Mountain Out Of A Mohel

They're debating circumcision at Inside Catholic, the Lord knows why. Good puns in the comments, though.

Irving Kristol

I'm going to let others do the heavy lifting as tribute to Irving Kristol, who died last week at the age of 89. What's striking in all the eulogies is that everyone who knew him recalls him as kind, modest, and impossibly slow to anger --insults just brushed right off him. And all the eulogists, too, note the strength of his marriage to Gertrude Himmelfarb, and his gratitude.

It reminded me of my contention that charity is among all the other things it is, an intellectual virtue. If you're busy being angry and affronted, it clouds your judgment. Strictly speaking, since Kristol, as a Jew, didn't have the theological virtue of charity, which is imparted by baptism, I suppose what I really mean is temperance. Whatever. If you can't think well of others, you can't think, period.

Meanwhile, enjoy these. It's a delight to read about a good man, for we see not only the impact of his ideas, but the simple and hidden power of goodness to touch people and multiply itself. And we get a window into a beautiful family in the process.

Bill Kristol's eulogy for his father.

During the 1960s and 1970s, when Liz and I were growing up, everything is supposed to have become complicated and conflicted and ambiguous. Not so with respect to my parents' love for each other. Or with respect to the love and admiration that Liz and I--and, later, Caleb and Susan--had for my father. Our love for him was always straightforward, unambivalent, and unconditional.

As was the love of his five grandchildren for him. And as was his love for them. Almost seven years ago, my father was scheduled for lung surgery. As we were talking the night before, my father matter-of-factly acknowledged the possibility he might not survive. And, he said, he could have no complaints if that were to happen. "I've had such a lucky life," he remarked. (Actually, I'm editing a bit since we're in a house of worship. He said, "I've had such a goddam lucky life.") But, he said, it would be just great to get another five years--in order to see the grandchildren grow up. That wish of his was granted. He got almost seven years. So he was able to see Rebecca and Anne and Joe graduate from college. He was able to attend Rebecca and Elliot's wedding. He--a staff sergeant in the Army in World War II--developed a renewed interest in things military, as Joe trained to be, and then was commissioned as, a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps.

And he was able to see Liz's children grow up too, to watch Max and Katy become poised and impressive teenagers--it turns out that's not a contradiction in terms. My father was able to get to know them, and to talk with them, in a way you can't with much younger kids. So that too was a great source of happiness.

Joseph Epstein, A Genius of Temperament

Irving himself did not provoke. I never saw him angry. Polemical though he could be in his political journalism, I never heard him put down political or intellectual enemies in conversation. If I could have any of his gifts, it would be his extraordinary ability not to take things personally. Accusations, insults, obloquy, all seemed to bounce off him. He had a genius of temperament.

And:

He also seemed to be without vanity. I never heard him claim credit for any of the things that obituarists are now claiming for him: helping to elect Ronald Reagan, launching neoconservatism, discovering youthful talent, and the rest of it. I never heard him quote himself, or remind other people of things he had written, or make any claims about himself whatsoever. I once told him that I thought Encounter, which he edited with Stephen Spender in London, and on which, I am certain, he did the lion's share of the work, was the best intellectual journal of my lifetime, but my praise appeared only to embarrass him. He didn't seem to wish to talk much about it.

Mary Eberstadt: My Irving Kristol & Ours This one's about her internship with him at Public Interest, the long line of interesting folk he mentored, his keen understanding of young people, and his moral and philosophical advice to them. She also has funny stories from those years, including the interns reading allowed the nutty conspiracy letters they'd get.

Sometimes whichever intern was lowest on the totem pole would read aloud these ravings about how the Public Interest magazine was the red-hot center of one or another Jewish conspiracy--a ritual that we junior editors found all the more entertaining since most of us during those particular years were cradle Catholics.

She also collects his bon mots, among which this is a favorite of mine:

The danger facing American Jews today is not that Christians want to persecute them but that Christians want to marry them.

And she notes his ability to see through the zeitgeist. Here's an example:

In "God and the Psychoanalysts," for example--written in 1949, a moment when Freudian thought was preeminent, and decades before it would finally be forced into intellectual exile by the accumulated weight of criticism from all sides--Irving not only anticipates the coming psychoanalytic crackup, but also foresees why it is coming: because the understanding of human nature on which the Freudian edifice depends is itself fundamentally cracked. Man's "flight from God," he observed in this essay written six decades ago, "has also been a flight from his true self, which had been made in His image. So it was that Freud could build a theory of human nature on the basis of his experience with hysterics and neurotics." This fact, Irving could see clearly, was "a unique and strange achievement which testifies to our modern psychic equilibrium."

Here's Mona Charen's tribute, and Charles Krauthammer's.

The wonder of Irving was that he combined this lack of sentimentality -- he delighted in quietly puncturing all emotional affectations and indulgences -- with a genuine generosity of spirit. He was a deeply good man who disdained shows of goodness, deflecting expressions of gratitude or admiration with a disarming charm and an irresistible smile. That's because he possessed what might be called a moral humility. For Irving, doing good -- witness the posthumous flood of grateful e-mails, letters and other testimonies from often young and uncelebrated beneficiaries of that goodness -- was as natural and unremarkable as breathing.

Not bad for a cunning neo-con conspiracist.

I suppose we must have some official obituaries for the external hard drive. Here's WaPo's, which goes through his political career, but gets into his upbringing as the son of a Jewish immigrant garment worker, his Trotskyism, which was more or less killed by his service in World War II, etc. Even WaPo notes his modesty. Despite Mr. Kristol's influence in public life, he kept a low profile.

"People like Arthur Schlesinger go to 'in' restaurants, hang around with beautiful people," he once told The Washington Post. "I never do that. I stay home and watch TV. I like Westerns and cop shows. Nothing solemn or instructional."

And a more informative one from the Formerly Gray Lady.

May he rest in peace.

Update: Good round-up of other tributes and a look at his influence at Against the Grain.

Know What They're Doing With Your Glass Recyclables

Absolutely nothing in many cases. Or burying it in landfills. It's cheaper to make glass from sand than to recover it, see, so there's not much market for recycled glass.

