Governor Northam and His Critics
I posted this brief comment on Facebook:
I have read some "conservatives" on FB calling for support or sympathy for Gov. Northam. This is almost as pathetic as the conservatives who are denouncing him for racism. Red Phillips strikes the right balance--Northam is not worthy either of defense or offense. Since when does an advocate of infanticide deserve sympathy or support from normal human beings? Of course no one in his right mind would join the pile-on (and isn't it interesting how few conservatives these days are in their right minds!), but imagine Pol Pot or Mao were attacked for insensitivity to Gays. What would be the proper response? Let them devour each other, it's no business of mine.
Responding to the tired old attacks on Senator Robert Byrd as a Klansman, I commented: Byrd like Truman and many many others did anything he could to stay in politics. Picking on KKK activities is a pointless exercise in historical revisionism--like the personal revenge Bush II took on Trent Lott on the false grounds that Lott had something nice to say about Strom. In fact, I had known for years-- from a friend who worked at the RNC--that Lott used to ridicule young George as "Junior," and the spoiled little boy who grew up to play the President took it to heart. The attacks on Byrd and Lott and Thurmond are a lot more vile than anything done by the targeted politicos. Conservatives always fall for hypocrisy--it is an addiction for them.
Piers Morgan, by the way, has outdone himself in attacking Liam Neeson for admitting that, when he found out a friend had been raped by a black, he went out looking for a back man to kill. Neeson said, yes, it was a terrible thought and he is sorry. I don't know much about Neeson, apart from loathing his zombified acting style, but he must be some kind of man to think he can express an honest opinion in public. It's time Mr. Morgan moved back to America and joined the GOP.
I add this:
When someone answered Red by insisting, principle or no principle, we have to attack the enemy by any means possible, one of Doc Red's supporters asked the highly pertinent question: Are we supposed to engage in retroactive political correctness?
Exactly the point. One of the marks of the Leftist--as visible as the mark of Cain--is their insistence on looking backward and condemning Washington as slave-owner, Robert Byrd as Klansman, Socrates as a misogynist. Perhaps without being aware of what they are doing, so-called conservatives are always doing the same thing, recoiling in horror at anyone in the past who might have thought, said, or done something that would he condemned today. Of course, the real effect--and the point of every exercise in historical revisionism--is to consolidate the revolution.
The result is that we are supposed to believe that the Bible opposed slavery and that anyone whoever resisted feminism or homosexualism is a pathological bigot. Conservatives--nearly all of them--are suffering from the Stockholm syndrome: They identify with their oppressors.
Tom Fleming’s final paragraph says it all. When the left superimposes modern sensibilities over someone or something from an earlier era, it is to be expected but when the right does so in an effort to also virtue signal I find it reprehensible. We also have putative conservatives who rush to virtue signal in an entirely contemporary context as we saw when writers for National Review were quick to condemn the Catholic schoolboys in their confrontation with the “Native American elder.” With conservatives like these who needs enemies.
The Republicans showed their usual cowardice and irrelevance by attacking “racism” rather than infanticide.
I have recently been reading Fulbright and Robert Byrd on their criticisms of American imperialism. Byrd made very good comments on Shrub’s Mideast adventurers. Both these men came from a patriotic standpoint that was only possible from a Southern Democrat.
By the way, Stonewall Jackson was not at Gettysburg. He died two months before.
Yes, sorry abut that, Clyde. It comes from scratching out ad copy in haste after scribbling foolishness on FB.
Well said. Of course this accessory before the fact to baby murder deserves no defense. Let them slaughter him.
Never mind that of course they were targeting another “Southern” governor, as they are wont to do. In this case it is richly deserved.
On the other hand, I found the juvenile picture in the med school yearbook quite funny. And it got funnier still, and turned hilarious, when the pundits started pontificating ever so seriously and with what imitation of gravitas they could muster, and MLK’s daughter, or wife, or whatever she was, was brought on air by Fox to throw verbal stones, all over a pointless and harmless photo from an old yearbook. Blackface and a klan suit! I was almost rolling! Where could we find a more hilarious farce? Almost like a Steve Martin movie.
Oh well, the scalawag traitor got his just deserts. Now how long will it be before someone with impeccable leftist credentials takes up his bloody infanticide banner?
Yes, you can’t make it up. I confess I never did blackface and didn’t know anyone who did, but it was a style of humor like Irish or Polak jokes.
Blackface minstrel shows were entirely a Yankee invention and form of entertainment.
The belief that the Bible opposes slavery is a belief based on folks having read the abstractions of the Enlightenment into Scripture as eisegesis and then having read them back out as exegesis. In a conversation with one of my Evangelical friends some time back, he began teasing anti-slavery sentiments out of some passages in Holy Writ, to which I responded that he was like the Gnostics on the Supreme Court, finding new “rights” as emanations coming from the penumbra of certain amendments. I told him that if those of his worldview had written the Bible, the commandment not to covet thy neighbors manservant or maidservant would have read – kill your neighbor, plunder his property, free his slaves to a life of destitution and fell good about yourself; or the Christ would said to the centurion, of whom He said, “No greater faith have I found in all of Israel,” something akin to “free the slave whom I just healed or you will be anathema.” Or St. Paul would have told Philemon, “free the slave I am sending back, give him all of your property, go sit on a dung heap like Job, and enjoy the dual feeling of guilt and virtue signaling.” St. Paul really messed up because he failed to mention slavery in the list of sins and wickedness in Romans 1. The retort is often one which reduces the Holy Spirit to a cunning manipulator in that it is asserted that the Roman Empire was not yet ready for a reformation on the question of slavery, to which I reply, “The Holy Spirit is not given to reformation, but to transformation.” We can all “feel good” that there is no more agrarian slavery as there was in the antebellum south while we waste away under the thrall of abject materialism with its capitalist and socialist faces.
In the end, I understand that the Utopia which Modernity promises is a lie. The future extolled by liberalism is a counterfeit eternity. The march of progressivism is a dead-end quest.
That which, however, rallies around the Eternal will produce fruits, analogia entis, which will be acknowledged and perfected when all things are made new in Christ.
The more our decadent Modernity strains to produce a judgment-free, asexual, culture-despising “utopia,” the more hilarious the etymological meaning of that term becomes.
Mr. Peters–What was your evangelical friend’s response?
Also, how are “conservatives” so sure that “liberals” uniformly believe in progress and an impending utopia? I know many more “liberals” than I know “conservatives”, and they seem to know that utopia is nowhere and–though perhaps fewer of them–that progress in the real world is just improvement–desirable but not inevitable.
Ever since I can remember, it seems, I have been enamored of conservatism, even before I discovered Russell Kirk from his introduction to the Regnery Gateway edition of The Communist Manifesto. I’m still a rather Kirkian conservative, one who’s almost never voted Republican (confession: I voted for Jim Edgar because his Democrat opponent was Dawn Clark Netsch, and I’m not sorry) because the Republicans believe that utopia already exists. Their utopia is called football, and they’ve made American politics over in its likeness.
Mr. Olson, Republicans are not conservatives. The political elites of both parties are interested in one thing: getting and retaining power.