BadgerPundit

Sayonara Gunga Dan

"Courage." Did he really sign off his last broadcast with that notorious Ratherism..."Courage"? Well, we knew that the stubborn old coot would not go gently into that good night without reminding us of some of his greatest hits.

Now Dan Rather, the greatest train wreck of a television journalist ever, is gone.  After complaining for so many years, I like most conservatives will probably miss his comically biased reports and shameless spinning for Democrats.  How Dan Rather ever got such a prominent job is anyone's guess... it has long been obvious that he lacks the intellectual equipment to understand anything he's talking about, much less complicated historical, economic, or social questions.

The folks over at RatherBiased have a good retrospective of the lowlights of the Danimal's career.  Also, don't miss Saint Walter Cronkite's recent thoughts on why Rather should never have gotten Uncle Walter's old job.

So don't let the door hit you on the way out, Mr. Rather.  From one amigo to another, I've got just one word for you...Coraje, pal. Now you have all the time in the world to watch tennis tournaments on television.

A Conservative Being Born

On rare occasions, it is possible to witness exact moment of a political epiphany- a shining instant when the scales drop from the eyes of the formerly bamboozled, and a man begins to see the world for the first time as it is.  We are indebted to "Professor" Ward Churchill, American Indian activist of highly dubious provenance and veracity, for inducing such a moment of political chrysalis in his University of Colorado colleague Paul Campos.  Writes Campos:

Academics claim to despise censorship, but the truth is we do a remarkably good job of censoring ourselves. This is especially true in regard to affirmative action. Who among us can claim to have spoken up every time a job candidate almost as preposterous as [Ward] Churchill was submitted for our consideration? Things like the Churchill fiasco are made possible by a web of lies kept intact by a conspiracy of silence.

Churchill thus represents the reductio ad absurdum of the contemporary university's willingness to subordinate all other values to affirmative action. When such a grotesque fraud - a white man pretending to be an Indian, an intellectual charlatan spewing polemical garbage festooned with phony footnotes, a shameless demagogue fabricating imaginary historical incidents to justify his pathological hatreds, an apparent plagiarist who steals and distorts the work of real scholars - manages to scam his way into a full professorship at what is still a serious research university, we know the practice of affirmative action has hit rock bottom. Or at least we can hope so.

Ward Churchill's career provides a lurid illustration of what can happen - indeed, of what we know will happen - when academic standards are prostituted in the name of increasing diversity. Tenure and academic freedom are hard to defend if they don't provide us who benefit from them with the minimal degree of courage necessary to say, when confronted by someone like Churchill, enough is enough.

Hallelujah! He once was lost, but now he sees.

Wanted: Investment Advice for Sy Hersh

In an excellent article in the Boston Globe (of all places), Ross Terrell takes the lunatic left to task for giving up on democracy, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Iran, in Venezuela, and everywhere else in the world where men and women yearn to breathe free.  He also notes the contempt of the left towards attitudes of the common man, as well as the inability of radical leftists to accept the contrary verdicts of democratic elections.  Witness the unintentional self-parody in Senator Edward Kennedy's (D- Rehab) remarks about the recent U.S. election.  Notes Terrell:

"The Democrats are the minority party in Congress, " said Senator Edward Kennedy, "but we speak for a majority of the American people." Don't the winners of an election have a better -- if imperfect -- right to speak for a majority of the American people than the losers? Not so to a left whose eyes bulge with self-entitlement and whose pale hand is estranged from physical labor.

Self-righteousness and an irrational antipathy towards George W. Bush have reduced Democrats and many leftist fellow travellers to overt enemies of freedom, who secretly hope for economic catastrophe at home, and the death of brave American service personnel abroad.  They hate America, plain and simple.  If they can't win, they'd like the rest of us to simply go to hell.  X-Files viewer, comedian, and "journalist" Seymour Hersh gives the game away in a recent radio interview, where he positively salivates at the prospect of American decline:

Seymour Hersh recently told "Democracy Now!" radio that America was in a bad way because "eight or nine neoconservatives" have "grabbed the government." Not mentioning that Bush was elected by 51 percent of the voters, Hersh did detect a ray of hope. One "salvation may be the economy," Hersh said regrettably, "It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick."