In northern Idaho, Kootenai County gave up collecting glass last year. In Oregon, which was the first of 11 states to adopt a bottle deposit law in 1971, Deschutes County stockpiled 1,000 tons of glass at its landfill before finally finding a use for it a couple of years ago - as fill beneath an area for collecting compost.

Glass also has piled up at the landfill serving Albuquerque, N.M., where officials this year announced that a manufacturer of water-absorbing horticultural stones would eventually use up their stockpiles. New York City gave up glass recycling from 2002 to 2004 because officials decided it was too costly.

Sounds like a business opportunity. I wish I had a head for business.

Looking Weak

Musharraf says the U.S. looks weak. Which reminds me that I heard an interesting interview with him on the radio the other day. He was asked about what Bush was like and said he thought he was an upright man. I'm paraphrasing, but his additional comment was something like this:

He is a man who tells you what he actually thinks, which I appreciate, and even better, he is willing to listen to what you actually think.

His tone implied those qualities are somewhat rare in world leadership circles, particularly the latter.

Meanwhile, American Digest has a simple exit strategy from Iraq & Afghanistan.

Update: Looking weak and feckless. Bret Stephens fields calls from French reporters on the failure of Obama's foreign policy.

It's Actually The NSFW

P0rn surfing rampant at the National Science Foundation. Employee misconduct investigations have grown 6-fold in the past year, swamping the agency's internal watchdog group.

For instance, one senior executive spent at least 331 days looking at pornography on his government computer and chatting online with nude or partially clad women without being detected, the records show.

When finally caught, the NSF official retired. He even offered, among other explanations, a humanitarian defense, suggesting that he frequented the porn sites to provide a living to the poor overseas women. Investigators put the cost to taxpayers of the senior official's porn surfing at between $13,800 and about $58,000.

"He explained that these young women are from poor countries and need to make money to help their parents and this site helps them do that," investigators wrote in a memo.

A real humanitarian, that guy. Another fellow was caught

with hundreds of pictures, videos and even PowerPoint slide shows containing pornography. Asked by an investigator whether he had completed any government work on a day when a significant amount of pornography was downloaded, the employee responded, "Um, I can't remember," according to records.The employee also said that friends sent him the pornographic files, that he never planned on viewing them and that he never got around to deleting the files, a claim one official later called "simply not believable."

Us taxpayers fund this agency to the tune of $6 billion per year.

Update: Not really related, except by use of the word P0rn, which word I like to misspell and use as infrequently as possible because of the spam and weird key-word searches it attracts. Here's Hadley Arkes on "the ricochets of liberalism," in which he envisions being in Judge Bork's seat to answer some of Joe Biden's questions during that infamous hearing.

He talks about how we have managed to fall so far that someone could actually utter these words, with utterly un-self-aware righteousness:

"We will not stop until there is a policy of requiring condoms to be used in porn.”

From permitting condoms to requiring them. Why?

Rights simply proclaimed, with no moral ground that explains and entails their rightness, can readily be inverted into their opposites when the occasion arises. The only constant is that the Left will not notice. They will not notice the absence of that moral ground when they install new rights, and they will not notice when they repress the same rights to make the world a better, more liberal place.

Hitler Never Died

No, really. This has nothing to do with health care, ACORN or czars. The Soviets told us they found Hitler dead in a bunker, but "Hitler's" skull is actually that of a woman in her 40s. Not Eva Braun.

There is no forensic evidence whatsoever that Hitler died in the bunker.

Curtsy: CMR

Benedict Among The Czechs

Are you following the Pope's trip to the Czech Republic? Great documents on freedom --see his press conference en route.

Question: Here we are 20 years after the fall of the communist regimes of eastern Europe; John Paul II, visiting different countries that had survived communism, encouraged them to the freedom that they had regained responsibly. What is your message for the peoples of Eastern Europe today in this new historical phase?

Benedict XVI: As I said, these countries really suffered under dictatorships, but in the suffering, concepts of freedom developed that are current and that must now be further elaborated and realized. I have in mind, for example, a text of Vaclav Havel that says: “Dictatorships are based on lies and if the lie is overcome, if no one lies any more and if the truth comes to light, there will also be freedom.” And this was how he explained the connection between truth and freedom, where freedom is not libertinism, arbitrariness, but is connected to and conditioned by the great values of truth and love and solidarity and the good in general. Thus, I think that these concepts, these ideas that matured under the dictatorship, must not be lost: Now we must return to them!

And, in the freedom that is often a little empty and without values, again recognize that freedom and values, freedom and good, freedom and truth go together: Otherwise freedom too is destroyed. This seems to me to be the message that comes from these countries and that must be realized in this moment.

More on creative minorities, too --where it's clear he's not calling for the Church to be a minority, it's calling for it to be creative, without worrying much about size.

Here's the homily from yesterday, and I hope to be able to do a Potpourri this week.

Daydreams of Atheism

I would really like to see or read a discussion between Richard Dawkins, official atheist of pop culture, and Jurgen Habermas, a cultured atheist. Imagining the exchange is quite amusing. This weird thought occasioned by this, from Habermas in "Times of Transition":

. . .Christianity has functioned for the normative self-understanding of modernity as more than a mere precursor or a catalyst. Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights, and democracy, is the direct heir of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.

Angie's Back

Merkel won a 2nd term and strengthened her majority:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday won the center-right majority that eluded her four years ago — nudging Europe's biggest economic power to the right as it claws its way out of a deep recession.

Voters sent the nation's main left-wing party, the Social Democrats of Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, into opposition after 11 years as part of the government. It was the party's worst parliamentary election result since World War II.

Weekend Joke

From my inbox:

The Pope and Nancy Pelosi were on a stage together in front of a huge crowd. However, both of them have been in front of crowds before, so, to make this time more interesting, Nancy said to the Pope, "Did you know that with just one little wave of my hand I can make every Democrat in the crowd go wild?"

He said, "Really! Show me."

She waved. Sure enough, every Democrat in the crowd cheered wildly. The cheering then subsided as quickly as it started.

The Pope, not to be outdone by such arrogance, thought about what he could do to answer her stunt. "That was impressive," the Pope said, "but did you know that with just one little wave of my hand I can make almost every person in this country go crazy with joy? What's more, this joy will not be a momentary display like that of your people, but will go deep into their hearts. They will forever speak of this day, and they will rejoice."

