qaeda members overseas who were using the telephone. If some of those calls were with people in the U.S., they were monitored for that reason only. But the media's stubborn mischaracterization of the story continued to frame the debate. This brings me to the use of unfair and unbalanced labeling by the media. How often, if ever, have you heard or read the term “ultraliberal”? I don't think I've ever heard or read it. You'll hear and see the term “ultraconservative” a lot, but not “ultraliberal”—even though there are plenty of ultraliberals. Another widely used labeling term is “activist.” If people are working to block a shopping center from being built or campaigning against Wal-Mart, they are called “activists.” Of course, what the term “activist” means is liberal. But while conservatives are called conservatives by the media, liberals are “activists.” For years we've seen something similar with regard to debates over judicial nominees. The Federalist Society, with which many conservative judicial nominees tend to be associated, is always referred to as the conservative Federalist Society, as if that's part of its name. But the groups opposing conservative nominees are rarely if ever labeled as liberal—giving the impression that they, unlike the Federalist Society, are somehow objective. Related to this, I would mention that conservatives are often labeled in a way to suggest they are mean and hateful. Liberals criticize, but conservatives hate. Have you noticed that the media never characterizes individuals or groups as Bush haters? There are Bush critics, but there are no Bush haters—whereas in the Clinton years, critics of the president were often referred to as Clinton haters. I'm not saying that there weren't Clinton haters on the fringes in the 1990s. But far-left groups like MoveOn.org have been treated as acceptable within the mainstream of American politics today by the media, while in truth they are as clearly animated by hatred as the most rabid anti-Clinton voices ever were. With regard to religion, Christianity in particular—but also religious faith in general—is reflexively treated as something dangerous and pernicious by the mainstream media. Back in the early 1990s when I was still at The New Republic, I was invited to a dinner in Washington with Mario Cuomo. He was then governor of New York, and had invited several reporters to dinner because he was thinking about running for president. At one point that night he mentioned that he sent his children to Catholic schools in New York because he wanted them to be taught about a God-centered universe. This was in the context of expressing his whole-hearted support for public schools. But from the reaction, you would have thought he had said that one day a week he would bring out the snakes in his office and make policy decisions based on where they bit him. He was subsequently pummeled with stories about how improper it was for him, one, to send his kids to religious schools, and two, to talk about it. It was amazing. The most rigid form of secularism passes as the standard in mainstream journalism these days. President Bush is similarly treated as someone who is obsessive about his religion. And what does he do? Well, he reads a devotional every day; he tries to get through the Bible, I think, once a year; and he prays. Now, I know many, many people who do this. Tens of millions of people do it. And yet the media treats Bush as some religious nut and pursues this story inaccurately. Again, it is clear that partisan bias is involved, too, because in fact, Bush talks publicly about his faith much less than other presidents have. There is a good book about Bush's religion by Paul Kengor, who went back to every word President Clinton spoke and found out that Clinton quoted scripture and mentioned God and Jesus Christ more than President Bush has. You would never get that from the mainstream media. The partisan bias of the mainstream media has been at no time more evident than during the last presidential election. Presidential candidates used to be savaged equally by the media. No matter who—Republican or Democrat—they both used to take their hits. But that's not true any more. Robert Lichter, at the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, measures the broadcast news for all sorts of things, including how they treat candidates. He's been doing it now for nearly 20 years. And would anyone care to guess what presidential candidate in all those years has gotten the most favorable treatment from the broadcast media? The answer is John Kerry, who got 77 percent favorable coverage in the stories regarding him on the three broadcast news shows. For Bush, it was 34 percent. This was true despite the fact that Kerry made his Vietnam service the motif of the Democratic National Convention, followed weeks later by 64 Swift Boat vets who served with Kerry in Vietnam claiming that he didn't do the things he said he did. It was a huge story, but the mainstream media didn't want to cover it and didn't cover it, for week after week after week. There was an amazingly well documented book written by a man named John O'Neill—himself a Swift Boat vet—who went into great detail about why John Kerry didn't deserve his three Purple Hearts, etc. It might have been a right-wing screed, but if you actually read it, it wasn't a screed. It backed up its claims with evidence. Normally in journalism, when somebody makes some serious charges against a well-known person, reporters look into the charges to see if they're true or not. If they aren't, reporters look into the motives behind the false charges—for instance, to find out if someone paid the person