Sound and Fury

I drove by and saw this rally in progress Saturday afternoon. About six or seven people were holding up a sign on the sidewalk, in front of the shopping center mentioned on their flyer. The Rightwing Blogosphere is still full of sound and fury about the traitors in the MSM, but away from a computer screen, their rage is signifying less and less.

American Top 40 . . .

The new Reactionary Radicals blog is up with an RR top 40(or so) list that has many good selections but misses a few that should be included. The list contains a couple of songs from the Kinks, including "Village Green Preservation Society and the title track from Muswell Hillbillies. The opening track, "20th Century Man," laments that "This is the age of machinery, A mechanical nightmare, The wonderful world of technology, Napalm hydrogen bombs biological warfare . . . Ain't got no ambition, i'm just disillusioned I'm a twentieth century man but I don't wanna be here . . ."

RR themes appear in later Kinks songs such as "Living on a Thin Line," (written by Dave Davies) from Word of Mouth. That song begins with the line, "All the stories have been told Of kings and days of old, But there's no England now . . . "

The list also features the Skynyrd classic "Sweet Home Alabama" but neglected "Things Goin' On" from their first album, Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd, which forcefully states:

Too many lives they've spent across the ocean.
Too much money been spent upon the moon.
Well, until they make it right
I hope they never sleep at night
They better make some changes
And do it soon.

Also, shockingly missing is Dwight Yoakam's "I Sang Dixie,"(from Buenas Noches From a Lonely Room) aptly described by Kauffman in Chronicles a few years back as a "deracine anthem":

He said listen to me son while you still can
Run back home to that Southern land
Don't you see what life here has done to me?
Then he closed those old blue eyes
And fell limp against my side
No more pain, now he's safe back home in Dixie

Come Monday

As Daniel McCarthy has pointed out, starting monday Reactionary Radicals goes on line to discuss the themes of Bill Kauffman's Look Homeward America : In Search of Reactionary Radicals. The participants include Kauffman, McCarthy, Jesse Walker and John Zmirak.

Alas, this blog will exist in the shadow of the blog discussing the Birthright Pundit's new book Can She Be Stopped? : Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless . . .

Rally To Censor The Iraq War

I saw this flyer posted on a bulletin board at the Universtity of Tennessee. I think there is at least a slight possibility that it is a hoax since it asks for volunteers, but leaves no phone number or email address; and it doesn't give a time for the demonstration. On the other hand his office is right across the street:

Rally To Censor The Iraq War

TIRED OF TV NETWORKS LIKE NBC,CBS ABC and CNN REPORTING UNFAIR, DISTORTED AND NEGATIVE NEWS? THE NETWORKS SAY OUR COUNTRY IS LOOSING IN IRAQ, AND THAT WE ARE TORTURING AND MISTREATING "THOSE POOR OLD TERRORISTS", WHO BY THE WAY WOULD LOVE TO KILL US AMERICANS AND OUR FAMILIES. IF YOU ARE FED UP WITH THIS LUNACY AND FOLLY,
JOIN US AT:

BROADWAY-KMART SHOPPING CNTR
SATURDAY, MAY 13, 2006

PATRIOTIC MUSIC AND SPEECHES OVER OUR P.A. SYSTEM. WE PLAN TO HAVE EVERY ONE SIGN A PETITION THAT WILL BE SENT TO PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH REGARDING CENSORSHIP ON THE WAR IN IRAQ. THE LIBERAL NEWS MEDIA, CERTAIN SENATORS AND GENERALS ARE DETERMINED TO UNDERMINE, BELITTLE AND DESTROY OUR WAR EFFORTS IN IRAQ, AS THEY DID IN THE VIETNAM WAR. SPEAKERS AT THE RALLY WILL EXPLAIN HOW IF WE LOSE IN IRAQ, WE WILL LOSE THE ENTIRE MIDDLE EAST AND 80% OF THE WORLD'S OIL!! YOU WILL SEE GAS PRICES SOAR TO $18 TO 20$ PER GALLON. THIS COULD HAPPEN WITHIN 1 YEAR TO 18 MONTHS AFTER AMERICAN TROOPS WITHDRAW. IF YOU LOVE YOUR COUNTRY AND WANT TO CONFRONT THE LIBERAL HATE AMERICA GROUPS, THE ACLU, THE NEWS MEDIA, HOLLYWOOD, SOME LUNATIC CONGRESSMEN AND SENATORS . . . THEN THIS IS YOUR OPPORTUNITY!!

The Only Thing

Politics is the only thing in the current administration:

After discussing the huge strides the agency has made in doing business with minority-owned companies, Jackson closed with a cautionary tale, relaying a conversation he had with a prospective advertising contractor.

"He had made every effort to get a contract with HUD for 10 years," Jackson said of the prospective contractor. "He made a heck of a proposal and was on the (General Services Administration) list, so we selected him. He came to see me and thank me for selecting him. Then he said something ... he said, 'I have a problem with your president.'

