Perfect for Halloween

Pikabu, formerly the world's greatest housecat, shuffled off this mortal coil three months ago, after a happy life.

She would sometimes amuse herself by hunting birds and mice, but it was her prowess at scorpion killing when we lived in Scottsdale, AZ, that cemented her status as "senior critter" in the O'Hannigan household.

An unofficial member of the neighborhood watch in four different neighborhoods, she was black as night, blazing fast in a sprint, affectionate on her own terms, and too smart to be a Halloween prop even though she did an admirable job of acting that way more than eight years.

Speaking of All Hallows Eve, while Elizabeth Esther makes the common mistake of confusing "tracts" with "tracks," her Halloween thoughts are still worth reading, not least because she knows it's not a "Pagan Holiday"

Strange brew

Did you see Andrew Romano's recent swing at the Tea Party piñata? It was an attempt to enlighten Newsweek's rapidly-dwindling readership about the multitude of ways that the Tea Party allegedly gets the U.S. Constitution wrong, and while declaring that the Constitution should not be confused with "Holy Writ," Romano missed the point.

People like Frank Warner have already done a yeoman job of fisking Romano's essay. Warner was amused by the way that Romano accused Tea Partiers of "not sweating the details" while writing approvingly of an administration whose economic mantra seems to be "Don't bother designing a system that pays for itself; just close your eyes and borrow." Warner also pointed out that it's hard to pin labels like "authoritarian" and "delusional" on the Tea Party without noticing that "expanding the size and power of government also embraces a fundamentally authoritarian idea and imaginary benefits." Goose, gander, sauce: you know the drill.

Wanting in on the fun, Michael Tennant, writing in The New American, took Romano's mendacious critique as further proof that the Tea Party has the establishment in a panic. It need hardly be said that the establishment includes "career politicians" of both major parties.

Tennant noticed that Romano's notions of what political positions are "divisive" and "fundamentalist" are remarkably one-sided. "Under the progressive approach, which we have endured for a century now, have Americans really become more united?" Tennant wondered. "The government programs and taxes and regulations that Romano champions pit the old against the young, the rich against the poor, the black against the white, the male against the female, the corporation against the taxpayer, the employer against the employee, and so on, ad infinitum."

"Moreover," wrote Tennant, warming to his rebuttal, "it is precisely the policies that progressives favor that have brought us to the current precarious position, degrading our currency, running up insurmountable public and private debts, and creating a dependent class that will likely take to the streets — as the French and Greek dependent classes have already done — before it gives up a single penny of its ill-gotten gains." Tennant then went to his whip hand for the final furlongs: "Had constitutional originalism held sway for the last 100 years, the United States would still be on a very sound footing, as it was prior to the Progressive Era."

Between them, Warner and Tennant gave the bum's rush to Romano's thesis. To be fair, however, Romano left his thesis vulnerable to rebuttal by making some big mistakes: any argument about the U.S. Constitution that aspires to high-mindedness should not waste its first three paragraphs on an "ad feminam" attack, as Romano did by going after Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell. Once past that peculiar introduction, Romano flashed his condescension, and then conjured up the "religious right" as a strawman-in-waiting. By the time Romano hit his stride, he'd unwittingly announced himself as an apprentice torturer, hoping to put various fundamentalists (The aforementioned O'Donnell, plus radio talker Glenn Beck and the ever-frustrating Sarah Palin) on the rack of his imagination. It didn't work any better than touting Cass Sunstein as a "centrist" legal scholar, or pointing out that Tea Partiers are not the first to speak reverently of the Constitution, which Romano also did.

Romano made his own biases vividly clear by asserting, embarrassingly, that the Constitution is a "relentlessly secular document." Talk about a failure to communicate. While the Constitution does not -- for example -- come embroidered with the old Jesuit abbreviation "A.M.D.G," which is a Latin initialism meaning "for the greater glory of God," it's a far cry from that to the contention that the document is "relentlessly secular."

How many secular documents time-stamp their own births by noting the "Year of our Lord" in which legislators who crafted them signify assent, or assume that the gifts that liberty bestows upon a people are "blessings" rather than mere "advantages"? How is it possible to ignore the text of the Constitution while you're trying to prove that the Tea Party twists that text?