The Speaker doubted this, of course, and said with a smirk, "One little wave of your hand and all people will rejoice forever? Show me."

So, the Pope slapped her.

Managerial Collusion: A Love Story

Cheeseburger Eating Surrender Monkeys

I think that's what I hear Sarkozy calling us here.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, came close to mocking his American counterpart for the good intentions, which Mr Obama had heralded as an "historic" step towards nuclear abolition, even though it set no specific targets or fresh mandates.

"We live in a real world not a virtual world," the Frenchman told the 15-member council. "And the real world expects us to take decisions.

"President Obama dreams of a world without weapons ... but right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite.

"Iran since 2005 has flouted five security council resolutions. North Korea has been defying council resolutions since 1993.

"I support the extended hand of the Americans, but what good has proposals for dialogue brought the international community?

Oh, the shame of having a Frenchman be more realistic than the American president.

Curtsy: Brutally Honest

Two Zionist Pigs Walk Into A Bar...

ninme has the scoop on this picture of Gaddafi and a former Libyan foreign minister --and the travails of two translators.

Update: she further notes the UN can't even enforce its own schedule.



Update II: At least he apologized.


Update 3: (this incident keeps on giving). Gaddafi couldn't find a place to pitch his tent. He finally found a place, but the locals weren't happy. Still touchy about hosting known terrorists after 9/11.

A building inspector tried yesterday to deliver a “stop work” order because the tent violated local regulations, but no one on the site spoke English.

As the Queen of Links says, "Oh, that old ploy."

Along Came A Spider

but Benedict was not frightened away.

Disturbing

It's not the celebrities bullying regular people in this satire about health care that bothers me. Nor the political message.

It's that anyone thinks it's funny.

Annals Of Self-Awareness, 3

Curtsy: Anchoress

In Which I Side Against The British PM

Related: After hijacking the forum for hours on end, Gaddafi ended his UN talk by dramatically throwing out the UN Charter. After which, Gordon Brown took the stand and reaffirmed it.

As I said at ninme's place, in this limited instance I think I'm on Gaddafi's side. Gaddafi's more honest about what the UN actually does.

Why must we pretend that an organization which exists to misspend money, enrich apparatchiks, make sex-slave rings of girls in war zones, fund China's forced abortion policy, give international venues to holocaust deniers, dictators and mass murderers, subvert international sanctions to prop up tyrants against human rights, promote abortion as the key to development, divert disaster relief money to fraudulent organizations, veto any effort to intervene on behalf of human rights for even the most oppressed peoples, bully religious nations into adopting Western promiscuity as a condition of aid money, allow countries such as Sudan & Syria to chair committees on human rights and persecute Israel as the sole nation on earth ever to have done anything wrong is in any way noble or dedicated to peace or human rights?

Move the UN to Tripoli and be done.

New Jersey Public Education

Little Ones Love The Dear Leader (Lyrics below)






Lyrics (hat tip: Cliff Thier)

Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
He said that all must lend a hand [?]
To make this country strong again
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
He said we must be clear today
Equal work means equal pay
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
He said that we must take a stand
To make sure everyone gets a chance
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
He said Red, Yellow, Black or White
All are equal in his sight
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama
Yes
Mmm, mmm, mm!

Barack Hussein Obama

segue to

Hello, Mr. President we honor you today!
For all your great accomplishments, we all [do? doth??] say "hooray!"
Hooray Mr. President! You're number one!
The first Black American to lead this great na-TION!
Hooray, Mr. President something-something-some
A-something-something-something-some economy is number one again!
Hooray Mr. President, we're really proud of you!
And the same for all Americans [in?] the great Red White and Blue!
So something Mr. President we all just something-some,
So here's a hearty hip-hooray a-something-something-some!
Hip, hip hooray! (3x)

It's starting that this school district doesn't fear a lawsuit in the way it would freak out if a teacher taught the kids to sing "Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight," from the famous "Jesus loves the little children"?

As I was saying....Children being raised not to be free by their overseers.

Yes. Yes I Do.

Update: Welcome, American Digest readers! For the record, I didn't create this poster, nor do I know who did. It's one of those email thingies.

It's All Alan Greenspan's Fault

Our girl Sarah gave a speech in Hong Kong.

In an echo of last year's presidential campaign, she criticized government policies that result in what she called a redistribution of wealth. "There is no justice in taking from one person and giving to another," she said. "History shows it simply does not work."

Mrs. Palin blamed the U.S. Federal Reserve's low interest-rate policy of previous years for setting the stage for last year's global financial crisis. She opposed appointing the Fed as the chief overseer of systemic risk in the U.S. financial system. "The words 'fox' and 'henhouse' come to mind. The Fed's decisions have created the bubble," she said.

Sighted

On a bumper sticker:

Please don't tell Obama what comes after a trillion.

As I Would Not Be A Slave

You may have seen the story yesterday in which Energy Secretary Steven Chu revealed what he thinks of us:

The American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should

The farther we go into the Obama presidency, the more this well-known line from Lincoln seems like the only thing to be said about our politics.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

We have so many folk willing to be masters now, and so blithely certain they'd be good at it. The death panel idea for our health care system (lest I be accused of lying, I refer to the ones already provided for in the original stimulus bill, by which a panel of experts accountable to no one is to make decisions about what the "appropriate" level of care is) is a bad idea, flat out. But ask yourself what kind of person would agree to serve on such a panel. Merely accepting the position ought to be a cause for immediate revocation of citizenship, but no doubt we will think of them with awe instead. Upright men and women would scorn such people, not bow to them.

As you know, I recently listened to Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel I have spent my adult life avoiding like a dose of cod liver oil for fear I would choke on the didactic prose. Well, it is didactic in parts, but the writing is so lovely and the characters so artfully drawn you don't mind at all.

Mrs. Stowe makes you choke with rage over the evils perpetrated on slaves, but that is the easiest part of her task. Anyone could evoke tears with scenes of mothers screaming as their tiny children are wrenched from their arms on the auction block.

