Small Arms Fire

Real Conservatism. Mark Steyn

With a few exceptions (such as Vermont), “blue states” mostly turn out to be red states with a couple of big blue cities (Pennsylvania, for example, or even California). Almost by definition, an effective conservative executive – the kind you might want in the White House – can only come from flyover country.

So, when a conservative pundit mocks Wasilla, he’s mocking conservatism as it’s actually lived, as opposed to conservatism as a theoretical fantasy playground for the purposes of cocktail-party banter.

Spread the Wealth Around. Power Line Blog raises as interesting question.

Currently, Barack Obama is outspending John McCain on the airwaves by something like four to one. It seems likely that he will succeed in buying the Presidential election.

But wait! We know that Obama is in favor of “spreading the wealth around” so as to achieve what he thinks is fairness. So presumably Obama will be willing to share his vast resources with the McCain campaign so the playing field will be level for the last weeks of the campaign. That’s only fair, right? What do you say, Barack? And if not, why not?

Packing It All into One Paragraph. Melanie Phillips doesn’t mince words:

I see this financial breakdown, moreover, as being not merely a moral crisis but the monetary expression of the broader degradation of our values – the erosion of duty and responsibility to others in favour of instant gratification, unlimited demands repackaged as ‘rights’ and the loss of self-discipline. And the root cause of that erosion is ‘militant atheism’ which, in junking religion, has destroyed our sense of anything beyond our material selves and the here and now and, through such hyper-individualism, paved the way for the onslaught on bedrock moral values expressed through such things as family breakdown and mass fatherlessness, educational collapse, widespread incivility, unprecedented levels of near psychopathic violent crime, epidemic drunkenness and drug abuse, the repudiation of all authority, the moral inversion of victim culture, the destruction of truth and objectivity and a corresponding rise in credulousness in the face of lies and propaganda — and intimidation and bullying to drive this agenda into public policy.