Conservatism 101

In light of financial issues, a good question was brought to me a few days ago about how a Christian like myself, who tries to show love and sacrifice of himself to give to others, could vote for conservatives, who, as the argument goes, promote greed and making the rich richer. The idea was I should be voting for liberals because they try to help the poor more. I thought it was a just question and a chance for me to remember myself why I vote the way I do. (It should be noted that the argument that conservatives don't care about the poor is false, but it is a line the democrats have successfully used for years and lots of people eat it up.) There are two main reasons I feel convicted to vote against liberal ideas of "helping the poor". First is an issue of ethics. I hate it that some people are poor and have a hard time making it and I'm all for programs to try to help that situation, but I don't think that makes it ethical for government to make arbitrary decisions of who has more than they need and demand that rich people cough up their earned money so it can be redistributed. That kind of thinking is contrary to the foundations of liberty and independence the country is founded on and again is extremely unethical. They can't play their own personal Robin Hood. And let me stress since this is touchy...it's not that I want people to stay poor. I hope the rich will choose to be very generous in giving to those who have less. But in the end, it is just that...it is their CHOICE. Forcing people into charity sounds awfully socialist to me. And that leads into the second reason I vote conservative on economic issues relating to social status. The second point is no form of socialism has ever worked throughout history, so why should it work now? No, I'm not calling liberals socialists or communists, but their ideas of wealth redistribution with central government control is actually getting pretty close to some aspects of socialism. And it has never ever ever worked. There's a reason for that. Theoretically and on paper, communism as a system is brilliant. But in practice it fails because the model doesn't account for humanity, which makes all the difference. Factors like reduced desire to work hard, lack of independence and personal dignity, and the inevitable corruption that accompanies absolute power name a few human components that have always made the system come crashing down, and I don't see liberal ideas of social equality (the nice term they use for stealing from the rich and giving to the poor) to be immune to those destructive forces. When the settlers of this country fled England and started things here, they intentionally and explicitly set up a system different from what they had come from, a system where the free market ruled and the government stayed out of the way. What was the result? We shot to the world power in a scant century and have been there ever since. So why liberals want to revert to the old way is beyond me. A strong free market and strong business sector doesn't eliminate the potential for poverty...neither does wealth redistribution in any form. But it does work out for the greatest good for the greatest numbers. I'll be back with more brilliance soon.

Uplifting Thoughts

Since I've done nothing but rant and complain of late, I thought I'd take a day off from my duty of identifying BS and talk about something more pleasant. The Ike storm system moved through today bringing high winds; as a result a lot of beautiful old trees came down and the whole town is without power and internet, save for a small portion of campus where my office happens to be. Hence my ability to post a blog. But following a day of destruction, I attended my normal 9:30pm mass which was done out of necessity by candlelight. This was not only a beautiful and welcomed deviation from the norm, but, especially fitting, we had a guest speaker discussing mission work he had done in Trinidad and Haiti where the people have so little. It was ironic that such a talk came on a night when we all were remembering how to live without basic electricity and internet. It was a sobering yet great talk. I'm glad we have that kind of thing from time to time to remind us of our blessings and of the needs that God has given us arms and feet to go out and fill.

