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| Get Real, America | Saddam Gets The Death Penalty |
by Christopher Chantrill
November 03, 2006 at 8:29 am
WHY DO I GET a feeling of déjà vu about Peggy Noonan’s appreciation of Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), now in a fight for his political life?
Noonan wheels out an unnamed moderate Republican senator to give us a look at his character.
The other day I called a former senator, a crusty old moderate Republican, and asked him if he liked Mr. Santorum. "No," he said, "I love him."
...
The former senator: "The political scientists all say to be honest and stand for principle, that's what people want. And he was exactly that, and he's about to get his head handed to him."
The guy thought for a moment and then said it was sad.
Then Noonan tells a story about the Santorums, Rick and Karen, praying every night for their opponents, the Careys, in the Pennsylvania race for the Senate. They knew how hard the campaign was for them, so they assumed it must be just has hard for their opponents.
It made me think of another man who for his entire political career was defined by his enemies, just as Santorum is hated by liberals of all stripes, as a hard-right ideologue.
Yes, of course. Ronald Reagan.
If you are a liberal comer, like, oh let’s say Barack Obama, you get fawning profiles in the MSM about what a wonderful person you are way back when you are just an asterisk, an inexperienced politician still wet behind the ears.
But if you are a conservative comer you run the gauntlet of liberal rabbit punchers your entire political career.
We only know the real Ronald Reagan, extraordinary man and great president, years after his departure from the arena of high politics as the men and women that worked for him tell their stories.
And so it seems it must be also for Rick Santorum.
Oh, he’s such a great guy, we learn, only after a long decade of liberal langrel.
If you want to know what people are really like, never, never, never listen to a liberal.
I’m sick of it.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists, she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is merely relative, is asking you not to believe him. So dont.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Paul Dirac: When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.
John Farrell, The Creation Myth
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, Letter to Lord Lytton
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
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©2007 Christopher Chantrill