"I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'I don't like President Bush.' I thought to myself, 'Brother, you have a disconnect -- the president is elected, I was selected. You wouldn't be getting the contract unless I was sitting here. If you have a problem with the president, don't tell the secretary.'

"He didn't get the contract," Jackson continued. "Why should I reward someone who doesn't like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? Logic says they don't get the contract. That's the way I believe."

Government contracts are now subject to a political litmus test(as is participation in scientific advisory panels, as Chris Mooney notes in The Republican War on Science). Rod Dreher notes that this is yet another example of the "rank cronyism" of the Bush administration.

Rummy's Lapdog

Hugh Hewitt interviews Donald Rumsfeld and Austin Bay and it is clear that the only problem that any of them see is with media coverage of the war:

HH: Is the American media doing a good job of covering the war in all of its facets?

DR: Oh, goodness gracious. You know, I'm not a judge and a jury. That's up for the American people to decide, and you know where they rank the media.

Hewitt didn't go into any possible problems with the way that Rummy has fought the war, or bring up the generals. Charlie McCarthy would have asked tougher questions of Edgar Bergen.

Winning

I agree that we are winning in Iraq. We have been winning for more than three years now and will be winning three years from now. The only problem is that our various enemies in Iraq don't have to win, they only have to not lose.

New TAC

The May 22 issue of The American Conservative is out with my review of Harvey C. Mansfield's book Manliness, along with an excerpt of Bill Kauffman's Look Homeward America : In Search of Reactionary Radicals. You should pick up a copy, or better yet, subscribe.

Fame & Fortune . . .

It's good to know that you are accomplishing something and I appreciate the kind words from A.C. Kleinheider, a Middle Tennessee blogger who now has a professional gig. Little did I know that when I linked to his original blog a year or so ago that it encourage him to continue blogging until he was discovered and launched on the path to fame and fortune.

Falling Up

The Right Side of the web is in a tizzy over Patrick Kennedy getting in a wreck, or something. And who can blame them? We all cheer when the other team fumbles. But leave it to one of the Power Line guys, John Hindraker in this case, to tread upon the thin ice:

Perversely, perhaps, I want to make a serious comment. Which begins with a quote from a dentist who lived in my home town in South Dakota: "Voting for Democrats is like picking your nose. You like to do it, but you're not proud of it."

Crude, but apt. Why on earth is a lost, pathetic nonentity like Patrick Kennedy a member of Congress? . . . Can the people of Rhode Island possibly be proud of being represented by a slow-witted, uninformed young man with admitted psychiatric and drug problems? I assume not.

. . .

Obviously, Kennedy is a Congressman because of his last name . . .

Actually, the dentist quote is stupidly inapt. What the heck does it mean? But the more important issue concerns a loyal Bushie criticizing Rhode Island voters for supporting a dullard with a famous name. Yeah, I can't imagine why people would vote for Patrick Kennedy, but he hasn't got nearly as much mileage from his name and family connections as George W. Bush. Read Kevin Phillips on the subject. Bush is a man who can only fall up, and he kept falling til he made the Whitehouse.

Self Made Candidate

Bob Corker is presumably Tennessee's best funded senate candidate this year since I have seen his ads enough to be sick of them. One has the wannabe senator telling an audience about his hardscrabble upbringing. You know the drill: born in a log cabin he built with his own hands . . . sold pencils on a street corner . . . Or something like that, it's the sort of boilerplate claptrap that I tune out.

It builds up to Corker desire to go to the Senate to get spending under control. Now I would like to get spending under control as well, but I am far more concerned about the war in Iraq, the looming war against Iran, immigration, etc. He does address these issues in a superfical manner:

We must complete our mission in Iraq, supporting the new emerging democratic government until Iraqi forces are prepared to defend their country.

Iran and North Korea pose exceptional dangers because of their possession of nuclear materials and our relations with these nations should be a top foreign policy priority. We must be firm in our insistence that Iran and North Korea renounce any nuclear weapons programs and we should stay focused on solving this problem in the near term.

Okay Sen. Corker, what if it takes another five or ten years to "complete our mission in Iraq"? Are you still game? Suppose Iran tells us to take our concerns about their nuclear program and stick them where the sun don't shine; do we bomb, invade, what? What do you have to offer other than platitudes?

And how can any Republican candidate talk about controlling spending with a straight face? If Republican control of the government for the last six years have led to exploding debt, I don't see Corker making much of a difference.

Indeed

Glenn Reynolds:

Of course, if we seized the Saudi and Iranian oil fields and ran the pumps full speed, oil prices would plummet, dictators would be broke, and poor nations would benefit from cheap energy. But we'd be called imperialist oppressors, then.
UPDATE: Various people (with various degrees of enthusiasm) see the above as a call for invasion. It was, rather, a comment on the vacuity of the "imperialist oppressors" language. Though I was probably wrong there anyway: If we really were imperialist oppressors, the critics would be sucking up.