making the false charges, and so on. But that's not what the media did in this case. The New York Times responded immediately by investigating the financing of the Swift Boat vets, rather than by trying to determine whether what they were saying was true. Ultimately, grudgingly—after bloggers and FOX News had covered the story sufficiently long that it couldn't be ignored—the mainstream media had to pick up on the story. But its whole effort was aimed at knocking down what the Swift Boat vets were saying. Compare this with September 8, 2004, when Dan Rather reported on documents that he said showed not only that President Bush used preferential treatment to get into the Texas National Guard, but that he hadn't even done all his service. The very next morning, the whole story—because CBS put one of the documents on its Web site—was knocked down. It was knocked down because a blogger on a Web site called Little Green Footballs made a copy on his computer of the document that was supposedly made on a typewriter 30 years earlier and demonstrated that it was a fraud made on a modern computer. Then, only a few weeks after that embarrassment, CBS came up with a story, subsequently picked up by the New York Times, that an arms cache of 400 tons of ammunition in Iraq had been left unguarded by the American military and that the insurgents had gotten hold of it. Well, it turned out that they didn't know whether the insurgents had gotten that ammunition or not, or whether indeed the American military had possession of it. It was about a week before the election that these major news organizations broke this unsubstantiated story, something that would have been unimaginable in past campaigns. Why would they do that? Why would Dan Rather insist on releasing fraudulent documents when even his own experts recommended against it? Why would CBS and the New York Times come back with an explosive but unsubstantiated arms cache story only weeks later? They did it for one reason: They wanted to defeat President Bush for re-election. There is no other motive that would explain disregarding all the precautions you're taught you should have in journalism. I'll wind up on a positive note, however. Forty years ago, John Kenneth Galbraith—the great liberal Harvard economist—said that he knew conservatism was dead because it was bookless. Conservatives didn't publish books. And to some extent, it was true at the time. But it's no longer true. Conservatives have become such prolific writers and consumers of books that Random House and other publishing companies have started separate conservative imprints. Nowadays it is common to see two or three or four conservative books—some of them kind of trashy, but some of them very good—on the bestseller list. Insofar as books are an indication of how well conservatives are doing—at least in the publishing part of the media world—I would say they're doing quite well. They're not winning, but they're much better off than they were before—something that can't be said about how they are faring in the unfair and unbalanced mainstream media. (Comment on this)
Monday, August 7th, 2006
12:46 am	On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs by Dave Grossman Honor never grows old, and honor rejoices the heart of age. It does so because honor is, finally, about defending those noble and worthy things that deserve defending, even if it comes at a high cost. In our time, that may mean social disapproval, public scorn, hardship, persecution, or as always,even death itself. The question remains: What is worth defending? What is worth dying for? What is worth living for? - William J. Bennett - in a lecture to the United States Naval Academy November 24, 1997 One Vietnam veteran, an old retired colonel, once said this to me: "Most of the people in our society are sheep. They are kind, gentle, productive creatures who can only hurt one another by accident." This is true. Remember, the murder rate is six per 100,000 per year, and the aggravated assault rate is four per 1,000 per year. What this means is that the vast majority of Americans are not inclined to hurt one another. Some estimates say that two million Americans are victims of violent crimes every year, a tragic, staggering number, perhaps an all-time record rate of violent crime. But there are almost 300 million Americans, which means that the odds of being a victim of violent crime is considerably less than one in a hundred on any given year. Furthermore, since many violent crimes are committed by repeat offenders, the actual number of violent citizens is considerably less than two million. Thus there is a paradox, and we must grasp both ends of the situation: We may well be in the most violent times in history, but violence is still remarkably rare. This is because most citizens are kind, decent people who are not capable of hurting each other, except by accident or under extreme provocation. They are sheep. I mean nothing negative by calling them sheep. To me it is like the pretty, blue robin's egg. Inside it is soft and gooey but someday it will grow into something wonderful. But the egg cannot survive without its hard blue shell. Police officers, soldiers, and other warriors are like that shell, and someday the civilization they protect will grow into something wonderful.? For now, though, they need warriors to protect them from the predators. "Then there are the wolves," the old war veteran said, "and the wolves feed on the sheep without mercy." Do you believe there are wolves out there who will feed on the flock without mercy? You better believe it. There are evil men in this world and they are capable of evil deeds. The