ABC Elevates Itself to My Hitlist

Never fear, fine readers...I'll continue to expose CNN for it's reporting malpractice. We'll just have added fun now as ABC will join them in receiving a well-needed dose of my wrath. Most of you (I say that as if I have a multitude of readers) probably know ABC's Charlie Gibson interviewed Sarah Palin recently. In a stunt truly worthy of the CNN Award for Insatiable Dishonesty, they edited the film to remove some of what she said in response to certain questions, thus changing the entire meaning of her answers for the global audience. Cheers to Gibson and his cronies for yet another example of why I have been forced out of retirement to start writing again. The good thing about all this is that it gives me confidence to see how badly the media is trying to tear her down. I figure if they didn't consider her a threat, they wouldn't waste their time. If that's an accurate assumption then it stands to reason that they're morbidly afraid of her based on how hard they're trying to beat her up with lies. And it makes me a bigger and bigger fan by the day. The more jerks like Gibson, Barbara Wa-Wa, and Hollywood dislike her, the more reason I have to assume she's great. Indeed, a political philosophy where one simply votes for a candidate those personalities despise would be quite a sound philosophy. So I beg the Hollywood celebutards, mainstream media and extremist bloggers to keep up the good work. I know it's making me a bigger Palin fan all the time and by the looks of the recent polls, I'm not alone in being affected that way. School has definitely gotten busy of late, but you can count on me to keep calling out the mainstream media for all their BS and giving you a more accurate side. The key point you should take from all this is that no matter what you read, no matter what the headline says, no matter how negative it sounds, you must question it and dig deeper. I've always accused the mainstream media of being biased and fudging some facts, but I've never known them to be this malicious. You're being blatantly lied to, peeps, so don't tolerate it. Take a stand and fight those who apparently think we're all blind followers of their false reality. You should all be offended. I certainly am. Dan Rather and others have actually lost their jobs from going too far with the bias and crossing that threshold from simply skewing information to completely lying. But the message didn't seem to stick because they're up to even worse tricks. We have to fight it and call them out.

A Nice Column

School duties have picked up quickly so I'll let someone else do my important work for me...this guy wrote a good short piece about the treatment of Palin, focusing on the corrupt media's reporting.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,420161,00.html

Snap!

It's late but I just heard a new Palin quote I had to share: "Just last night, Senator Obama finally broke and brought himself to admit what all the rest of us have known for quite some time, and that's thanks to the skill and valor of our troops, the surge in Iraq has succeeded. Senator Obama said, 'the surge succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.' 'I think,' said Senator Obama, 'that the surge succeeded in ways nobody anticipated.' I guess when you turn out to be profoundly wrong on a vital national security issue, maybe it's comforting to pretend that everyone else was wrong too." Wow. My friends, I don't mind admitting that my Alaskan bias is in full effect as long as you don't mind admitting that Sarah Palin is the real deal, not afraid of the arrogant Obama and ready to make it clear how wrong he is. I love it that Obama thought he was the young change the nation needed (arrogance in full effect) and here comes the obscure, unknown Palin annihilating his fortress of confidence and undeserved assuredness. Leno had a great joke tonight that isn't too terribly far from the truth: "A lot of Republicans aren't too [excited] about McCain's speech last night, in fact, Sarah Palin is thinking of dropping him from the ticket." Ya know, even if we (conservative thinkers) lose this election, it's nice to know we'll go down with pride. I have no problem losing with my support going to McCain and especially Palin. And be assured...even if they lose this one, the liberals and the corrupt are afraid of her. Why else would the media be assaulting her? If she's no threat, she'd be a wast of their time to focus on. And yet she's been assaulted like no one I've ever seen. She's a force and they know it and they'll have to contend with her again no matter what. Rock on. In fairness, we do have to see how this "abuse of power" accusation goes. I'm humble enough to jump off the ship if she turns out to be frauding us all. For now, however, I don't expect that and I think we've got a great future with her. And even if this probe turns out bad for her, I dare say she still seems more realistic than most other DC personalities.