Ironically, it may be progressives (rather than originalists or Tea Party types) who treat the Constitution as though it were Holy Writ, thanks to their overweening fondness for genuflection in the direction of an endlessly-malleable (read "living") Constitution (Romano: "The Tea Partiers are right to revere the Constitution. It’s a remarkable, even miraculous document. But there are many Constitutions: the Constitution of 1789, of 1864, of 1925, of 1936, of 1970, of today...") Progressives approach the Constitution (and government generally) the way pre-Christian druids approached trees. Originalists, on the other hand, contend only that its words mean what their authors intended them to mean. In metaphorical terms, the opposing camps might be described as the shamens and the engineers-- and guess who's more likely to cloak even blatant disregard of the Constitution under the color of authority?

Having mistaken the lack of explicit references to "God" or "Jesus" for Terminator-style secularism in our federal charter, Romano then interpreted the election of Barack Obama as "a provocation" for "the forces of orthodoxy." Not for Romano the more thoughtful argument that "taxed enough already" resistance started brewing under George W. Bush, back in the halcyon days of the original "Troubled Asset Relief Program."

Hunting desperately for hypocrisy among Tea Party people and those who sympathize with them, Romano pointed out that "in the current Congress, conservatives like Michele Bachmann have suggested more than 40 additions to the Constitution," including flag-descrecration and balanced-budget amendments. By his lights, "none of these revisions has anything to do with the document's original meaning." But does that mean, as Romano infers, that Bachmann and her ilk are not the originalists they think they are? Hardly, because the Constitution provides mechanisms for its own amendment. Whether Bachmann backs a losing cause is another question, though I trust her far more than I trust a politico like Harry Reid.

Romano may not be what Bugs Bunny used to call a "maroon," but as an archeologist studying the Tea Party movement with barely-concealed revulsion (NYT columnist Tom Friedman knows all about that, BTW), he manages to write like a maroon. Echoing President Obama's dismissal of "bitter clingers," Romano asserts without a scintilla of evidence that Tea Party fundamentalists "seek refuge from the complexity and confusion of modern life in the comforting embrace of an authoritarian scripture."

How would Romano know this, exactly? A preponderence of "analysis" like that is what eventually gets your magazine sold for a dol -- Oh, never mind. The only scripture I know is the one that calls us to be charitable even to our enemies.

Systemic fraud?

Elsewhere in North Carolina, a Donkey Party sympathizer rigged a voting machine, maybe (is this what they mean when Get-Out-the-Vote mavens talk about a political "ground game"?):

A Craven County voter says he had a near miss at the polls on Thursday when an electronic voting machine completed his straight-party ticket for the opposite of what he intended.

Sam Laughinghouse of New Bern said he pushed the button to vote Republican in all races, but the voting machine screen displayed a ballot with all Democrats checked. He cleared the screen and tried again with the same result, he said. Then he asked for and received help from election staff.

“They pushed it twice and the same thing happened,” Laughinghouse said. “That was four times in a row. The fifth time they pushed it and the Republicans came up and I voted.”

He's not alone, and not in Nevada (whre SEIU members are up to no good). Yet some people still wonder why voter fraud is a concern across the country.

The quotable Mister O'Rourke

P.J. having fun is always incisive and frequently hilarious (the wording below is P.J. O'Rourke's but the Greek Chorus of hyperlinks comes from me):

"Democrats aren’t just dateless dweebs clambering upon the Statue of Liberty carrying a wilted bouquet and trying to cop a feel. Theirs is a different kind of love story. Power, not politics, is what the Democrats love. Politics is merely a way to power’s heart. When politics is the technique of seduction, good looks are unnecessary, good morals are unneeded, and good sense is a positive liability. Thus Democrats are the perfect Lotharios. And politics comes with that reliable boost for pathetic egos, a weapon: legal monopoly on force. If persuasion fails to win the day, coercion is always an option."

Making it wail

Thanks to Orrin Judd for this find (apparently the harmonica player's name is Ted Welter):

In praise of NIMBYism, writ large

Krauthammer:

"Even as we speak, the social-democratic model Obama is openly and boldly trying to move America toward is unraveling in Europe. It's not just the real prospect of financial collapse in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, with even the relatively more stable major countries in severe distress. It is the visible moral collapse of a system that, after two generations of increasing cradle-to-grave infantilization, turns millions of citizens into the streets of France in furious and often violent protest over what? Over raising the retirement age from 60 to 62!

Having seen this display of what can only be called decadence, Obama's perfectly wired electorate says no, not us, not here. The peasants have seen the future -- Greece and France -- and concluded that it does not work. Hence their opposition to Obama's proudly transformational New Foundation agenda. Their logic is impeccable: Only the most blinkered intellectual could be attempting to introduce social democracy to America precisely when the world's foremost exemplar of that model -- Europe -- is in chaotic meltdown."

