Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Politics

  • Welcome to Civil War

    To Dennis Prager's "The bigger the government the smaller the citizen," I add my "The bigger the government, the more to fight over."  The more the government takes over, the more they violate the individual liberty of the citizens, the more they insinuate themselves into every aspect of your life, the more protests, the more…

  • Bernard Goldberg on Health Care

    I enjoy Bernie Goldberg's commentary on The O'Reilly Factor and I generally agree with it.  But I just heard him say something that is not quite right.  He sees the leftist-conservative disconnect on the recent health care legislation in the following terms:  for leftists it is a moral and civil rights issue whereas for conservatives…

  • Now the Battle Begins in Dead Earnest

    Speaker Pelosi really outdid herself last night in point of mendacity.  She referred to the opening sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and…

  • Ron Paul on the 2010 Census

    On this issue, he talks sense. 

  • Should Conservatives Take the High Road When Opposing the Left?

    This just over the transom from a regular reader: Your recent, small quip about the possibility of accusing liberals of racism had me curious of something. Clearly you think that many on the left use unfair or unjust means of persuasion (Attempting to label their opponents as racists, for example.) And I've often heard it…

  • Primum Non Nocere

    "First of all, do no harm."  Not just for medicos.  Also for the benighted politicos who would 'fix' health care.  Their approach is a bit like fixing a roof leak by tearing down the house and building a new one.  And don't you just love the way these idiots use 'fix' and broken'?  Talk like a…

  • Progressives and the Growing Dependency Agenda

    A must-read from the pen of George Will.  And here is a balanced discussion of the Tea Party movement by the blogging biker, Mike Valle.

  • Liberal Condescension

    Why are liberals so condescending?  Especially when they are so frightfully wrong about so frightfully much?  Gerard Alexander's WaPo article is an outstanding piece of analysis.  Liberal disdain is expressed "in the form of four major narratives about who conservatives are and how they think and function."

  • Balık baştan kokar

    Balık baştan kokar is Turkish for "The fish stinks from the head."  Quite apropos of the Obama administration the corruption, incompetence, and stupidity of which boggles the mind. He's done everything wrong.  But there is hope: Obama's fiscal irresponsibility and liberty-destroying socialist malfeasance has suffered a massive rebuke in, of all places, the People's Republic of Taxachusetts. Here are…

  • How Bob Dylan Got Unpoliticized

    The story is told in My Back Pages.  "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

  • How Joan Baez Got Politicized

    David Hajdu, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina, 2001, p. 147: Dylan nestled his guitar on his lap and began strumming a C chord in three-quarter time. He repeated it until the small room hushed, then he slid into the opening of "With…

  • The Conservative Deist on Palin’s Book

    Here.

  • Political Action and the Principle of Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien

    Attributed to Voltaire. "The best is the enemy of the good." Meditation on this truth may help conservatives contain their revulsion at their lousy choices. Obama, who has proven that he is a disaster for the country, got in in part because of conservatives who could not abide McCain. Politics is a practical business. It…

  • Ronald Reagan’s Role in the Fall of the Wall

    Twenty years today the Berlin Wall came down.  Anthony R. Dolan in Four Little Words explains the difference between a leader like Reagan and an appeaser like Obama.  Excerpt (emphasis added): Reagan had the carefully arrived at view that criminal regimes were different, that their whole way of looking at the world was inverted, that…

  • Political Discourse as Unavoidably Polemical: the Converse Clausewitz Principle

    A regular reader writes: I would urge some caution withyour recent political cartoon.  This is only because you may unjustly be treated with less seriousness than your blog deserves if someone wants to peg you in a certain way.  I'm certainly not being PC or suggesting that political satire is problematic — it's primarily a…