Teleprompter

Did anyone know Sarah Palin's teleprompter broke during her speech Wednesday? I check CNN.com regularly throughout the day as well as some other news sources occasionally and never saw anything about this. Nor did I hear anything on (P)MSNBC or CSPAN which I saw a little of today. Nothing at all. And yet it happened. The fantastic speech she gave is now even better because apparently the prompter wasn't stopping (or the operator wasn't stopping it) when the audience applauded so after a while, she was way behind and did the whole thing by memory. Who knew? I never noticed it from her behaviour and she never complained about it. I learned of it from Rush and Leno, during a standup joke on his show tonight, confirmed it. I did hear reports on CNN about how her speech was written for her, blah blah blah. As if that's not standard practice. But they didn't bother to report that she did the speech more on her own than Obama or anyone else who also had their speech written for them AND a perfectly operating teleprompter. Once again, our fine companions in the media show how dishonourable they are and continue to erode the scant confidence I have left in them. My warning to all: question EVERYTHING. Everyone out there has an agenda, even me. We all have our biases that are hard to overcome. Some are ethical and acknowledge this, like myself. Others, like the media, are beyond unethical to the point of scandalous. But I will give kudos to Anderson Cooper from CNN. Apparently, when Campbell Brown (a fellow CNN reporter with him no less) asked him if he thought it was responsible for Palin to run for this office when she has 5 kids, he responded, "It's funny, I don't remember anyone asking Obama that." I'm always happy to give praise to a liberal media type when it is deserved, and he earned it with that. Good for him. Unfortunately, the fact that he holds a CNN microphone still has him on my blacklist. One more note, Palin made a funny comment during her speech saying she thought the former AK governor's private jet was over the top and a taxpayer burden, so she "put it on eBay." The media (you guessed it, CNN) now reports she did PUT it on eBay but it didn't sell and she had to sell it another way. OK, so MAYBE Palin fudged a fact there. I think, however, there was no deception intended at all...the logistics of how the jet was sold were irrelevant, the point is she did it and the eBay comment she made was not like a grandiose lie, it was just a humorous pop-culture line that elicited a number of laughs. They took a light hearted comment she made and are trying to make it sound like she's lying. But they won't report that she was completely on her own without a teleprompter. Scandalous. And one more note (really this time): Us Weekly magazine has a cover with Pain's picture and the caption, "Children, Lies, Scandal." The actual article when you read it inside links the lies and scandal part to bad things being projected AT her so it's actually a not-so-bad article about her. But the cover, it seems, is an intentional misrepresentation intended to catch the attention of supermarket check out line people who will read only that, associating her face with the words lies and scandal, people who will not actually read the article. Us Weekly is published by none other than the owner of Rolling Stone, one of the most liberal extremists out there. McCain and Palin have to fight not only Obama's campaign, but the media, Hollywood, and hippie protestors. That Bush won twice in a row against those odds is an accomplishment and McCain doesn't quite have the charisma of Bush. Let's hope Palin can help in that arena. I'll end on a couple of good comments from Rush about McCain's speech and Obama: "...the performance aspect might have been low, but the words were penetrating and they were from the heart and they were from the soul." "I don't think Obama thinks he needs to grow. Obama's it in his mind and in the minds of his supporters."