Her brilliance lies in showing how slavery entangles, corrupts, taints, degrades, ennervates and enslaves in multiple ways and varying degrees every single person it touches. Not just or even especially the slave, not just brute masters and oily slave-traders, but also the kind masters and opponents of slavery striving to be obedient to the law.

It's a very revealing novel, almost not about slavery so much as it is about how difficult it is simply to be a man under a corrupt system; and at the same time there are several very different models of true and virile manhood: George, the runaway slave; Uncle Tom (who is in no way an "Uncle Tom"); and the Quaker men of the underground railroad.

There are many folks on our national scene we can recognize in Uncle Tom's Cabin (Stowe is particularly withering in her portrayal of Christian accomodationists, than whom the oiliest slave-trader is more honest). Katherine Jeffords Schori is there, as are Doug Kmiec and Nancy Pelosi.

To digress slightly, something that particularly drew my attention was Stowe's description of the kind of entertainments masters provided to slaves to keep them low-minded, ignorant and docile. Very much like the television we inflict on ourselves deliberately, and pretty much for the same purposes.

Anyway, when I hear a cabinet secretary denounce the citizens he's meant to serve as unruly teens, or a chic columnist dismiss hundreds of thousands of her fellow-citizens as racist scum, all I can think of these days is overseers: slaves happy to identify with their owners in exchange for the power to beat and tyrannize the other n-----s on the plantation. A thing Uncle Tom flat out refused to do, at the cost of his life.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.

Update: Hey, kids, we made Sidelines at American Digest. Yay.

Taking The Wind Out Of Sudan's Sails

President Obama spoke at the UN today. At a climate change summit. He dumped on the US so much and so hard and was so alarmist, there was nothing left for the honorable members from Sudan, Syria, Iran, Libya and North Korea to say.

To use Andrew Klavan's crude but effective term, the speech itself is "craptastic:" a tissue of falsehoods, embarassing cliches and the sort of generality that used to be called glittering.

But the journey is long and the journey is hard. And we don't have much time left to make that journey.

Oo, "journeys." How poetic.

It wouldn't even be fun to fisk this, the writing is so bad. Remember in the speech on health care a few weeks ago when his writers actually let him say, "not all the details are worked out yet" and offered historical analogies that cut against his argument? How about this line

there should be no illusions that the hardest part of our journey is in front of us.

Fellas, that means precisely the opposite of what you think it does. I quit teaching high school not to have read essays like that anymore.

Update: Here's a more sober dissection should you need one. The America bashing was quite severe.

No one believes America’s history is pristine; we are all familiar with the catalogue of our own sins, beginning with slavery. Other presidents have recognized them, and a few have given voice to them. But it was done in the context of a reverence for America—for what it has been and stands for, for what it is and can be. Think of the words of George Washington, who said of America, “I was summoned by my Country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love.” That is a noble sentiment from a man whose love of country knew no bounds. They are also words that I cannot imagine President Obama saying, at least with conviction. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t like his country or admire things about it; it means that he has yet to really speak out for it. And it means that he has shown, so far at least, that he is more interested in advancing his interests than in speaking on behalf of the nation that elected him. There are enough critics of America in the world; we don’t need to add America’s president to that list.

Perhaps Mr. Obama will come to understand that there is a problem when the president of the United States—an “inestimable jewel,” Lincoln called her—has harsher things to say about his own country than he does about many of the worst regimes on Earth.

It is all quite disturbing, and to have to say this about an American president almost makes me sick.

In Passing

This caught my eye in a piece about how atheism is failing to reproduce --biologically or intellectually.

this sudden outpouring of bile against Christianity seems clearly motivated by a secret fear of another Abrahamic religion.

All's Swill That Ends Swill

The Queen of Links braved the pages of the Formerly Gray Lady to find this tale of woe from Egypt, where bureaucrats unwittingly disrupted a system.

They got rid of their pigs, en masse, thinking thereby to purify society of pig swill and swine flu. It didn't exactly turn out that way --as government officials were amply warned by those closest to the situation.

The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba.

Ramadan Hediya, 35, who makes deliveries for a supermarket, lives in Madinat el Salam, a low-income community on the outskirts of Cairo.

“The whole area is trash,” Mr. Hediya said. “All the pathways are full of trash. When you open up your window to breathe, you find garbage heaps on the ground.”

What started out as an impulsive response to the swine flu threat has turned into a social, environmental and political problem for the Arab world’s most populous nation.

We will nobly leave aside most of the snarky comments that occur to us and simply call this an "adventure in subsidiarity."

Art For AARPs Sake

Specifically, the Administration's been caught red-handed manipulating the NEA grantees for political purposes, especially promotion of Obamacare. There are a lot of Leni Reifenstahl wannabes out there, apparently.

Proxy War, Persian Style

Interesting day on the streets of Tehran yesterday. Massive demonstrations for al-Quds, which was instituted by Ayatollah Khomeini on the last Friday of Ramadan, as a massive rally of opposition to Israel. Basically, the whole country of Iran is supposed to take to the streets shouting, "Death to Israel! Death to the United States!" This year 500 (if you trust the state press) or 1-2 million green demonstrators opposed the government instead. (And doesn't that sound eerily like our official coverage of the tea parties? America: a free press, just like Iran's. But I digress).

The regime supporters yell “Death to Israel!” and the Greens chant back “Death to Russia!”

Former President Khatami apparently had his turban removed in a melee. Which Wiki says is a grave insult in Shia Islam. Great pictures of both sides here.

How To Tell If Your Dissent Is Racist

Curtsy to L for shamelessly pinching this from here.
Click to enlarge.

The "R" Word, Two Cents More

Further to the "R" word post. Why must I and others pay the freight for MoDo's baggage? In her infamous column saying the opponents of Obamacare are racists she writes:

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: "You lie, boy!"

But of course no one said or implied any such thing. That last, and offensive, word was no place but in her inmost thoughts. Ann Althouse rightly asks,

Why is she not ashamed to let us hear that? Because she somehow really thinks that what comes from her own brain does not come from her own brain. That's not just unfair — as her statement reveals she knows — it's crazy.

Well, that's crazy Mo for ya'. Yet another reason I miss the late Michael Kelly is because as her friend he kept her remotely sane.

