Summum Bonum

The debacles of the last 6 months of the Obama administration should come as no surprise to anyone who has studied the essence of authentic leadership. This summer I was standing in the Churchill War Cabinet Rooms Museum right behind Whitehall in London and I was struck by the contrast between a seasoned prepared leader such as Churchill and Obama.

The tape has been released and there is absolutely no evidence of police misconduct in Cambridge, Mass against Henry Louis Gates. Big surprise. The “teachable moment” is here for Obama and Gates not for officer Crowley. Gates’ neighbors were concerned about his property and Crowley was simply doing his job. The circus could have been avoided if both Obama and Gates judged human beings by the “content of their character” and if Obama had simply waited for the facts.

Good piece by Salon’s Christopher Lee on the secretive process behind the periodic, increasingly ludicrous expansions of “disorders” by the authors of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

Lee doesn’t go there, but I’d predict that a great deal of what the secrecy is hiding is serious, and improper, involvement by pharmaceutical companies.

Creeping diagnostitis…wonder if there’s a pill for that?

One of the attributes of modernity has been the rise of what Orwell called Newspeak in 1984. The totalitarian misuse of language is alive and well in the West and especially in the US as we continue to allow our political leaders to misuse language and warp the truth.

CNN reporter who argued with Chicago tea party protesters on-air was let go by CNN.

I have to give Politico credit; they have had the courage to expose the basis of the bias against Palin: the fact that she gave birth to her youngest son, Trig. I have always thought that this is a major source of the hatred for Palin amongst political elites, both left and right. Trig and his mother witness to and embody what the right to life means in time and actuality. Parents who have special needs children embody the unconditional nature of human worth. There are many such parents whose voices are not heard in this hate-filled political din of our time.

One of the few. Jake Tapper of ABC news seems to be doing some investigative journalism. He has reported on the intimidation tactics of several of Obama’s cabinet heads against Senator Kyle of Arizona and the people of Arizona who do not believe the so-called “stimulus” spending bill is working. He suggested that it be stopped:

I used to enjoy Prairie Home Companion. Garrison Keillor’s latest, in the NYT, is called “In Praise of Ordinariness.” A good  topic, and a Christian one.

But what’s this? After praising an ordinary Midwestern street and its flowers, etc.: “There are men who would destroy this street and other men would defend us against them: Those opposing men may have more in common with each other than with the people living on this street or the people in whose names it would be destroyed.”

What?? The soldiers and Marines who are defending us have more in common with Al Qaeda than with the “ordinary” garden-tenders Keillor praises? And this is the insight Keillor gets right after being in church?

There it is, right there, the moral equivalence and militant dumbness that helped destroy liberalism and made it illiberal. Yes, the Tokyo firebombing was reprehensible, but it’s really just too easy to make us equivalent to the Japanese (as Keillor does). Note how he also devalues the Holocaust. That devaluation is another by-product of liberal moral equivalence.

Making moral distinctions is just too hard, isn’t it, Mr. Keillor? Easier to take refuge in pious attitudinizing. The smug certainties are laid out like flowers in a mid-western flowerbed, the eye casually flicking over them. No need to think; it’s an aesthetic appreciation that’s on offer here. But those flowers are giving  off an odor of self-satisfied complacency. Or maybe that’s just you. Call it twenty-first-century Babbittry.

I have heard from the journalistically connected that Peggy Noonan’s spot on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has helped make the editorial page popular. I really can’t argue with this–I am most definitely not connected. But what I can make an assessment of is what she writes and her behavior on the political stage. My very minority opinion is that Noonan is a political and social snob who cultivates an image of equanimity and tsk-tsk moralism. She sits in her ivory tower and pronounces that we must all get along, that “we must all grow up” about Sotomayer’s confirmation, that Sarah Palin must now move on because after all she really wasn’t suited for the political stage— she is only really “a retail politician” after all, that Palin actually harmed our fair republic and the Republican party from becoming a grand old party again with only the “best” people leading it. Noonan reminds me of a cross between Barbara Walters and Martha Stewart in her affect. And her columns drip with mild-mannered condescension toward many mainstream Americans in the red states who are not willing to accept the current administration’s policies on many many fronts.