Protestors at McCain's Speech

This just in - John McCain is neither as good looking (few are) nor as interesting to listen to as Sarah Palin. His speech started quite slow but I was impressed by the end. Instead of making a series of promises, he gave a speech that showed he knows how to love and care about others over himself. He sold me with it much more than Obama's promises that he would provide us pretty much everything under the sun. But lately this has not been a blog of praise but rather a rant and while I don't consider myself a pessimist, I must take upon myself, once again, the unpleasant duty of pointing out ridiculousness. I'm not too keen on labels as I think labels too often stick us in a box and influence our thoughts through biases and feelings that we have to be a certain way to fit the label we've assigned ourselves. In other words, it can be an imprisonment that blinds us from objective thought. As such, I try not to ever call myself a Republican (for that matter, I generally even try to avoid referring to myself as a Christian, a term that has less and less objective meaning). But no matter how hard I try to avoid labeling myself a Republican, I'm always faced with a new reason why I should wear that title with pride. Tonight a shameful display was put on by liberal protestors of McCain...again. Outside, they had to be tear gassed because they were creating trouble, blocking streets, kicking police officers, etc. Inside, it seemed even worse. McCain's speech was interrupted multiple times as people yelled things and tried to get on stage to do who knows what. A particular organised group is wearing pink clothing with spray painted messages. I remember something like 5 different times the speech was interrupted tonight. Now I realise there are plenty of lunatics and weirdos that call themselves Republicans, just as there are plenty that are staunch Democrats. I don't pretend my side is without them. But I also never saw it from Republicans. Not once in Denver at the DNC did I see coverage of any rowdy protesting. Again, not once. Maybe I missed it, but as I watched it about as much as the RNC, it seems an unlikely coincidence that I saw it so much in Minnesota and not at all in Colorado. There are two possible explanations for this. Firstly, perhaps the one-sided media was not interested in letting anyone know that Democrats were being heckled and protested. This can't explain everything, however, because during McCain's speech, it was unavoidable. He had to completely stop multiple times. That's not something even the media can hide, and they're good at hiding news when they want to. So the only explanation I can think of is perhaps Republican leaning people are just a classier bunch. "Whoa, Jonathan," you say. "That's out of line to say such a thing." Perhaps. But, as I've mentioned the last few days, I'm done being nice, humble, and respectful to absurdity. I'm ready to call this crap out for what it is and, stereotyping as it might be, it seems a feasible explanation in my opinion, and very fitting with historical left extremists. Case in point, I just read a story about how hippie Miami students in the 70's protested the war by setting buildings on fire. What? That's not even close to consistent with a message of peace. Obviously, not all, or even most, Democrats are like this. And maybe it's not fair for me to make such a stereotype. But the point is this: When I see yahoos behaving with no respect or temperance and realise that they're all Obama supporters, it makes me very happy to know that I am not voting for the candidate that motivates them. My mind will now have a permanent association between disrespectful protestors and Obama supporters. I'm glad no one will be able to make an association like that with me because Republicans simply didn't do it in Denver. Call me unfair or biased if you want, but that's the fact. At least so far in this election, one side appears to be much classier and I'm happy to be a part of that side.

She Nailed It.

I've attempted the last couple of days to express my displeasure with unethical actions by the media, and quite right...there can not possibly be enough criticism for their one-sided atrocious attacks on Sarah Palin's family. I have by no means, however, intended to express any leaning toward one side of our dual party system or the other, although I admit it's probably hard to separate me from the cause of McCain and Palin just as it's difficult to tell the difference between the national media and Barack Obama's campaign. So since I'm exposed, I'll report that my former governor (of a way-too-short 8 months) did indeed knock it out of the park tonight with her speech. I couldn't have asked for a better combination of attacks, humour, charm, family and qualifications. I'm thrilled for her and since I firmly believe in the fundamental ideologies of conservatism (by the way, don't necessarily confuse that with republicanism - for anyone curious about the difference, I'll be happy to elaborate), I will continue to firmly support her and McCain. And if that team is unsuccessful in November, I'll go down swinging with pride, because I believe despite the outcome, the right decisions have been made in the selection of these two, especially Palin. She was great when I lived in Alaska and I think she'll be great in the White House. I'll end by quoting one of my favourite lines from the night: "Al Qaeda terrorists want to inflict pain on the United States and [Obama] is concerned about reading them their rights." I'll be back soon with more brilliant commentary and insightful analysis and I welcome any comments or points of debate. Let's get a productive intellectual discussion going.

More thoughts...