Fortunately, the punchline to this bad joke is on Hersh himself.  One can only hope Sy will surrender to his delusions and transfer his savings to Italy.  Consulting my latest issue of The Economist magazine, I observe that unemployment in Italy stands at 8%, remarkably high given the low labor force participation rate of 49%.  In the U.S., by contrast, unemployment is 5% on a 65% labor force participation rate.  If as many people in Italy wanted to work as do in the United States, the Italian unemployment rate would be nearly 31%, or approximately 6 times the U.S. level.  In 2004 and 2005, GDP growth in the U.S. is expected to be 4.3% and 3.5% respectively, versus only 1.3% and 1.4% for Italy.  As it has for most of the past decade, the U.S. economy is growing 2 to 3 times faster than than the Italian economy.  Italy's national debt is over 100% of GDP, versus only around 45% for the United States.  Italy's population is aging rapidly, with birth rates well below replacement level.  Given Italy's far more extravagant welfare state, this demographic time bomb will cause Italy's continuing budget deficit (currently 3% of GDP) to blow up much faster than in the U.S.

Sunning themselves in a pleasant Tuscan villa, Sy Hersh and his America-hating friends may believe Italy (or anywhere else in the Eurozone) is the future.  Economic facts, however, suggest his long term bet on Italian real-estate will prove to be a sucker's bet.  So sell your stocks, Sy, and hop on that boat.  When the Italian crash comes, it couldn't happen to a nicer person.

NYC Liberals Making Friends

The Village Voice offers the following reasoned critique of Americans who disagree with it on a wide swath of foreign policy, economic and social issues:

   

Remember Red State America- liberals hate you and everything you stand for.  With gems like this, Democrats let the mask fall.  If you go to church or think you pay too much in taxes, they think you're a moron.  They think all Americans are morons, just like Michael Moore and Oliver Stone when they speak to foreign audiences.  Just like what Russ Feingold thinks of Wisconsinites when he's not in Wisconsin.

Don't get mad- get even.  Look past the disingenous appeals that liberals will lamely offer in 2006, and punish them at the ballot box by retiring even more Democratic senators.

"Meritocracy" Apparently Doesn't Include Editors of the Economist

Andrew Sullivan links to this article in the Economist, which purports to describe signs that meritocracy is dying in America.  Although written in the smirking, snarky style for which the Economist is famous, the piece is so riddled with factual errors, omissions, and logical absurdities its hard to know where to start.  Quoth the Economist:

The most vivid evidence of social sclerosis comes from politics. A country where every child is supposed to be able to dream of becoming president is beginning to produce a self-perpetuating political elite. George Bush is the son of a president, the grandson of a senator, and the sprig of America's business aristocracy. John Kerry, thanks to a rich wife, is the richest man in a Senate full of plutocrats. He is also a Boston brahmin, educated at St Paul's, a posh private school, and Yale—where, like the Bushes, he belonged to the ultra-select Skull and Bones society. Mr Kerry's predecessor as the Democrats' presidential nominee, Al Gore, was the son of a senator. Mr Gore, too, was educated at a posh private school, St Albans, and then at Harvard.

It's hard to take this hysteria seriously, when the article overlooks the lowly provenance of "The Man from Hope", George Bush's immediate predecessor in office.  For God's sake, Bill Clinton was Arkansas trailer trash who rose to become President in 1992 and was re-elected in 1996.  Isn't that the embodiement of the American dream the Economist claims is long dead?  What about the humble origins of Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter?  If the Economist were to bother studying American history, it might realize that there is Jackson to every Adams, a Truman to every Roosevelt, and a Nixon to every Kennedy.

Having embarrased itself with this non-evidence of "social sclerosis", the Economist then compounds the error by approvingly citing a study from the generically but misleadingly named Economic Policy Institute.  In fact, the EPI is a far left think tank funded and controlled by organized labor.  Check out the EPI's board of directors here, and you will count no fewer than 9 senior union executives, in addition to such ultraliberal (some migh say socialist) luminaries as Robert Reich and Robert Kuttner.  Kuttner, for readers who don't know him, is the founder and editor of the American Prospect, which is the most fevered and hysteical leftist magazine in America, including even Mother Jones.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the EPI would fund and produce research which alleges declining social mobility, economic stagnation, and a hopeless plight for the working man against those cold-hearted capitalists at the top of the income distribution.  Lurking always behind such research from organized labor are the invariable demands for greater income redistribution through taxation, coercive collective bargaining powers, and protectionist trade barriers.  Although the EPI apparently snookered the Economist into broadcasting such Big Labor propaganda, the study's assertions are both sloppy and substantively false.