And how did you think he'd react?

Ace is too profane to quote at length, and glides right past the personality profiles that National Public Radio still does better than any other broadcast outfit, but his righteous indignation seems well-deserved:

"[Juan] Williams shouldn't be fired for making utterly noncontroversial statements about Muslims being more worrisome on airplanes than Lutherans even if he hadn't "saved" himself with the feel-goodery [...] NPR is a left-liberal's idea of "diversity" -- a taxpayer-extorted fantasyland showcasing diverse opinons all the way from the center left to the hard left."

Two for tea

Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell both made waves the other day, but -- with a few honorable exceptions -- mainstream reports about why have been irredeemably stupid. Palin did not confuse 1773 with 1776, and O'Donnell wasn't so much "questioning the separation of church and state" as asking her opponent to explain why he (wrongly) thought that the First Amendment's "establishment" clause was a sop to militant secularism. Investor's Business Daily offers a history lesson in response to the resulting brouhaha.

UPDATE: Speaking of history, let's not flush this mendacious bogus Lincoln quote down the memory hole.

Why Barack Obama will never write a good vampire novel

As some other people noted early in his political career and right after the inauguration, our president has no respect for ritual, and you need that (among other things) to write a good vampire novel. That's my thesis in a new essay for American Spectator Online, anyhow.

Twilight redeemed

The Basilica of Saint Lawrence in Asheville, NC.

It's done in Spanish Renaissance style, but has at least a few windows from Munich.

Culture shock

A conversation with my 11-year-old daughter:

"Whatcha got for homework, pumpkin?"

"I have to read The Tempest."

"Shakespeare? Cool!"

She pulled a pint of Ben & Jerry's "Chunky Monkey" ice cream out of the refrigerator and sat down to start reading the paperback. Several spoonfuls later, she got indignant.

"Hey! Ariel in this book is a boy!"

"That's because The Tempest was written before The Little Mermaid."

"But Ariel is a girl's name!"

"Not always."

Cuba Gooding, call your office

Kevin D. Williamson with that rarity, the economics-themed bon mot:

"We just basically set a $1 trillion pile of money on fire and roasted marshmallows over the flames. That is why Nancy Pelosi is about to become the first female ex-speaker of the House."

In related news, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat dispels some myths about the Tea Party movement. And from the North (in case the thought of a "show me the money" trifecta appeals) comes this tale of the "Rent-an-Eskimo" racket funding the write-in candidacy of Lisa Murkowski.

A little night music

Street musicians play on a corner in Asheville, NC, where we went this past weekend to do some leaf-peeping along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Asheville is a neat town. Any place with a "Tupelo Honey Cafe" and a functional but slightly smaller version of New York City's Flatiron Building must have something going for it.

The Mast General Store is pretty nifty, too.

Provacateur

John C. Médaille explains why he is a modern-day monarchist, politically speaking:

"Tyranny is a degeneration of proper monarchy and generally happens only in degenerate times, and even then, the king has to be speaking for some other and greater force, such as a strong army or a commercial oligarchy. A king, no less than a president, must consider the forces and interests in his kingdom. But a king is free to judge the justice of the arguments; a president is free only to count the votes. And while the president might attempt to engage in persuasion, in the end he himself can only be persuaded by power, that is, by whoever controls the votes, which is very likely to be the one who controls the money. A king may also be persuaded by power and money, but he is always free to be persuaded by justice. And even when a king is a tyrant, he is an identifiable tyrant; much worse is when a people live in a tyranny they may not name, a system where the forms of democracy serve as cover for the reality of tyranny. And that, I believe, is our situation today."

C is for cookie?

Now what would be entertaining is for the First Lady to try the same thing on Sully from Monsters, Inc.

Joseph Lawler has a related thought, as does Tom Maguire and even -- tangentially-- one of the folks at HotAir (with an assist from a federal judge)

John C. Wright et. al. on Evil in Spooky Stories

Ha! I was just writing about the same subject myself, only my own essay has yet to see the light of publication. It turns out that John C. Wright and I think along parallel lines, but he is funnier.

Wright's essay was sparked by a thoughtful rant from Leo Grin.

Both essays are worth your time, as I hope mine will be, if the crew at American Spectator Online sees fit to publish it.

The Good Samaritans

Jeff Hart and a handful of other drilling engineers from Colorado have friends all over Chile now; it was their yeoman work over 33 days that bored a hole wide and deep enough to accommodate the ongoing rescue of trapped miners.