But hang it all if I don't get a whiff of the same poison and have precisely the same reaction to President Carter's latest remarks. That is, that he is revealing his own inner demon, not anyone else's.

It Should Be True

Mr. W. has an expression about great apocryphal or unverifiable stories: "it should be true." Powerline has a good example.

Stewart Gets It Completely Right

Not just about ACORN, but about the press. I'd missed the NY installment. Language alert.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Audacity of Hos
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests

The "R" Word

Not so long ago, dissent was the highest form of patriotism. Now it's the highest form of racism, apparently, as an internet meme has it. The Anchoress has a good round-up on "racers" --people who, like birthers and truthers, believe in a conspiracy of racism behind every objection to liberalism.

I expect nothing better from MoDo, but I am disturbed by how many of my liberal friends --genuine friends-- are persuading themselves that all the tea partiers are Southern racists (and, to go along with: the crowd wasn't really that big, the pictures were faked, it's all a big racist conspiracy).

Many people have noticed the reverse racism involved in political correctness: "the soft bigotry of low expectations," the idea that because a person (in this case the President) is black, he can't take the rough and tumble of debate.

What I've realized in go-rounds with a few old chums is that calling a person a racist is the equivalent of calling a black man the "n" word. It's a way of saying, "I don't recognize your humanity, and consider it beneath my station to engage you as an equal."

I've just finished reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the parallel is striking. The slaveholder's rejoinder to any word of truth or justice from a black man is always: "N-----!" As if that were all the rebuttal required.

Now we have Times columnists, an ex-President, and too many others, who have found their own "N-word" with which to dehumanize their perceived inferiors. It's vile; our public life is populated with Simon Legrees.

The difference is that I think few people are being cowed by the accusation this go-round --more's the pity for people with actual racial grievances, who'll find themselves less heard after all this crying wolf.

Who Said This?

No fair googling.

The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.

Ask The Experts

IBD has a blockbuster. They polled our actual doctors (as opposed to the AMA, which only represents 18% of docs and is hemorrhaging members since it started shilling for Obamacare)

Four of nine doctors, or 45%, said they "would consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement" if Congress passes the plan the Democratic majority and White House have in mind.

More than 800,000 doctors were practicing in 2006, the government says. Projecting the poll's finding onto that population, 360,000 doctors would consider quitting.

• More than seven in 10 doctors, or 71% — the most lopsided response in the poll — answered "no" when asked if they believed "the government can cover 47 million more people and that it will cost less money and the quality of care will be better."

Hyattsville Wild!

Next in an occasional series.

Fledgling Monarch in a pear tree.

I was in my neighbor's yard when I saw what had just hatched from one of these...

make its maiden voyage, alighting in the tree you see above. Our neighbors discovered the chrysalises under some hosta plants and transplanted them for observation.

Here's another species, "caught" on the Northwest Branch trail near home.

Ain't they purty? Thanks to C. for sending them along.

Coming & Going

By now I suppose you've seen the story about the British preemie left to die because it was against the rationing rules to treat him, even though he'd have been "worth saving" if he'd been born just 48 hours later.

And WaPo this morning runs a story about British Greens who argue the best way to end pollution is to prevent polluters from being born.

There is no possibility of drastically reducing total carbon emissions, while at the same time paying no attention whatever to the drastic increase in the number of carbon emitters," said Roger Martin, chairman of the Optimum Population Trust, a British nonprofit that sponsored the report and whose goal is to rein in population growth in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. "For reasons of an irrational taboo on the subject, [family planning] has never made it onto the agenda, and this is extremely damaging to the planet."

They specifically don't want any more American babies, by the way.

What is new, in the British study and in a separate report from Oregon State University, are statistics that show exactly how much each life -- and especially each American life -- adds to the world's emissions.

Everyone denies they want to force people not to have children, but, excuse me, why bring it up as a policy concern otherwise?

Here's what that old kook Paul VI said in Humanae Vitae, that prophetic and wise document which even most Catholics reject.

From Section 17, Consequences of Artificial Methods [of birth control], the Pope foresaw the lowering of moral standards, the decline of respect for women and, most pertinent to the topic at hand:

Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.

Isn't it interesting that one of Paul VI's precise objections to artificial contraception was his concern that government might end up in everyone's bedrooms at the cost of personal liberty and responsibility?

Odd

Peter Schramm found this odd AP story. Odd, I guess, because the headline makes you think a stampede resulted from a missile strike, but that's not what happened.

MIR ALI, Pakistan — A missile fired from a suspected unmanned U.S. drone slammed into a car in a Pakistani tribal region close to the Afghan border Monday, killing four people, intelligence officials and residents said.

Separately, at least 18 women and girls waiting to get free flour in Pakistan's southern city of Karachi died when the crowd around them swelled and a stampede occurred, officials said.

As you read, your mind tries to link the two stories, but they simply aren't linked. Except that they both happened in Pakistan. I guess the AP can't afford two separate stories in these difficult economic times.

OutMasoning the Masons

ninme also found the interactive Dan Brown plot generator. Did you know that in his latest missive he takes on the Freemasons?

How brave of him.

I note that even Slate's selection of groups to attack in parody includes nothing remotely Jewish, Muslim, Black, Hispanic or Asian/Pacific Islander. (Apaches take it on the chin for Native Americans for some reason.)

I'm surprised they didn't include Tea-Partiers, though.

Great Moments In Evolution

She found the missing link and beat it to death.

Curtsy: ninme's tweets via Brett McS.

The Tea Party Was Bigger Than The Inaugural

With numerical justification for the assertion.

Scenes From The Tea Party

All photos by Mary Bell

My spy at the big tea party sends along her photos and comments. How large was the crowd? Since thanks to Louis Farrakhan the Park Service doesn't count anymore, it's disputed. However, WaPo, which always puts the 50-70,000 Marchers for Life (depending on the year) at "tens of thousands," says

Saturday's throng appeared to number in the many tens of thousands.

Which makes organizer claims of 1 to 1.5 million seem right to me. This is many-fold times the size of the March for Life. But judge for yourself by the pictures. The Daily Mail photographer got this same shot but further back and calls it, "up to two million."

Anyway, on with the show.

A favorite sign.

Love this shot. "These guys were enthusiastic and they held those flags for hours."