My rage against the media shall continue, and rightly so. Having grown up with reverence for God and trying to live a life that models the Scripture, I'm no stranger to the criticism of hypocrisy. I have spent my life reading the Bible in public places, attending church and, when asked, offering my views on life. As such, I have observed there are many people out there who are eager to scrutinize and call me out for wrongdoing. And while they are often correct in their assessment, it's the pleasure they receive in tearing me down that has always puzzled me. Since I have an increasingly unfavourable view of humanity in general (myself included), I've always attributed this to normal human hatred that runs through all our veins in varying degrees. But with the media's merciless assault on Sarah Palin's family, I decided to ponder this desire to destroy more psychologically. I came to the conclusion that Christians do put themselves in the realm of attack in the way we live (or try to live) our lives...by having standards to live by, we set ourselves up for defeat time and again because we will all stumble upon our weak moments when we don't meet the standards we've set for ourselves. But that fact brought up an interesting revelation...maybe that difficulty in life is one of the main reasons so many others refuse to live by any standards or scruples at all. A life lived that cannot be measured is quite convenient and safe. It frees the person from defeat and the scrutiny that comes with it. The cost is paramount, however...such a life is void of courage. And that's how I see so many of the media that feels compelled to destroy Palin and others. There's no defeat, no victory, no possibility of failure, no challenge, and in essence therefore, no life, when you live a life void of scruples, so I consider cowardice to be the driving force for people who choose to live such lives, and this definitely applies to the ravenous media dogs. Going even farther, the Scripture often refers to shallow livers as "blind," unable to see realistic truths that hurt; the human mind has a great ability to suppress truths that are unpleasant. So I doubt people like the media would ever be able to be cognitively aware of their cowardice, yet in some deep subconscious level, they know it. And it's that suppressed knowledge in the sub-conscience that brings out murderous jealousy when they encounter people of strength like Sarah Palin who aren't afraid to take the challenge to live something better. Because of her courage which they'll never know, they hate her and are doing everything they can to get her head on a platter. This is of course a very simplified analysis of human psychology that is ignoring many other factors that make people tick the way they do, but I think it is a useful model to help explain what we're seeing...insane jealousy that Palin is tougher and braver than anything they'll ever know. Luckily, I heard a story that when the McCain people warned Palin of the scrutiny she'd be under, she replied, "Do you know the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick." I hope she knocks it out of the park tonight, right down the throats of CNN and all the children that report for them.

I return with fury

For any faithful readers who have wondered where I've been for the last year on my blog posts, the answer is no good pictures of Ohio and too much school work. I felt, however, that I must vent today out of an anger that I haven't felt for some time and this seemed the best way to do it. In a way, it pains me to contribute to the ridiculous discussions about Sarah Palin and her family. It is my usual policy to fight this kind of nonsense with silence and refusal to participate. It seems this time, my threshold has been crossed and I'll be fighting and arguing with anyone I have to in order to defeat something I consider to be a great evil. For 2 or 3 days now, I've listened to a repulsive rhetoric of double standards and maliciousness from the national news media against not only Palin herself, but her family as well, and I'll list just a few of these double standards. The strategy being carried out is one that has been embraced by terrorists and dictatorships throughout the ages...one of the best ways to destroy a person's resolve and threaten them is to attack not only that person, but their family as well. Viewers of movies like Braveheart and Gladiator watch in disgust as evil men slaughter innocent women and children and destroy families just to get under the skin of their real enemy. These same viewers, however, seem to relish the opportunity to watch the non-fictional demise of Palin and her family (double standard number 1). I also find it curious that the very liberal feminists who become outraged when told they can't do the same things as a man are criticizing Palin for taking this responsibility when she has children and a pregnant daughter..."stay home and be a mom" they now say in a stunning departure from their normal rant (double standard number 2). Liberals themselves are always the ones saying abstinence doesn't work and we should give out condoms and sex ed in the schools, that sex among teens is normal, but they're ready to crucify Palin and her family for a pregnant teen (double standard number 3). Also curious is the lack of news of Obama's failures. While he himself writes in his book that at 17 he "attended class sparingly, drank abundantly, and tried drugs enthusiastically," there is no mention of these events in the news. For Obama, these things are good because they make him one of us, they were obstacles he got over, he's stronger for them. But for Bristol Palin, they're ready to burn her at the stake (double standard number 4). Al Gore's son was busted for DUI just before the 2000 election. I remember slightly catching mention of that story then never hearing of it again unless it was in the form of sympathy for Gore's son facing a tough time (double standard number 5). I could go on with double standards but I think I've made my point. I'm not one for conspiracy theories but I can confidently say our liberal friends in the media want Obama to win so badly that nothing, not even the destruction of children, will get in their way. For my friends who read, I hope you'll be aware of this maliciousness and do your part to get the message out that this is intolerable.