Power corrupts ...

...everything.

//In his letter to Mandell Creighton, a bishop and historian, Acton warned that we should not make moral allowances for powerful people just because they are powerful. If a common man murdered someone, Acton explained, he should hang. But when a king or queen murders, we make allowances for it. “I would hang them higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice,” Acton wrote. Now, if the issue were merely the homicidal intrigues of monarchs of old, we might make allowances for the times in which they lived. But Acton’s point is much broader, and more relevant, than that.

We are constantly making allowances for “great” men and women, though we don’t use the word “great” that way. But the gist is the same. Bill Cosby is believed to have gotten away with his alleged abuses because he was powerful and famous. The same goes for Bill Clinton and his many alleged transgressions. The Polish director Roman Polanski, who fled U.S. prosecution for statutory rape, had countless celebrity defenders whom a plumber would never have under the same circumstances. The same was true of Michael Jackson.

While money often plays a role — the powerful and famous are very often rich as well — it’s rare that such people buy the kind of protection I’m talking about. The people who forgive, say, Fidel Castro or Che Guevara for their innumerable crimes aren’t paid to do so. Their defenders volunteer for duty.//

We need to protect the right of the apathetic to be apathetic.

And the best way to do that is to shrink the power of government to mess with our lives.

Jonah Goldberg writes:

It should surprise no one who's read this column for the past eight years that I hope Romney defeats Obama decisively when the votes are tallied. But the truth is that from a conservative perspective, a Romney victory would simply be making the best of a bad situation.

The mere fact that presidential elections matter this much is not a sign of national health but of national dysfunction. The more the federal government gets involved in every aspect of our lives — for good or ill — the more people will feel that their livelihoods, lifestyles, even their actual lives are at stake in a presidential election. If the federal government didn't have so much leverage over your life, politicians wouldn't be able to scare you into the voting booths.

Thought for the Day.

"But this is the kind of ass-clownery that stems from the fact that all philosophy looks weird when you don't have one."

-- Jonah Goldberg.


As an added bonus, here is the famous Judd Apatow/Jonah Goldberg micro-twitter debate on campaign finance reform.

One of the great things about being a conservative is that you get to speak curmudgeonly but undeniable truths such as...

...young people are so frickin stupid.

Another entry for the "Poverty of Public Discourse" File.

There's nothing like a grudge-match to bring out an audience.

Tomorrow night, Jonah Goldberg, author of The Tyranny of Cliches, will be appearing on Piers Morgan’s CNN show tomorrow night for a rematch of last week’s bloodbath, in which Morgan refused to ask Goldberg about his book, clearly hadn’t read it, and then didn’t let Goldberg give answers to his questions.

Right now, Goldberg and Morgan are engaged in a furious Twitter battle, with Morgan firing:

Looking forward to our re-match tomorrow night @JonahNRO - hope you bring your self-fabled A-game this time.... #CNN

Goldberg quipped:

Not sure why @piersmorgan is so eager for my "A" game when he had so much trouble with my C-game.

Game on.

The ironic thing - which Morgan would know if he had been listening to Goldberg - is that the thesis of Goldberg's book is that liberals pretend to be neutral while having an ideological agenda. Hence, Goldberg twitters:

Jonah Goldberg
@JonahNRO .@piersmorgan Ah Piers. That's part of your problem. You claim to be unbiased, but you considered the interview a "match."

in response to Morgan's fatuous:

Piers Morgan
✔@piersmorgan We Brits are a nation of warriors @JonahNRO - everything's a match. But I promise a fair fight tomorrow, and it will be about your book.

Hugh Hewitt observes:

C-SPAN's Brian Lamb set the standard for author interviews. No one can match him, but everyone can try, and when a writer as skilled as, say, Del Wilber, whose "Rawhide Down" hasn't had a negative review yet from anyone who read it, says an interview was the best he has had, well then, that's a compliment worth receiving.

Which is why Piers Morgan's non-interview of Jonah Goldberg last week ought to have been an embarrassment to Morgan and his network, CNN. Morgan had quite obviously not read Jonah's wonderful "Tyranny of Cliches," and seemed almost afraid to let Jonah speak a complete sentence, for fear that the Los Angeles Times columnist and NationalReview.com contributor might have wielded his well-known wit against his host.

So Morgan launched a fusillade of bizarre questions, few of which had anything to do with the book and none of which genuinely sought or allowed an answer. Goldberg kept his cool and repaid gracelessness with graciousness, but should he have done so? Hitchens would never have put up with such behavior by someone so obviously unprepared and also so churlish, but the American way is to smile and look quizzically at the boorish host.

