Progressive Hamann Dogma
It was the German philosopher Johann Hamann who said that far from being a pre-condition for truth the absence of contradiction is a pre-condition for dogmatism.
Johann Hamann was an 18th Century philosopher who anticipated the 20th Century progressive contention that individual unalienable natural rights are superseded by government’s definition of what is good and what is true. Today in America we have a president who encourages anticipatory infanticide, the killing of a human being before it escapes a woman’s womb. For those who support the concept that a human fetus as not a human being contend that any other conceptual interpretation is irrational and therefore should be ignored and even better for those that hold such a belief, maligned.
Then there are those you contend that global warming is anthropomorphic, in other words caused by man. Notwithstanding there is not a scintilla of evidence in support of this contention those who object are also maligned as global warming deniers who more than likely also believe that the earth is flat.
Then of course there are those who contend that the theory of evolution is uncontestable and anyone who does contest it is just plain silly. However can we not agree that the theory of intelligent design, the belief that God has directed evolution, is not inconsistent with the scientific theory of evolution?
I suppose what bothers me more than anything about progressive dogma, is just that. It’s dogma.
Third Party Candidate
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On The Border
Over this Memorial Day weekend I had my first chance to digest the liberal Jewish defense of President Obama’s recent position on the Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative. It starts with their belief that Israel is doomed.
It was approximately 2 weeks ago that President Obama stated in a speech at the State Department “We believe that the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps so secure and recognized borders are established for both states.” This one line from a speech that most Americans were in agreement induced anger and concern both in Israel and the U.S. A bi-partisan Congress welcomed Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel who gave a rousing speech in Israel’s defense. President Obama’s statement concerning Israel’s return to its 1967 borders created a bright line between those American Jews who continue to support President Obama and who constitute an overwhelming majority and those Jews who see in this President a person who has no intention of maintaining America’s historical support for Israel his soaring rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding.
In warfare, the greatest enemy of victory is wishful thinking. And if there is any criticism to which President Obama is vulnerable, giving him the benefit of good faith, it is just that. Truth be told many military strategists contend that the current borders of Israel are less defensible than those of 1967. Moreover as long as Israel depends upon the U.S. or any third party country for its defense it will always be insecure. The liberal Jewish view of Israel is unacceptable because it assumes that Israel is not a viable nation no matter what its borders. And for those Jews that accept Israel’s existence based on the assumption that Israel will always have the U.S. prepared to rush munitions to the battlefield or help create costly sophisticated missile defense systems is simply wishful thinking. The time has come for Israel and its people to address the realities of existence. Defend yourself.
60 Years And Three Generations
My daughter called to tell me that she was watching on television an account of America’s campaign in the Pacific during the Second World War and realizing that I was alive at the time wanted to know how I felt about the Japanese. I make it point to tell the truth about such things. But I did hesitate, for a moment.
I was 5 years old on December 7, 1941, when informed by Matthew Hart, my best friend at the time, that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Neither of us knew exactly where Pearl Harbor was and we hardly knew who the Japanese were. However by the end of the war I was 9 years of age and by then I knew exactly where Pearl Harbor was located and nobody could tell me much more than I already knew about the Japanese, and it wasn’t very good. I told that to my daughter, who is now a grown woman with a child, and she expressed surprise that since all the years that she knew me I never expressed those deep, wrathful feelings. I told her there are certain things you don’t even tell yourself but pointed out that it’s been more than 60 years, 3 generations, since the end of the war and Japan is a different country and the Japanese people that brought that war on, who survived, are mostly dead and gone. I told her, however, I still commemorate December 7th. She said, “Celebrate?” No I said, “Commemorate, you know, keeping in the deep recesses of my memory and give honor to those thousands upon thousands of American young men and women who fought and died in that miserable war.”
Remember The Veterans
We send our soldiers off to war with glory. They return, some of them dead, only to be forgotten.
This is Roger Madon and this is what I think.
This week Frank Buckles, the last surviving U.S. veteran of WWI, the war to end all wars, died at 110. 53,000 soldiers died in that war within two years while nearly five million joined the armed forces to fight. And today, for us, it is as if it never happened.