Flags galore.

One elderly, frail looking lady sitting in a wheel chair with a sign, "Don't pull the plug on Granny!" caught my attention. I'd say this was not just an anti-Obama rally; it was an anti-big-government rally. And the people were very friendly!

All in all, a day of peaceful protest against what thousands of us think is a run away government spending money we do not have. Everyone was very nice, and I didn't see even one inkling of unpleasant confrontation. And the National Mall was not trashed!

Here's a shot of my spy with her husband. She & my mom have been friends since high school and we've known them for ages, so I can vouch for them: neither birthers nor birchers, no matter what the Lefty blogs tell you. And do they look mean to you?

I made my sign small so it would be easy to carry. We had a good time. We met people from CA, KS, ME, TN, NC, SC, OH, and lots of people from Texas [my spy's always on the lookout for fellow Texans]. They came from Houston, The Woodlands, Garland, San Antonio, and other places too numerous to mention.

Update: More signs. Our side has a sense of humor! Revolutionary in itself. (Curtsy: ninme)
Update 2: time-lapse vid of the crowd

Joe Wilson Feels Like A Million Bucks

Joe Wilson fundraising passes the $million dollar mark (curtsy to Ken Thomas, who's taught me some things about Bob Dylan, not that it's relevant to this post). And an FB friend foresees the bumper sticker of record for the next few years.

You Lie!

It does seem like the fitting rejoinder to all those Bush lied stickers.

Now, after an overcast day with gloomy news (except for the tea party), I am going to take refuge in a rosary, PG Wodehouse on tape,and baking.

Update, hours later: too bad there's no smellavision, as the wafting is divine. And I have successfully sublimated my gloom over the demise of the regime of freedom.



Don't you wish your wife baked you apple cakes when she was feeling b----y?

In Which We Get Tough On Iran

For, oh, 30 seconds, before backing down.

Read this last night and felt heartened.

The Obama administration has signaled that it will reconsider its efforts to engage Iran on its pursuit of nuclear weapons if no progress has been made by the end of September.

But as it turns out, the administration had already folded by the time I read that.

Meanwhile, playing pussy-foot with the Mullahs is encouraging them to meddle in Afghanistan, and our NSA has signaled there's less than steel in our spine with respect to that effort.

Visiting the newly installed military commanders in Afghanistan in late June, Jones told General Stanley McChrystal that if he requested more troops any time soon, Obama would have a "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" (i.e., "What the f--") moment. Jones then, in an interview, made the claim--denied by everyone else involved--that military leaders had agreed that when the president earlier sent 21,000 troops to Afghanistan, "there would be a year from the time the decision was made before they would ever come back and ask for any more."

Jennifer Rubin points out that this kind of thing is exactly what's fueling people like George Will's desire to get out. Her view is that Obama should be pushed to do the right thing rather than capitulated to right away.

that’s what the debate is about now—to see if the president can be encouraged and supported to do the right thing. There will be time enough to quibble and, yes, condemn if he fails to fulfill his responsibilities as commander in chief. But it seems like a rigged game to complain that the president is insufficiently resolute—and then egg him on to be less resolute.

Cliff May has a good spine stiffener for people like me who are disheartened about our prospects while there's no clear focus and no desire for victory.

Meanwhile --back to Iran-- Khameini says, "no compromises" with the West, the intelligence community believes Iran now has the uranium it needs for nukes and Iran just commissioned stealth submarines, too.

And lookie what Abombnjihad's great ally, OOOOgo, is doing: taking delivery of Russian Missiles; helping Abombnjihad to subvert UN sanctions; inviting Iran to store its nukes in Venezuela.

Ah, diplomacy.

Proselytism 101

From a blog where I was following tea-party doings:

My cabbie to the hotel told me he is a democrat but loves the republicans; the dems always try to negotiate the price down from the meter and the republicans give him a nice tip because he trys to work hard and do a good job.

Why The Earl Grey Ran Out

Traffic-cam shot of today's DC tea party. Instacurtsy.

Fun shots from the crowd here. Two of my faves:

Godawful

I really like the WSJ. It's evolved over time into a real newspaper and not just a specialty paper for brokers with a little conservative commentary on the side. Its culture pages are actually interesting, not mere cheerleading for the counter-culture that is now our ruling class.

This morning, however, it falls down on the job, turning a "debate" about God over to two atheists (only one of them doesn't understand that's what she is).

Richard Dawkins and Karen Armstrong go at it. Dawkins completely has her number, but reading him is a sad window into the narrowing of the human mind.

Interestingly, both authors take Evolution as their starting point, which only shows that whatever its merits as an account for how things got here, its intellectual and cultural effect has been to dull men's minds to the point they can't think philosophically --there is no string on the violin that quivers to that frequency. He thinks the existence of the laws of physics disproves the existence of God! Aristotle had his number.

John Zmirak, in a column that predates this exchange, explains it perfectly, introducing a column on the virtue of diligence:

Procrastination isn't so much an art as a science, in the old sense of the word that predates Descartes, which means a quest for knowledge of the cosmos and one's self. (Since that high-strung Frenchman redefined "science" as the project of making man the "master and possessor of nature," we learned to sniff condescendingly at "knowledge work" that doesn't involve white coats, beakers, and electrified fetal pigs. That's how theology traded its crown as "Queen of the Sciences" for the little paper hat called "Religious Studies" and learned to ask, "You want Christ with that?"

That is precisely the nature of the exchange in this morning's WSJ. The man in the field of knowledge work has a polite little conversation with the professor of religious studies, both of them utterly missing the point.

Rahming It Through

Senate to use the "nuclear option" to pass healthcare.

Mark Steyn elaborates. The President's speech was a failure, but it turns out, that doesn't matter

.it was a joke. Or, rather, it would be a joke if the president’s intention was to persuade an increasingly skeptical if not downright hostile electorate. On the other hand, if the intention is to ram it down America’s throat whatever the citizenry thinks, then the joke’s on us.

Useless to claim we won't be treating illegal immigrants. What are we going to do with a dying man on our doorstep, turn him away?