CNN's ratings are in the tank, and it is because the network increasingly allows new and unprepared hosts to displace pros like Wolf Blitzer, Candy Crowley and John King, or CNN burdens a good interviewer like Anderson Cooper with an inane slogan like "Keeping Them Honest" and obliges him to repeat it in an exercise designed to discredit whatever follows.

Another liberal who is palpably unable to engage in a discussion, but retreats to non-discursive tactics.

There's something to the theory.

"Piers Morgan's Childish, Hostile, Cliché-Ridden Interview Of Jonah Goldberg"...

...and it was just plain weird.

Particularly when Morgan is insistent on having Goldberg defend his proposition that Romney is a "stiff" but maybe not a "nerd."

No one wonder CNN is dying.

Check out this Big Journalism post.

And here is the video.

You say "dogma" like it is a bad thing.

Jonah Goldberg on Dogma.

Once you get through the dazzling prose, the hilarious jokes, the compelling history, and the utterly tasteful nudity, the argument at the core of Tyranny of Clichés is that contemporary liberals and self-proclaimed centrists are far more dogmatic than conservatives. Now, that's not the problem. I like dogma. The problem is that liberals don't recognize or acknowledge their own dogmatism. They think they are free thinkers, empiricists, fact-finders, and pragmatists.

Conservatives have dogma, too. And that's a good thing. The difference is that we know where ours comes from. It's the difference between a devout orthodox Christian and a person who "doesn't believe in religion" but is passionate about "spirituality." Both have dogmatic convictions. But the Catholic knows their source: Church teaching, scripture, tradition, etc. The self-proclaimed spiritualist floats through life, like a jellyfish in the ocean, scooping up the bits and pieces he needs, bending to the circumstances, riding whatever currents he finds himself in, collecting magical anecdotes that confirm what he already believes.

But control of the media is supposed to protect Democrats from being held to the same bizarre standards they apply to the Republicans.





Jonah Goldberg observes:

JONAH GOLDBERG, NATIONAL REVIEW: We are in a really weird place where the head of the Teamsters can’t talk tough. I mean, I guess ex-cons are the only ones left who can still talk like men every now and then. We would not be in this mess, we would not have this controversy, if we did not have this bonfire of asininity that came out of the Tucson shootings where all of a sudden Sarah Palin’s Facebook Congressional map was somehow to blame for not only this madman but for all of the violence overtaking America. And for all I know listening to some of these people on MSNBC, it was responsible for Lee Harvey Oswald.


I mean, it was absolutely bizarre standard that was established that was led by, that Barack Obama picked it up. He created the standard for themselves where any martial metaphor, any tough language like this was automatically by their own words and their own standards set up as to being inciting violence and what not, and now it's blowing up in their faces if I’m allowed to say that. And they deserve it.

Hey, you know, it seems that all that talk about civility was complete bullshit.

Every now and again I wake up and wonder how I became a citizen of weird-upside down land where a kid's lemonade stand is shut down for not having a business permit but transexual prostitutes...

...are proud of their "work."

Jonah Goldberg observes:

Across America, lemonade stands run by little kids are being shut down because the kids didn't get the necessary permits. In Georgia some little girls had their stand shut down after making $5 because they needed a $400 permit. The economic stakes here are beyond negligible. The state will never collect that $400 bucks, and the economy will survive the lost economic activity from the shuttered stand. But culturally, the lessons learned and not learned are really significant. Running a lemonade stand is simply a great thing for a kid to do. Creating a society where even pretend entrepreneurialism is crushed will have consequences. In Detroit, a city which should be throwing flower petals at the feet of entrepreneurs, it took a food-truck owner 60 trips to City Hall to get the permits he needed. That's horrifying but oddly not surprising.


Work, and respect for work, creates a culture. Disrespect for work creates a culture too. If you can stomach it, watch this.

The other night, my wife watched some special on Dateline about transgender people. One young man (I think) was working as a cross-dressing prostitute in order to save up the money to buy a sex change in Mexico. I'm paraphrasing, but the reporter asked "him," "Why do this? You don't have to be a prostitute, you could work at McDonald's."

Apparently the kid's response involved a look of disgust at the suggestion that "he" demean himself by working at a fast-food joint. After all, fellating random dudes has honor. Working for a regular paycheck is shabby.