A little more than a third of the population supported the American Rebellion and General George Washington didn’t have much of choice at Valley Forge but to attack the Prussians in Trenton since within a very short period of time he was about to lose nearly his entire army through disease, starvation and legal furlough. How many of us today remember the Battle of Trenton and how it changed the course of the Rebellion and for that matter, the world?
James Webb, U.S. Senator from the Virginia wrote despairingly in “Born Fighting”, which explores how the Scots Irish shaped America, that we sacrifice our soldiers’ lives for wars more often than not and they are unimportant to our national security, and, when they return home they are abandoned and even worse, unremembered.
If all this is true – what is it that drives our young men and women to join the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force, placing themselves in harm’s way, pulling themselves away from those they dearly love? Not a generation goes by when the U.S. finds itself on some far-flung battlefield fighting some ambiguous war that our politicians swear to us must be won. But Americans are not fools. They know the politicians are lying. And they know more about the chance for victory then all the pundits on FOX, CNN and MSNBC. But they also know what those who fought in WWI and the Vietnam War, and have fought and are stilling fighting in Afghanistan know.. that if we don’t fight the small stupid wars which we may lose from time to time we’ll be fighting the big important ones which we can’t.
This is Roger Madon and that’s what I think.
Obama’s Socialism
Last week on my daily live show one of my callers took strong exception to the fact that I referred to President Obama as a Socialist. What the caller failed to appreciate is that by me referring to President Obama as a Socialist I was referring to him as something less sinister.
This is Roger Madon and this is what I think.
As I do not love humanity without knowing its vises, I do not love the truth without fearing it. If I were certain that President Obama was a Socialist I would breathe a lot easier. Allow me the drug of self-delusion. Allow me to believe that President Obama is a Socialist or a Statist; one who believes government is the panacea against alleged corporate greed or corporate villainy. Allow me to dream that President Obama is a Socialist rather than awake and know that behind that soaring rhetoric lay something a lot more menacing.
If the American people did not rise up last November and remove one chamber of Congress from the support of President Obama, namely the House of Representatives, do Americans, Republican or Democrat, actually believe that President Obama in his State of the Union speech would have been as contrite, willing to compromise with Republicans, speak about American exceptionalism with admiration or refer to the beauty of democracy? Would he have inferred in that speech that his craven desire for government control had been satiated? Not on your life.
And it’s not President Obama of whom I am concerned , who in truth may be only nothing more than a benign Socialist, but the groups and institutions with which he has been associated ever since his early days at Columbia University such as the Marxist Midwest Academy, Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ or the Marxist front group the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, otherwise known as ACORN. These are not benign institutions but rather anti-American, anti-capitalist and yes even perhaps anti-Semitic.
Over the next 2 years leading into the 2012 presidential election, as these associations become more widely known by the American people and known to be linked to President Obama he will have to do more than provide soaring and elegant rhetoric to persuade the American people that he is nothing more than a garden variety, benign, European Socialist.
This is Roger Madon and that’s what I think.
Pat Tillman & The Irrelevant Elite
When I think of Pat Tillman’s death in combat I am reminded of the words from Shakespeare’s King Henry V in which King Henry responds to Westmoreland’s concern that the French have more soldiers on the field than the English, “The fewer men, the greater share of honour.”
This is Roger Madon and this is what I think.
Pat Tillman was a man who coveted honor; a man with a keen sense of right and wrong who directed his life to things in which he passionately believed. We all know that he turned down a $3.6 million dollar contract to play defensive back for the Cardinals. But do we know he graduated from Arizona State University summa cum laude? Here is a man who could have picked any future, any career. With his good looks and strong body he could have directed his life to any pleasure, carnal or otherwise. He chose honor.
When I think of Pat Tillman I cannot help but think of the many privileged children in this country, privileged in family, in schools, in contacts, in money who direct their lives to covet even more gold. The very thought that of the parents of these children would, after all the right education, the right grooming, the right everything, join the armed forces to defend America, is considered a distinct failure in their responsibility as parents. And this in today’s world, especially during America’s confrontation with radical Islam, is what makes them and their children irrelevant.