Me (or anyone not insane): Well, yeah, invading a country to steal its resources does seem kind of "imperialist" and a little "oppressive." But if those terms are too leftwing, how about "Saddam like" or perhaps, "not unlike the actions of Imperial Japan circa 1941." What is really disturbing is Reynolds' mindset. He thinks that opposing aggression is a morally suspect position.

And note that Reynolds is deciding how his political opponents would respond to a theoretical position and then he labels it vacuous. Harsh words coming from someone whose greatest contribution to public debate is "heh."

Responsible Rummy

Even if Mackubin Owens is correct in asserting that the problems in Iraq are due to Don Rumsfeld deferring too much to the military brass(and I have my doubts), he is still in charge and responsible for the failures of that occupation.

Crunchy Post

The Washington Post Style Section goes Crunchy. The most startling revelation is that a youthful Rod Dreher served as a tour guide for the late 60's radical, Abbie Hoffman in Baton Rouge.

Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman came to campus, and Dreher volunteered to escort him around town. A wigged-out Hoffman demanded to be driven to Jimmy Swaggart Bible College so he could yell obscenities out the car window and maybe pick a fight. There was an arrogance to it. It was a small moment in a Dreher's journey rightward, toward something that seemed more sensible, upstanding.

On Pins & Needles

Set aside plenty of time for reading, Stephen Green is working on an “essay.” Make that two.

Close Call

Another Memo-of-Mass Destruction. "Saddam Regime Document CMPC-2003-016083 dated in 2001 contains a series of Top Secret memos that address the production of Nerve Gas Detectors which was prohibited by the United Nations resolutions concerning Iraq according to the document itself."

They loaded these banned detectors onto unmanned aerial vehicles and dropped them on our cities and killed millions.

Writers in the South

Rod Dreher thinks he knows why the South produces good writers:

Think of all the material! I just got this from my old pal Thomas, a fellow Louisiana native:

My father’s dachshund (Huey, named after Huey Long) was going to turn 16 in June. My folks had to put him down on Friday for a number of health reasons but there is such a nugget of humor in this that I had to share. Mother informed me that they buried Huey with a can of Miller Lite (his preferred beer) and positioned him facing East. Do you suspect other families have “flavor” such as this?

Well, my late Uncle Murphy once won a tombstone off an undertaker in a bourre' game. Guy couldn't pay him, so he gave Murphy a tombstone made to order. It had Murphy's name, date of birth, and the epitaph Murphy selected for himself. Murphy put it on his front doorstep, where it sat for over 20 years. When he finally expired, his kids had the date of death carved into the stone, and as he requested, put it at the head of his grave. The epitaph reads: "This ain't bad, once you get used to it."

The late Walker Percy begs to differ (from his self interview reprinted in Signposts in a Strange Land:

But what about those unique characteristics of the South? Don't they tend to make the South a more hospitable place for writers?
Well, I've heard about that, the storytelling tradition, sense of identity, tragic dimension, community, history, and so forth. But I was never quite sure what it meant. In fact, I'm not sure that the opposite is not the case. People don't read much in the South and don't take writers very seriously, which is probably as it should be. . .

I have a theory of why Faulkner became a great writer. It was not the presence of a tradition and all that, as one generally hears, but the absence. Everybody in Oxford, Mississippi, knew who faulkner was, not because he was a great writer, but because he was a local character, a little-bitty fellow who put on airs . . .

The Stud

It is instructive to remember what the people were saying when caught up in the moment three years ago today. Their comments have aged well, like fine wine . . .
K-Lo:

Presidential Stud, Continued [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

That looked to me like a pefect landing, to cap off a combat war won in under a month. If the likes of Fox News Channel and NR chose the pictures that would best characterize his presidency: bullhorn at Ground Zero, in a flight suit on the deck of the Lincoln, hanging with his men . . . This is one cool presidential moment. If this were a private corporation, whoever thought of it would be getting a nice raise.(emphasis addded)

More K-Lo:

This is different, guys. And it's not just because he is a Republican and I like him. It's different because he is a leader of a nation that is winning a historically significant war. He is using the props of commander in chief to show the nation and the world--the day after the State Department announced that terrorism is at its lowest point in decades in the U.S.--to demonstrate that we are winning this long war on terrorism, even if we still have miles to go, to show that we support these guys who fought and those who died for our freedom and for the freedom of Iraqis, Afghans, and hopefully in the future, others in that part of the world . . . Again, this is not some stunt photo op.

John Hindraker: "Yeah, we've had better leaders. Their names were Washington and Lincoln. And maybe Roosevelt."

Glenn Reynolds was more skeptical, but caught a lot of flak. "The jet-pilot arrival, on the other hand, rang false."

Actually, I'm a Radical Reactionary

I received my long awaited copy of Bill Kauffman's latest book, Look Homeward America : In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute will be hosting a blog, starting in a couple of weeks, to discuss the themes presented by Kauffman; and I have been invited by the author to participate.

Unsinkable

Fox News anchor and talk radio host Tony Snow is going to be the new press secretary to President Bush. Apparently, the position of Titanic cruise director is taken.