moment you forget that or pretend it is not so, you become a sheep. There is no safety in denial. "Then there are sheepdogs," he went on, "and I'm a sheepdog. I live to protect the flock and confront the wolf." If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen, a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath, a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? What do you have then? A sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero's path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed Let me expand on this old soldier's excellent model of the sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. We know that the sheep live in denial, that is what makes them sheep. They do not want to believe that there is evil in the world. They can accept the fact that fires can happen, which is why they want fire extinguishers, fire sprinklers, fire alarms and fire exits throughout their kids' schools. But many of them are outraged at the idea of putting an armed police officer in their kid's school. Our children are thousands of times more likely to be killed or seriously injured by school violence than fire, but the sheep's only response to the possibility of violence is denial. The idea of someone coming to kill or harm their child is just too hard, and so they chose the path of denial. The sheep generally do not like the sheepdog. He looks a lot like the wolf. He has fangs and the capacity for violence. The difference, though, is that the sheepdog must not, can not and will not ever harm the sheep. Any sheep dog who intentionally harms the lowliest little lamb will be punished and removed. The world cannot work any other way, at least not in a representative democracy or a republic such as ours. Still, the sheepdog disturbs the sheep. He is a constant reminder that there are wolves in the land. They would prefer that he didn't tell them where to go, or give them traffic tickets, or stand at the ready in our airports in camouflage fatigues holding an M-16. The sheep would much rather have the sheepdog cash in his fangs, spray paint himself white, and go, "Baa." Until the wolf shows up. Then the entire flock tries desperately to hide behind one lonely sheepdog. The students, the victims, at Columbine High School were big, tough high school students, and under ordinary circumstances they would not have had the time of day for a police officer. They were not bad kids; they just had nothing to say to a cop. When the school was under attack, however, and SWAT teams were clearing the rooms and hallways, the officers had to physically peel those clinging, sobbing kids off of them. This is how the little lambs feel about their sheepdog when the wolf is at the door. Look at what happened after September 11, 2001 when the wolf pounded hard on the door. Remember how America, more than ever before, felt differently about their law enforcement officers and military personnel? Remember how many times you heard the word hero? Understand that there is nothing morally superior about being a sheepdog; it is just what you choose to be. Also understand that a sheepdog is a funny critter: He is always sniffing around out on the perimeter, checking the breeze, barking at things that go bump in the night, and yearning for a righteous battle. That is, the young sheepdogs yearn for a righteous battle. The old sheepdogs are a little older and wiser, but they move to the sound of the guns when needed right along with the young ones. Here is how the sheep and the sheepdog think differently. The sheep pretend the wolf will never come, but the sheepdog lives for that day. After the attacks on September 11, 2001, most of the sheep, that is, most citizens in America said, "Thank God I wasn't on one of those planes." The sheepdogs, the warriors, said, "Dear God, I wish I could have been on one of those planes. Maybe I could have made a difference." When you are truly transformed into a warrior and have truly invested yourself into warriorhood, you want to be there. You want to be able to make a difference. There is nothing morally superior about the sheepdog, the warrior, but he does have one real advantage. Only one. And that is that he is able to survive and thrive in an environment that destroys 98 percent of the population. There was research conducted a few years ago with individuals convicted of violent crimes. These cons were in prison for serious, predatory crimes of violence: assaults, murders and killing law enforcement officers. The vast majority said that they specifically targeted victims by body language: slumped walk, passive behavior and lack of awareness. They chose their victims like big cats do in Africa, when they select one out of the herd that is least able to protect itself. Some people may be destined to be sheep and others might be genetically primed to be wolves or sheepdogs. But I believe that most people can choose which one they want to be, and I'm proud to say that more and more Americans are choosing to become sheepdogs. Seven months after the attack on September 11, 2001, Todd Beamer was honored in his hometown of Cranbury, New Jersey. Todd, as you recall, was the man on Flight 93 over Pennsylvania who called on his cell phone to alert an operator from United Airlines about the hijacking. When he learned of the other three passenger planes that had been used as weapons, Todd dropped his phone and uttered the words, "Let's roll," which authorities believe was a signal to the other passengers to confront the terrorist hijackers. In one hour, a transformation occurred among the passengers - athletes, business people and parents. -- from sheep to sheepdogs and together