The minute a first-world country has “free” health care, it becomes the provider of choice to anyone who can get there, particularly for any long-term ailments requiring state-of-the-art medications. In 2004, Britain’s Health Protection Agency revealed that 44 percent of HIV patients being treated by the National Health Service were not residents of the United Kingdom at all, but from southern Africa. In essence, a huge number of AIDS patients in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Swaziland, and Lesotho have decided to outsource their health-care needs to British taxpayers. Similar trends will manifest themselves here in nothing flat.

But putting that aside, the point is that health care reform is sleight of hand.

In order to do something for the 10 percent of the population outside the current system, why is it necessary to destabilize the arrangements of the 90 percent within it?

Well, because the 90% have troubles if they try to switch jobs.

In that case, why not ease the obstacles to health-care portability?

Uh...

Well, says the president, shuffling his cups and moving the pea under another shell, we’re spending too much on health care. By “we’re,” he means you and you and you and you and millions of other Americans making individual choices over which he casually claims collective jurisdiction.

And that is the point.

Three stories bubbled up in the last week, although if you read the New York Times and the administration’s other airbrushers you’ll be blissfully unaware of them; the resignation of Van Jones — former (?) Communist and current 9/11 “truther” — from his post as Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar”; the “re-assignment” of Yosi Sergant at the National Endowment for the Arts after he was found to be urging government-funded arts groups to produce “art” in support of Obama policy positions; and, finally, the extraordinary undercover tape from Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website in which officials from ACORN (the Obama chums who’ll be “helping” with the next census) offer advice on how pimps can get government housing loans for brothels employing underage girls from El Salvador.

What all these people have in common is devotion to big Soviet-style government against individual liberty. And so forth, coming to The Hill's same conclusion:

My sense from Wednesday’s speech is that the president’s gonna shove this through in some form or other. It may cause a little temporary pain in Blue Dog districts in 2010, but the long-term gains will be transformative and irreversible.

ACORN In The AG's Office

You have got to be kidding me. For the excellent investigative journalism exposing ACORN, here is the response from the Baltimore City AG's office.

If it is determined that the audio portion now being heard on YouTube was illegally obtained, it is also illegal under Maryland Law to willfully use or willfully disclose the content of said audio. The penalty for the unlawful interception, disclosure or use of it is a felony punishable up to 5 years.

Liberty

This is nicely done: Klavan on the Culture.

Me Too, Me Too!

Those are the two things I hate most also.

ACORN Won't Run the Census

Everyone has this story about an outfit called Big Government catching ACORN out pushing child prostitution. I'm linking for external hard drive purposes.

It is extraordinary. These people register our voters.




Gateway Pundit has a good link-up here, and points out the Census Bureau cut ties with ACORN today. And Congresswoman Bachman's calling for hearings.

Rude But Right

Just for the record, today the Senate moved to close the loophole for illegal aliens in Obamacare.

The controversy over Republican Representative Joe Wilson's shouting "You lie!" at the President over his claim that illegal immigrants wouldn't benefit from health-care reform apparently sparked some reconsideration of the relevant language. "We really thought we'd resolved this question of people who are here illegally, but as we reflected on the President's speech last night, we wanted to go back and drill down again," said Senator Kent Conrad, one of the Democrats in the talks after a meeting Thursday morning. Later that afternoon, Baucus said the group would add a proof-of-citizenship requirement for participation in the new health exchange — a move likely to inflame the left.

You mean illegal aliens were indeed covered Wednesday night when the President assured us they were not?

Obamavilles

Jim Geraghty picks up on Time's picking up on Larry Summers admission that all is not well, in spite of Obama having saved our economy:

The American economy has been shedding jobs much, much faster than Okun's law predicts. According to that rough rule, we should be at about 8.5% unemployment today, not slipping toward 10%. Something new and possibly strange seems to be happening in this recession. Something unpredicted by the experts. "I don't think," Summers told the Peterson Institute crowd — deviating again from his text — "that anyone fully understands this phenomenon."

Except I think Mr. W. predicted this strange phenomenon pretty well. It's called "Stimulus." If the average American job pays $40,000/ year and we take $1 trillion out of the public sector, that's a loss of some 25 million jobs we're causing right there. (Right? Someone still good at Math work that out for me.)

Plus there's the whole green jobs thing, also noted here previously, by which every job we "create" costs 2.2 traditional jobs.

if the result is that we're stuck with persistent 9%-to-11% unemployment for a while — a range whose mathematical congruence with that other 9/11 is impossible to miss — we may be looking at a problem that will define the first term of Barack Obama's presidency the way the original 9/11 defined George W. Bush's. Like that 9/11, this one demands a careful refiguring of some of the most basic tenets of national policy.

Time thinks we're headed for Obamavilles --not quite as bad as Hoovervilles.

We're a long way from Hoovervilles, of course. But it's not hard to imagine, if we're not careful, a country sprouting listless Obamavilles: idled workers minivanning aimlessly through overleveraged cul-de-sacs with no way to pay their mortgages, no health care, little hope of meaningful work and only the hot comfort of angry politics.

They say it regretfully, as a thing to be avoided. I say it's the express goal of the Obama/Alinsky Administration.

Some More Equal Than Others

I seem to recall we all knew of and were outraged by George Tiller's murder within seconds.

WaPo Whapping

WaPo's been on an embarrassing tear trying to undo the GOP gubernatorial candidate in VA. The Weekly Standard's take on that is amusing.

Occasionally, however, WaPo does redeem itself, as witness this story related to Congressman Wilson's "Liar!" moment, in which we learn how other Parliaments treat their PMs, just by way of comparison.

At least Joe Wilson didn't slice President Obama's sausage.

That's what happened last year to Italy's then-Prime Minister Romano Prodi when two members of an opposing party started scarfing slices of mortadella -- a sausage from Prodi's home town of Bologna -- in the Senate chamber to mock the embattled leader.

That's just the beginning of a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Why Joe The Plumber Is Married To Soccer Mom

You may argue all you please that there are no innate differences between men and women besides the accident of physical differentiation. But the evidence is against you. Here's a study showing that having kids makes men more Conservative and women more Liberal.

Curtsy: Inside Catholic

Remember

Fr. Philip Powell, OP, has a nice reflection.

Vanderleun, from whom I shamelessly pinched the Lileks video, posts his contemporaneous reflections from 2001.

