To the establishmentarian Republicans who mourn Rand Paul’s likely victory tonight in the Kentucky senatorial primary, I say: Lighten up. The rising conservative majority can use some tempering with a bit of Robert A. Taft caution about too-much foreign entanglements rather than total solidarity concerning foreign-military adventures. Paul has impressed me with his domestic courage including his willingness to advocate raising the Social Security retirement age to 70. Long overdue. I can take dissent on some other things in order to get this courage in the Senate.
They say he’s not as nutty as his old man who wants to end the national intelligence function and who says we got what we deserved on 9/11 because we were too involved overseas. I’ll take the promise that Rand isn’t Ron. That’s good to know. I don’t particularly like his criticism of the PATRIOT act but a little dissent is worth it.
Anyhow during the Senate’s great years in my lifetime…conservatives came in many different varieties: the foreign policy nationalism of Taft (by all odds the greatest Senate intellectual in my lifetime), the healthy criticism of Taft’s surprisingly liberal education and housing programs by Virginia’s arch-conservative Democrat Harry F. Byrd, Sr., the brilliant criticism of Taft’s somewhat blind eye on tax cuts by Colorado’s Eugene Milliken and George Malone’s pestiferous criticism of what he called Milliken’s blind-sidedness on trying to cut innovative research programs in the military.
It’s the meld that makes a great caucus…a dash of this, a splash of that. Have no fear: Rand Paul belongs.
Here’s Hoping…
…that McCain loses to Hayward and finally has a chance to discover how many houses he owns due to his marrying a multi-millionaire lady. I sorta kinda hope Specter wins so as to make it easier for Pat Tooney to defeat him in November—but I don’t think that’s possible so we’ll be saying farewell to the biggest phony who ever inveigled the two party system…
Rahm’s No-Class Act’s Unclassy Language.
Since I first met Rahm Emanuel when he was a wee sprout raising what he called “Jewish money” for Daley, I have been disinclined to believe he was anything more than a smart-alecky, wisecracking ultra-pragmatic heel who would eagerly chisel the gold out of his dead grandmother’s molars to make earnings come out even, saying in effect, Hey, the old lady ain’t got use for them anymore. They’ll fetch a good price in the gold market. See what I mean: no class.
That early judgment has been ratified with every stage of his so-called political growth: the chiseling way he fabricated bogus “anti-Semitism” on his first run for the Congress after a feeble senior-senior citizen in Nancy Kaczak’s campaign goofed and said he thought Emanuel had dual citizenship…the way Tomczak was allowed to go to jail for recruiting Water Department workers to work precincts for him (at his demand made to Daley minions)…the way the Clinton White House manipulated threats of revealed sexual peccadilloes which was largely the contrivance of one man…the sudden transformation of Rahm the political manipulator to Rahm the Investment Banker where he made millions through political connections in merely following by-the-book formulae regarding a Com Ed merger
[continued]…the egregious use of his board membership on Freddie Mac where he earned $300,000 plus salary for six meetings a year and escaped criticism for the horrendous mismanagement of the agency during his time on the Board…the scandalous way passage of ObamaCare was handled with lavish federal payoffs to Louisiana (the Louisiana Purchase) and Nebraska (the Cornhusker payoff) all handled by Emanuel.
Yesterday meeting with some Rabbis, Emanuel tried to set the disastrous Obama-Israel policies into focus. His statement to the Rabbis: “We screwed up the message.” My personal opinion is he doesn’t care how the Middle East turns out so long as he’s protected from blame. He goes through the paces of Judaism but I’d be very surprised if he and Axelrod give a personal thought to its policies. Like the secular Jews Norman Podhoretz describes, the Second Torah is the religion of secular liberal Democratic accommodation. Hence the slip-shod use of language to Rabbis who are concerned about their Faith:
“We screwed up the message.” Yes Rahm but I’ll amend it. You’re screwed up. Screwed up from the accumulated weight of many years of indentured service to a party that is concerned not with values but the cost of cutting deals.
______________________________
*: St. Eric of Sweden [AD 1161]. He was recognized in most parts of Sweden as king and his line lasted for a century. He helped establish Catholicism in Upper Sweden and built the first large church for the faith at Old Uppsala. All laws and constitutions were collected at his orders and were contained in one volume, known as King Eric’s Laws. But he was soon challenged by heathen Finns who made incursions into his territories. A good general as well as king, Eric vanquished them and he commissioned the bishop of Uppsala, later to become St. Hilary, to evangelize the people.
But Eric’s zeal for the Catholic faith angered some nobles who entered into a conspiracy with Magnus, son of the king of Denmark. While he was at Mass the conspirators rushed upon him, killed him and beheaded him on May 18, 1161. He was regarded as the principal patron of Sweden until the Protestant Reformation. His relics are contained in the cathedral at Uppsala and his effigy appears on the country’s coat of arms.
No comments:
Post a Comment