From Peter Hitchens

I often wonder what Christmas dinner is like with brothers Peter and Christopher Hitchens. Christopher, if you remember, wrote "God Is Not Great" last year.
Drom London's, "The Mail On Sunday"

November 09, 2008 1:32 AM

"The night we waved goodbye to America ... our last best hope on Earth"

Anyone would think that we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell or that, at the very least, John Lennon had come back from the dead.
The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship, its nearest equivalent, is focused on a man who actually did something.

I really don't see how the Obama devotees can ever in the future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts.

It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers which recorded Obama's victory have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama picture books and Obama calendars and if there isn't yet a children's picture version of his story, there soon will be.

Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his blundering trip to Africa , are little-read and hard to find.

If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe anything. He plainly doesn't believe it himself. His cliche-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was what you would expect from someone who knew he'd promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.

He needn't worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of America 's Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill Clinton's stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to collect the rich spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, which is what he is used to.

Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan . He really did talk about a 'new dawn', and a 'timeless creed' (which was 'yes, we can'). He proclaimed that 'change has come'. He revealed that, despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn't know what 'enormity' means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once more toward the hope of a better day (Don't try this at home).

I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of stuff.

And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his admiring audience by repeated, but rather hesitant, invocations of the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against his will 'Yes, we can'. They were supposed to thunder 'Yes, we can!' back at him, but they just wouldn't join in. No wonder. Yes we can, what, exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my advice. He'd have been better off bursting into 'I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony' which contains roughly the same message and might have attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship.

Perhaps, being a Chicago crowd, they knew some of the things that 52.5 per cent of America prefers not to know. They know Obama is the obedient servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political machines in America . They know that one of his alarmingly close associates, a state-subsidised slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has been convicted on fraud and corruption charges.

They also know the US is just as segregated as it was before Martin Luther King in schools, streets, neighbourhoods, holidays, even in its TV-watching habits and its choice of fast-food joint. The difference is that it is now done by unspoken agreement rather than by law.

If Mr Obama's election had threatened any of that, his feel-good white supporters would have scuttled off and voted for John McCain, or practically anyone. But it doesn't. Mr Obama, thanks mainly to the now-departed grandmother he alternately praised as a saint and denounced as a racial bigot, has the huge advantages of an expensive private education. He did not have to grow up in the badlands of useless schools, shattered families and gangs which are the lot of so many young black men of his generation.

If the nonsensical claims made for this election were true, then every positive discrimination programme aimed at helping black people into jobs they otherwise wouldn't get should be abandoned forthwith. Nothing of the kind will happen. On the contrary, there will probably be more of them.

And if those who voted for Obama were all proving their anti-racist nobility, that presumably means that those many millions who didn't vote for him were proving themselves to be hopeless bigots. This is obviously untrue.

I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America 's beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street which runs due north from the White House the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America , it also now has a new division, and one which is in many ways much more important. I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.

As I walked, I crossed another of Washington 's secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America 's conservative party the Republicans to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US , like Britain before it, has begun the long, slow descent into the Third World . How sad.
Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

P.J. O'Rourke on Charity

Charity is one of the great responsibilities of freedom. But, in order for us to be responsible - and therefore free - that responsibility must be personal.

There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as "caring" and "sensitive" because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good with his own money - if a gun is held to his head.

When government quits being something we use only in an emergency and becomes the principal source of aid and assistance in our society, then the size, expense and power of government are greatly increased. The decision that politicians are wiser, kinder and more honest than we are and that they, not we, should control the dispensation of eleemosynary goods and services is, in itself, a diminishment of the individual and proof that we're jerks.

Government charity causes other problems. If responsibility is removed from friends, family and self, social ties are weakened. We don't have to look after our parents; they've got their Social Security check and are down in Atlantic City with it right no w. Parents don't have to look after their kids; Head Start, a high school guidance counselor and AmeriCorps take care of that. Our kids don't have to look after themselves; if they become addicted to drugs, there's methadone, and if they get knocked up, t here's always AFDC. The neighbors, meanwhile, aren't going to get involved; if they step outside, they'll be cut down by the 9mm crossfire from the drug wars between the gangs all the other neighbors belong to.

Making charity part of the political system confuses the mission of government. Charity is, by its nature, approximate and imprecise. Are you guiding the old lady across the street or are you just jerking her around? It's hard to know when enough charity has been given. Parents want to give children every material advantage but don't want a pack of spoiled brats. There are no exact rules of charity. But a government in a free society must obey exact rules or that government's power is arbitrary and freedom is lost. This is why government works best when it is given limited and well-defined tasks to perform

Naked Emperor News

Okay. Every night when we sit down at the dinner table (that's every night we sit down; please don't misunderstand we sit down every night, although we do pretty good) the kids have to tell me 2 good things about their day before they can complain about anything, including what's on the plate in front of them.

In keeping with the rule, I have limited myself to one BO complaint per sitting, although Lady MacBeth looking at private schools for the two princesses is now on a 3-day reign. Hypocrisy personified. And don't think confession isn't now needed every time I write a tuition check.

So I DIDN'T need to find this website, because it has given me too much material:

http://www.nakedemperornews.com/

Listen to the podcast about mandatory community service if you want your head to explode.

You'll find this GREAT quote at the top of the website, which is just the encouragement I need to keep ranting:

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Mystery solved on last week's election results

John Ziegler is at it again. This is a movie whose progress will be worth watching:

http://www.howobamagotelected.com/

Watch it and weep.

And then watch this interview of John Ziegler. It's long. It's in-depth. It's interesting. It's worth your time.

A Redefining Moment? For whom?

Regarding: "For black men, a redefining moment?" printed in the LA Times, November 12, 2008.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-aftermath12-2008nov12,0,7121616.story?track=rss

The election of Barack Obama changed nothing in this country. We woke up on November 5 the same people we were on November 3. For that matter, we are the same country we were in 1996 when a majority would have voted for Colin Powell: namely, a country who will elect a black man for its highest office. It is therefore the perception of white America as racist that should be transformed by the election of Obama.

That having been said, to young African American males like Hakeem Holloway dressed in hoodies and jeans who complain of being eyed by white women, please know that my white, bald-headed son is rightly eyed by women of all colors when dressed in a similar fashion. And I have witnessed women hold their purses more tightly when being approached by my 6'2" white husband.

Women are not reacting primarily to your race; they are reacting to your thug attire.

And to UCLA's dean of public affairs who is queried about being a record producer when he flies first class, wouldn't it be great if we could look forward to better education, and therefore more opportunities and success, being made available to children of all races during Barack Obama's presidency? But with Barack Obama's steadfast rejection of vouchers, I'm afraid we have little improvement to look forward to in that arena.