Cheap Shots

Obama doesn't know what to do in Afghanistan, but he's doing it better than Bush.

The President's view is that there are a lot of good ideas out there and we should hear them all. When you come down to the questions of governance, we've seen what happens when one viewpoint is not particularly debated or challenged or reviewed or measured. So says a "senior administration official."

But she's not speaking of the Democratic approach to health care, climate change, or for that matter, any other issue. No, she's talking about Bush & Iraq.

Yes, Dear.

Meanwhile, here's John Bolton on the topic.

Conrad Black's Repentance

Not of any crime we convicted him of, though. Instead, this is the tale of how he came to be Catholic and how Catholicism nurtures him during unjust imprisonment.

Though there are many moments of scepticism as matters arise, and the dark nights of the soul that seem to assail almost everyone visit me too, I have never had anything remotely resembling a lapse, nor a sense of forsakenness, even when I was unjustly indicted, convicted, and imprisoned, in a country I formerly much admired.

Curtsy: ninme

Good For Sarah

On her facebook page, Sarah Palin responds to being called a liar by the President of the United States.

Our objections to the Democrats’ health care proposals are not mere “bickering” or “games.” They are not an attempt to “score short term political points.” And it’s hard to listen to the President lecture us not to use “scare tactics” when in the next breath he says that “more will die” if his proposals do not pass.

Snort.

In fact, after promising to “make sure that no government bureaucrat .... gets between you and the health care you need,” the President repeated his call for an Independent Medicare Advisory Council -- an unelected, largely unaccountable group of bureaucrats charged with containing Medicare costs. He did not disavow his own statement that such a group, working outside of “normal political channels,” should guide decisions regarding that “huge driver of cost ... the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives....” He did not disavow the statements of his health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, and continuing to pay his salary with taxpayer dollars proves a commitment to his beliefs. The President can keep making unsupported assertions, but until he directly responds to the arguments I’ve made, I’m going to call him out too.

She sure does get under his skin, for being such a backwards, ignorant, nobody.

Congressman Joe Wilson is catching flak and was forced to apologize for heckling the President with, "You lie!" last night. He should have apologized; heckling the President is not our tradition. But, honestly, it was probably involuntary. I couldn't stop shouting at the President at home. When you're a captive audience to a whole lot of lies, your system rebels.

And if Joe Wilson must apologize for his lack of decorum, when will the President apologize for the much worse breech of calling a private citizen a liar in a national speech (about which he was lying)? Ok, he didn't say her name. Did anyone doubt who he meant?

Never Laughed So Hard At A President

I am not going to bother fisking the many false statements in the President's speech on health care just now. (Update: the folks at CATO already did!) It was almost all of 'em.

Politically, he was called upon to lead by narrowing choices; instead he widened the discussion, so in that sense I think it was an utter failure. But nevermind that.

The man invoked American can-do spirit and rugged individualism in defense of socialism!

And he invoked Teddy Kennedy as the exemplar of our nation's moral character.

Even he literally had trouble keeping a straight face at one point. Did you see the moment when he said some of the details of the bill had yet to be worked out, the Republicans (and I, sitting at home) laughed out loud, and he had to struggle not to do so himself?

My favorite line had to be

I still believe we can replace acrimony with civility,

coming as it did hard on the heels of possibly the most mean-spirited, partisan speech ever delivered by a sitting President. (Although I'm sure I could comb Carter's ouvre for some challengers.)

Unless it was this:

But by avoiding some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits, excessive administrative costs and executive salaries...

Profits are overhead? Econ 101 is not a required subject at either Harvard or Columbia? Or maybe now we know what he's telling us when he says he going to eliminate waste from the budget.

I have never laughed out loud so hard or so often at a President.

Which makes me sad. It's not a thing I wish to do.

Update: You know you've told some whoppers if even AP notices.

Birdwhackers

Say goodbye to yer Golden Eagles

WSJ reports a certain inequity in our horror over 85 birds killed by Exxon versus the daily hawkocaust that is your average wind farm.

A July 2008 study of the wind farm at Altamont Pass, Calif., estimated that its turbines kill an average of 80 golden eagles per year. The study, funded by the Alameda County Community Development Agency, also estimated that about 10,000 birds—nearly all protected by the migratory bird act—are being whacked every year at Altamont.

Altamont's turbines, located about 30 miles east of Oakland, Calif., kill more than 100 times as many birds as Exxon's tanks, and they do so every year. But the Altamont Pass wind farm does not face the same threat of prosecution, even though the bird kills at Altamont have been repeatedly documented by biologists since the mid-1990s.

The number of birds killed by wind turbines is highly variable. And biologists believe Altamont, which uses older turbine technology, may be the worst example. But that said, the carnage there likely represents only a fraction of the number of birds killed by windmills. Michael Fry of the American Bird Conservancy estimates that U.S. wind turbines kill between 75,000 and 275,000 birds per year. Yet the Justice Department is not bringing cases against wind companies.

The Mayor Of Doncaster

I think ninme had this story some time ago, but for some reason I only just read it. Common sense has reared its benighted head in Britain.

In his first week in office he cut his own salary from £73,000 to £30,000, which is putting one’s money where one’s mouth is. He also scrapped the mayoral limousine. He is ending Doncaster’s twinning with five towns around the world, an arrangement which he describes as “just for people to fly off and have a binge at the council’s expense”. He intends now to reduce (that’s right, reduce) council tax by 3 per cent this year.

The “diversity” portfolio has been abolished from the council’s cabinet. From next year no more funding will be given to the town’s “Gay Pride” event, on the grounds that people do not need to parade their sexuality, whatever it may be, at taxpayers’ expense. Black History Month, International Women’s Day and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History Month are similarly destined to become history.

Council funding of translation services for immigrants has been scrapped because he believes incomers should take the trouble to learn English. Officials have been ordered to abandon bureaucratic gobbledegook language. Davies is saving the taxpayers £80,000 by disaffiliating from the pointless Local Government Association and the Local Government Information Unit. He aims to abolish all non-jobs on the council, as epitomised by “community cohesion officers”.

You know who he sounds like, right? We've probably only moments til Sully suggests the man's children are not his own.