33 days, 33 miners, one 625-meter escape shaft with a 28" diameter. Gotta love it.

UPDATE: They're all safe; the shift supervisor volunteered to be the last man up. And Sebastian Pinera, president of Chile, also acquited himself well.

See also this essay from Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal. Just to whet your appetite:

If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?

Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit.

This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill's rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock's president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive.

Quietly heroic

The inspiring pro-life activism and odyssey of Lila Rose.

Ignorant and hypocritical?

As "October Surprises" in a midterm election year go, the Obama administration's public tiff with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over whether the latter takes foreign money illegally seems a small potato, but also perhaps a hot one.

Nonpartisan fact-checking discredited the original charge almost as soon as it was made. True to form, however, the vice-president -- he who implied recent visits to a long-closed eatery in his home district -- was a little slow on the uptake.

As to why the tiff is a stupid one to have in the first place, well, there are positive and negative reasons. Let's remember that business members of the Chamber of Commerce actually create jobs. Moreover, one of the things I encountered while perusing an angry new book (Pamela Geller's The Post-American Presidency) was this very interesting quote from Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union. In May, 2009, Stern bragged to Michael Mishak, reporter for the Las Vegas Sun, that "We [the SEIU] spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama -- $60.7 million to be exact -- and we're proud of it."

Given that admission and the name of the union, would it be uncouth to wonder how much of its own dues were a) foreign and b) illegally used to influence an American election? (If SEIU collects no dues from foreign members, then in what sense would it be "international"?)

(The book, by the way, is worth reading, although flawed by indifferent editing and Geller's penchant for hyperbole. There is considerable evidence to back Geller's overall assessment of the Obama presidency, but I could never figure out why a rogue paragraph about fraud in global warmism dropped unexpectedly into a discussion of sharia law on p. 25, for example, or why Geller describes Obama's presidency as "lethal for Israel" rather than simply "dangerous" to that ever-beleaguered country; one can only hope she's not prescient about Israel's fate. But flaws like those are easily forgivable in an otherwise-useful compendium of offenses that does a slow boil through 300 scary pages and is vouchsafed by heavy hitters like John Bolton and Robert Spencer.)

Quote of the day

A tip of the chapeau to Joseph Susanka for finding this gem from Flannery O'Connor:

"Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them."

(Why yes, I do believe there is a link between that assertion and the underrated, entertaining, and surprisingly moral "Nacho Libre.")

Remembering the Battle of Lepanto

The Dominican order of Catholic priests apparently has a web site devoted to stamps that it has influenced, including the one at left commemorating the unexpected Christian victory over a Turkish naval armada in the last conflict between oared warships.

The outcome of the October 7, 1571 Battle of Lepanto bought Christianity in the West time it would not otherwise have had, and checked what up until then had been inexorable Muslim military advance.

By way of expressing gratitude for the result for which he and many others had prayed fervently to the mother of Jesus, Pope Pius V -- a Dominican priest who was the first to forego vestments of "cardinal red" so he could keep the white robe of his order after being elected to the papacy -- added "Our Lady Help of Christians" to the (Marian) Litany of Loreto, and declared the first Sunday in October a feast of the rosary.

Mark Shea has pertinent theological thoughts posted today, and I commend them to you.

Meghan McCain copying Jan Brady

Meghan "one-woman revolution" (giggle) McCain has Jan Brady's signature complaint down cold: "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia! It's always about Marcia!"

Like a poker "tell" for the Hispanic Caucus

Es la verdad.

"So what accounts for [President] Obama's eagerness to semantically superimpose Mexican people onto our early territory? There are convincing reasons to believe that Obama meant that today's Mexicans are descended from the rightful owners of part of this country. Allowing them to return via illegal immigration and lax enforcement is simple fairness -- geographic reparations."

BUT -- and you knew there was a 'but'--

"The problem with that [geographic reparations] theory is that the people who were here first were not Mexican. There were warring tribes with no Mexican national identity whatsoever, who had themselves been fighting and displacing each other. The brutal territorial conquests of the Iroquois and Osage long predated Columbus. For the president to say that "Mexicans" were here "[l]ong before America was an idea" is a historical fable. He is trying to delegitimize our claims to sovereignty and to make us ashamed of our territorial boundary. From these absurd premises the left builds an entire house of cards, including an open-borders immigration policy."

Just in case you thought the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was old news.

