THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

TO BE RESPECTABLE, YOU MUST MAINTAIN LIBERAL DENIAL | 2001-05-05

No one remembers today that almost every "intellectual" in the 50s and 60s said that the only way to economic EFFICIENCY was to have all industry owned and run directly by the government. Back then, "socialism," which represented the Inevitable Future of Social Progress, was defined as "government ownership of the means of production."

This idea is so stupid it is hilarious, so no conservative is allowed to remind anyone of what was once Inevitable and Efficient. You will never see that anywhere but here.

Likewise, the fact that integration was supposed to lead to improvements in the statistics on illegitimacy, drug use, crime, and so forth has been flushed down the Memory Hole of every respectable conservative.

O'Reilly on the Fox Cable News Network gives the justification for busing that is popular today. The purpose of busing, liberals say, is to take hostages: If you have white students forced into ghetto schools, their parents will be forced to vote for more ghetto school money.

Liberals never put it this way, of course. But their ORIGINAL argument for busing was that it improved education, and nobody will dare remind them of THAT nonsense!

The other argument liberals NOW use for integration is Holy Diversity.

The 1960s justification for integration was the exact OPPOSITE of Diversity. With integration, "Negroes" would be just like whites, "except for the color of the skin."

On one program, O'Reilly was discussing home schooling with William Bennett. Bennett said that home schooling worked great, but he guiltily admitted that it does not provide Holy Diversity.

Bennett is one of our leading respectable conservatives. To be a good one of those, you have to be genuinely too stupid to see reality. So Bennett is honestly puzzled that Holy Diversity doesn't seem to be necessary to a good education.

It would never occur to Bennett or Jack Kemp or other respectables that the exact opposite is always the case.

So when Bennett said this, O'Reilly dutifully jumped in and said, "That is what I like about public education. Diversity is good." But he did not stop there. His next sentence, without a break, was, "I CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHY WE KEEP PUMPING MORE MONEY INTO PUBLIC EDUCATION AND IT KEEPS GETTING WORSE."

Well, DUHH!

A routine respectable conservative could say that and believe it, but O'Reilly is no fool. Surely he can see that his second sentence answered the first!

AFKAN | 2008-02-18

By the way, a quick comment on Bob's observation, "A society which is only held together by an opinion cannot have freedom of opinion."

Am I alone in noticing that the Ron Paul Campaign seems to have literally had the lights turned off, overnight, quickly, quietly, and silently?

Am I alone in noticing that Libertarian Ideals ran into *SOMETHING* that just hit the "OFF" switch?

Am I alone in noticing that the foundation of what could have been to the future what the Goldwater Campaign was to the Reagan Revolution seems to have been suddenly, dramatically, short-circuited?

AFKAN

Precisely.

This is why bitching about newspaper crap in general, "Well, the Mantra is in there IMPLIED" -- is like Paul trying to dodge the race issue in a cloud of Libertarian verbiage and patriotism.

As AFKAN says, that crap was out of date in 1981, a quarter of a century ago.

WHAT IS "COMBAT?" | 2005-06-23

I was raised around what I call "professional World War II veterans." These were men who fought in WW2 and have had no life since. According to them, if you weren't in WW2, you didn't know what real life was all about.

I was talking to one of the more pathetic of those guys and mentioned a friend of mine who was the only soldier in his unit to come back on his feet from a battle in the Korean War. The professional WW2 vet replied, "He wasn't in a real war, he was in a police action. I was in The WAR."

True, not all WW2 vets are that callous and stupid. But I have never heard ONE SINGLE member of the group that calls itself The Greatest Generation have the moral courage to contradict this kind of statement by a "professional WW2 veteran."

And plenty of them were sitting right there when the professional WW2 vets told me nobody else had been "in combat" but them.

You might as well spit on Korean War vets' graves.

This is another reason why I have a low opinion of the group that calls itself The Greatest Generation.

My brother-in-law served in WW2 in the Merchant Marine. He insists he was "never in combat."

He didn't have to tell me that. Very few men who were in the Merchant Marine were "in combat" and lived to tell about it. "Combat" meant they were attacked by a submarine. Very few of the men who were on a Merchant Marine ship that got attacked by a submarine are around to talk about it.

No, my brother-in-law was not "in combat." He just risked a horrible death at sea, never knowing when, day or night, his ship might go down under him.

For excellent reasons, I can only reveal that I have almost certainly have never been in a fire-fight that involved as many as two hundred combatants on both sides. My WW2 friends told me I had never really been "in combat."

You sure could have fooled me.

I also knew some of the people who were trying to kill my brother-in-law. One of them was serving on a German submarine at the age of thirteen. He showed an understandable reluctance to talk about how much experience he had had "in combat." He would have had to tell me about his success in killing people like us.

The death rate in the AMERICAN submarine corps in WW2 was one in seven. The death rate among Germans was more like 50%. And it was horrible way to die down there.

Professional American WW2 vets would probably say that all this German submariner ever did was help run the submarine while it shot torpedoes at Allied ships. He wasn't really "in combat" unless he had been fired back at.

But he was in the same position as my brother-in-law. Very few German submarine crews who had depth charges dropped at them lived to tell about it.

So even he, a man who was in The Real War, was never really "in combat."

Let me tell you something: I would FAR rather be in a fire-fight out in the field than sitting on a ship for months waiting day and night for a torpedo to send me to a cold drowning death. And I would take either option long before I would be willing be go down in a sub and spend months waiting for a suffocating death down there.

But what would I know? I've never been a Real War.

DR. DUKE REPORTS THAT EUROPE NOW HAS A CHAMPION OF FREE SPEECH! | 2006-10-29

"Switzerland's justice minister has called on the Swiss government to reverse a law which makes historical revisionism illegal.

Minister Christoph Blocher is on a campaign to change the law, according to the Neue Zuercher Zeitung (NZZ) newspaper – even if it will impinge upon the sensitivities of minority groups, including the country's Jewish communities.

Blocher claims that freedom of _expression is more important than protecting the sensibilities of minority groups, NZZ wrote.

Blocher just returned from a trip to Turkey where a public discussion of the Armenian genocide is de facto punishable by a court of law. Upon his return home, Blocher said that he believes that Swiss laws needs to be a beacon for other nations.

As far as the minister is concerned, a ban on free speech in Turkey has made an effective public discussion of the Armenian genocide and Kurdish issues there impossible. In effect, he claims that widening the possibilities for freedom of speech in Switzerland might entice other countries to do the same.