they fought the wolves, ultimately saving an unknown number of lives on the ground. There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men. - Edmund Burke Here is the point I like to emphasize, especially to the thousands of police officers and soldiers I speak to each year. In nature the sheep, real sheep, are born as sheep. Sheepdogs are born that way, and so are wolves. They didn't have a choice. But you are not a critter. As a human being, you can be whatever you want to be. It is a conscious, moral decision. If you want to be a sheep, then you can be a sheep and that is okay, but you must understand the price you pay. When the wolf comes, you and your loved ones are going to die if there is not a sheepdog there to protect you. If you want to be a wolf, you can be one, but the sheepdogs are going to hunt you down and you will never have rest, safety, trust or love. But if you want to be a sheepdog and walk the warrior's path, then you must make a conscious and moral decision every day to dedicate, equip and prepare yourself to thrive in that toxic, corrosive moment when the wolf comes knocking at the door. For example, many officers carry their weapons in church.? They are well concealed in ankle holsters, shoulder holsters or inside-the-belt holsters tucked into the small of their backs.? Anytime you go to some form of religious service, there is a very good chance that a police officer in your congregation is carrying. You will never know if there is such an individual in your place of worship, until the wolf appears to massacre you and your loved ones. I was training a group of police officers in Texas, and during the break, one officer asked his friend if he carried his weapon in church. The other cop replied, "I will never be caught without my gun in church." I asked why he felt so strongly about this, and he told me about a cop he knew who was at a church massacre in Ft. Worth, Texas in 1999. In that incident, a mentally deranged individual came into the church and opened fire, gunning down fourteen people. He said that officer believed he could have saved every life that day if he had been carrying his gun. His own son was shot, and all he could do was throw himself on the boy's body and wait to die. That cop looked me in the eye and said, "Do you have any idea how hard it would be to live with yourself after that?" Some individuals would be horrified if they knew this police officer was carrying a weapon in church. They might call him paranoid and would probably scorn him. Yet these same individuals would be enraged and would call for "heads to roll" if they found out that the airbags in their cars were defective, or that the fire extinguisher and fire sprinklers in their kids' school did not work. They can accept the fact that fires and traffic accidents can happen and that there must be safeguards against them. Their only response to the wolf, though, is denial, and all too often their response to the sheepdog is scorn and disdain. But the sheepdog quietly asks himself, "Do you have and idea how hard it would be to live with yourself if your loved ones attacked and killed, and you had to stand there helplessly because you were unprepared for that day?" It is denial that turns people into sheep. Sheep are psychologically destroyed by combat because their only defense is denial, which is counterproductive and destructive, resulting in fear, helplessness and horror when the wolf shows up. Denial kills you twice. It kills you once, at your moment of truth when you are not physically prepared: you didn't bring your gun, you didn't train. Your only defense was wishful thinking. Hope is not a strategy. Denial kills you a second time because even if you do physically survive, you are psychologically shattered by your fear helplessness and horror at your moment of truth. Gavin de Becker puts it like this in Fear Less, his superb post-9/11 book, which should be required reading for anyone trying to come to terms with our current world situation: "...denial can be seductive, but it has an insidious side effect. For all the peace of mind deniers think they get by saying it isn't so, the fall they take when faced with new violence is all the more unsettling." Denial is a save-now-pay-later scheme, a contract written entirely in small print, for in the long run, the denying person knows the truth on some level. And so the warrior must strive to confront denial in all aspects of his life, and prepare himself for the day when evil comes. If you are warrior who is legally authorized to carry a weapon and you step outside without that weapon, then you become a sheep, pretending that the bad man will not come today. No one can be "on" 24/7, for a lifetime. Everyone needs down time. But if you are authorized to carry a weapon, and you walk outside without it, just take a deep breath, and say this to yourself... "Baa." This business of being a sheep or a sheep dog is not a yes-no dichotomy. It is not an all-or-nothing, either-or choice. It is a matter of degrees, a continuum. On one end is an abject, head-in-the-sand-sheep and on the other end is the ultimate warrior. Few people exist completely on one end or the other. Most of us live somewhere in between. Since 9-11 almost everyone in America took a step up that continuum, away from denial. The sheep took a few steps toward accepting and appreciating their warriors, and the warriors started taking their job more seriously. The degree to which you move up that continuum, away from sheephood and denial, is the degree to which you and your loved ones will survive, physically and psychologically at your moment of truth. (1 Comment |Comment on this)