Essential Virtue

Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks -- no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea, if there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them."

-- James Madison (speech at the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 20 June 1788)

Of Multicultural Patriots

A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. And the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes.

-- Woodrow Wilson

Canadian free speech at risk

Canadians who do not like their hate-speech policy, it turns out, are not free to call censors unflattering things.

Let me rephrase. Canadians are not free to call censors "enemies of free speech." Even if, by the clear meaning of the English language (as well as by American standards) that's what hate-speech censors are, just because they're censors: Enemies of free speech.

. . . [A Canadian] judge ruled that a government official working from duly enacted government policy cannot be an enemy of free speech. That's just unthinkable!

Yes, in Canada you may not speak the truth about free speech to its official enemies. In Canada, the reason why we [Americans] must defend even the most vile speech and writing becomes clear: because suppression of it eventually leads to the inability to criticize government.

You know you've lost your freedom when you cannot call a censor a censor.

-- Paul Jacob, townhall.com, 12/9/07

Military Minds

I've attended several conferences sponsored by the military. They bring in a bunch of civilian experts (and one sci-fi author who is an expert in nothing, but he wrote Ender's Game) and seat them at a table and each of them gives a presentation. Then they question each other in sharp-witted conversation,proving and testing each other's ideas.

During all of this, the walls of the room are lined with soldiers. Officers young and old, who listen.

Just listen.

Not that they don't have opinions. On the contrary -- when I've met these same officers in other contexts, I have been deeply impressed by the level of intellectual rigor among our military.

I daresay that if you're looking for the sharpest thinking in America, you'll find more of it in the military than in the university -- because the military know that a lot of lives depend on their getting right answers, whereas is many academic departments absolutely nothing is at stake and they can teach and write any amount of nonsense without any effect in the real world.

But in those conferences, the soldiers sit silently against the wall, saying nothing; not even their faces show what they're thinking.

-- Orson Scott Card, meridianmagazine.com, 11/27/07

Who started the crusade, anyway?

Somehow, my worthy, lifelong profession, the mass media -- following the lead of the cultural establishment -- have made up their collective mind that the evangelicals, the religious-righters, the preachers, the shouters, call them what you will, launched in the '60s some cockeyed crusade to put the Holy Bible in the center of our affairs. Putting it there might not be such a bad thing, but assuredly, that's not what the preachers, etc., undertook.

The preachers didn't start this business; the secularists did. Out of the celestial blue came the news from the U.S. Supreme Court, in the '60s, that the public schools enjoyed no right to allow prayer of any kind or the reading of the Bible.

-- Bill Murchison, townhall.com, 12/11/07

Vice President McCain

[There are] five iron-clad and important Running Mate Rules.

1. FAMILIAR AND REASSURING. Most successful running mates of recent years were well-known, highly respected senior statesmen -- not newcomers or rookies.
2. OLDER. . . . there's something vastly reassuring about an older Vice Presidential nominee whose only interest is service and support, rather than plotting his own future races for the top job.
3. INSIDER. . . . We all want a Vice President who knows Washington well enough to step into the job at a moment's notice.
4. FORMER CANDIDATE. . . . The big advantage in choosing a Vice Presidential nominee who's run before for President is that the candidate has already been vetted -- whatever skeletons he (or she) may have kept stashed in the closet has already been discussed and digested by the press.
5. With mainstream media fixated on various "firsts" in the Presidential race(first woman, black, Hispanic, Mormon, and Italian American double-divorcee as serious candidates) there's a natural tendency to look at other "breakthrough"possibilities in a running mate. Any smart nominee will resist this temptation: whenever it's been tried in the past, it's always failed.

With these commons sense, unassailable rules in mind, one potential choice for the Vice Presidential nomination should emerge as an apparent Veep frontrunner-- and his name is John McCain.

-- Michael Medved, townhall.com, 12/12/07

Bigotry Revealed

When Mike Huckabee asked a New York Times' reporter, "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers," he crossed a line he cannot uncross. . . .

Huckabee's obvious attempt to salt the mine and get the reporter to carry anti-Mormon rhetoric into the paper without Huckabee's fingerprints on it backfired, and the transparent attempt to use the MSM to further the anti-Mormon message was repulsive. . . .

He went to CNN immediately thereafter and asked for forgiveness.

Will that put Huckabee's anti-Mormon genie back in its bottle. I don't think so. "That which is said while drunk has been thought out beforehand," goes the old saying. In the modern media world, candidates for the presidency don't say careless things to the New York Times. It was a premeditated aside, an attempt to get a virus into circulation. It didn't work, but it did tell us a lot about Mike Huckabee.

-- Hugh Hewitt, townhall.com, 12/13/07