The “old money” and newly affluent families have turned their backs to America. They have received the rewards of our freedom but reject the responsibility that comes with it. Among themselves they denigrate these soldiers as ones who don’t know how to get themselves out of the rain. While their children are moving up the affluent ladder of success other children are fighting and dying.
But when its over these children will be coming back. Victory will be sweet in their mouths but a deep sadness will be in their hearts for those who did not return. That taste of victory and hollow sadness will be shared by all those American families whose children went abroad to defend us. And what of those who stayed behind and made themselves still richer? Again my mind goes to King Henry’s words,
“And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here;
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon [this] day.”
This is Roger Madon and that’s what I think.
To Hell With Freedom!
The question that is being asked among the cognoscenti is whether WikiLeaks is a legitimate journalistic organization or just a very special form of anarchism. Not surprisingly The New York Times thinks that Wikileaks, its partner, is just another form of journalism. Would you like to guess what the Pentagon thinks?
This is Roger Madon and this is what I think.
This Monday David Carr of the New York Times wrote that WikiLeaks is “a new form of hybrid journalism emerging in the space between so-called hacktivists and mainstream media outlets…” To me the argument is similar to the one between pro-life and pro-choice adversaries: Where you stand on the subject has a lot to do with whether you consider human embryos human or just ordinary tissue. If you believe that governments, particularly the United States government, are nothing more than corrupt, secretive and inherently evil states and that its foreign and defense ministries are illegitimate organizations then it becomes quite easy to reveal information that can damage their ability to speak to other governments and even more importantly, to themselves. One of the main reasons that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were able to be attacked on 9/11 is that America’s intelligence agencies weren’t allowed to talk to each other. This has obviously changed and the very purpose of WikiLeaks, as its founder Julian Assange has clearly affirmed, is to return America to its September 10, 2001 mentality.
What The New York Times and the other so-called legitimate journalists such as Le Monde, The Guardian and Der Spiegel, the enablers of WikiLeaks, fail to appreciate is that governments, with the United States leading the way, will ultimately conclude after enough damage is done that these so-called legitimate journalist organizations are no more than in your face enemies. That will happen when America is attacked again, when thousands die and the reason will be traced back to the likes of a WikiLeaks and its enablers. That’s when the American people will say to their government, “To hell with freedom of the press and freedom of speech, stop the leaks and keep us safe.” And that’s when the question as to whether WikiLeaks is a legitimate journalistic organization goes right out the window.
This is Roger Madon and that’s what I think.
The Effects Of A Socialist Union Rule
We are constantly warned that if we don’t stop the taxing and spending of the last 4 years we are going to turn into France. However if you truly want to see what a progressive-socialist America will look like look to Argentina.
This is Roger Madon and this is what I think.
It has been over a 100 years that the progressive-socialist movement has attempted to capture the American psyche. That attempt can be traced from the Sixteenth Amendment wherein Congress was given the power to tax income, to the Great Depression, to the Great Society. We are now eating the bitter fruit of this monstrous tree. But what has been recently revealed as the true nature of this poisonous economic and social philosophy is something that even those who promoted its adoption never quite anticipated. And that is the cancerous growth of public employee unions and their deleterious effect on the public fisc. Throughout the country our state budgets are breaking the back of the middle class taxpayer due to the increase in the number of our public employees and the extraordinary growth of their pensions and wages. Recently government obligations are exceeding 40% of GNP. What happens to a government when vast numbers of organized citizens rely upon it for their wages and pensions. We are seeing that now in Argentina.
Argentina is a country subject to one party rule, the party of Juan Peron which is controlled by, you guessed it, a public employee national union. This union provides the goons that when new taxes are considered to be legislated and then paid by those in the private sector…they get legislated and they get paid. America hasn’t gotten their yet but when public sector unions in this country are able to tax their members and use this money to make contributions to politicians who then pass laws to increase the wages and pensions of those very public employees we are not too far behind.
This is Roger Madon and that’s what I think.
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