Because the story was archived under "zeitgeist"

This from the Paragraph Farm's unofficial European Bureau Chief, as found in the English-language edition of a publication (Spiegel) that he can read in its original German:

Visitors to the Munich Oktoberfest this year drank their way into the history books by downing an unprecedented 7 million liters of beer, beating the previous high of 6.94 million reached in 2007, the organizers said. The impressive list of lost items includes a set of dentures and a live rabbit.

Papa Ratzi

Sometimes blog post titles just write themselves.

Seriously, thanks to Elizabeth Scalia for the pointer to "Venerable Bead's" takedown of Richard Dawkins, not least because Bede -- although himself an atheist -- performs the useful service of pointing out that Dawkins habitually misuderestimates the pope, whose arguments he utterly fails to refudiate.

A sample:

"Reason is not a wall that doesn't need defending, or a talisman incapable of perversion or misuse. It needs rigorous vigilance and bravery to safeguard it from without, and a larger context of legitimisation to prevent corruption from within. Left to fend for itself in the marketplace of ideologies it can never hold its corner against more basic passions, bigotries and appetities. If Dawkins wants us to believe he has not this knowledge, Ratzinger is rather braver, telling the Italian senate in 2004, "reason is inherently fragile", and ideologies based in the claim either that it can function without morality, or comes with morality attached, "become easy targets for dictatorships".

This, he explains is what happened in Nazi Germany -- and that is what Dawkins and his cronies choose to misread as blaming atheism for Nazism. I wish it were only stupidity, but Dawkins is not stupid, so it can only be cowardice.

But compare Ratzinger's rigorous analysis of the "loss of an awareness of intangible moral values" in a culture that "sees in its own history only what is blameworthy and destructive [and] is no longer capable of perceiving what is great and pure" with the ghastly fluffy-bunny 'consciousness raising' of Dawkins's recent sermons and decide for yourself in whose hands your future would be safer."

-- The takedown excerpted above ties well with musings by Joe Carter about faith and reason among America's Founding Fathers.

See also this headline from Orrin Judd, and this palate-cleanser that I found at Julie's place.

Wisdom from the late Joseph Sobran

Like P.J. O'Rourke (who is still with us) and Michael Kelly (who has gone to glory), Sobran was a fearless columnist. James Antle found a quote from Sobran that's 18 years old and still appropriate. Sobran saw the Tea Party movement before it had coalesced into what it is now:

"The real opposite of a legislating party is not a foot-dragging party, but a party of repeal. What we need is a conservative Congress whose chief business will be chopping down the jungle of bad laws that oppress us, laws that range from misconceived to iniquitous and unconstitutional."

Little did I know while cleaning out the garage...

This feast day slipped by while I was delivering real estate flyers for my wife, losing a virtual football game of "Madden '10" to my son,, and admiring the "Twilight" perfume that my daughter found someplace.

Book Review: 102 Minutes

New York-based writers Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn have been around the block a few times, and it shows. 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers is a masterpiece of investigative reporting in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. That its authors had the resources of the New York TImes at their disposal helps a lot, but it's no easy thing to build a coherent narrative from hundreds of interviews, as they did in this book, which also includes a handful of helpful diagrams and photographs.

Dwyer and Flynn write with an appealing combination of urgency and studied professionalism about what is probably the most soul-searing event ever broadcast to a mass audience on live TV. What keeps their narrative relevant even now is its detail and its unflinching honesty. This work will be around long after other titles in the "Current Events" section of your local bookstore have been remaindered by the passage of time. I came away from the book grateful for the selfless heroism displayed that day, and frustrated by the all-too-human lapses in design, culture, and communication that made the carnage worse than it might otherwise have been.

If this account is not required reading for first responders, building inspectors, architects, and municipal planners everywhere, it should be.

Friday frivolity

It's almost wabbit season.

Apropos of something else entirely, Margaret Cabaniss noticed the "sad song" survey done by a British tabloid, and decided to have some fun with it. Naturally, I had a few suggestions.

R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" is okay, but I think the only reason it's a survey winner is that people forgot about (or never heard) the magnificent weepers by Alison Krauss, Ray Charles, Townes Van Zandt, John Prine, and even ABBA.

That list doesn't even get to the Rolling Stones' "Angie" or "As Tears Go By," much less Dire Straits' "Tunnel of Love" or Roy Orbison's "Crying."

Yes, I'm a sucker for the sad stuff. Even Maurice Jarre's instrumental score for the movie "Witness" is (was) cathartic-- anyone else remember the soaring synthesizer of "Building the Barn"?

Cowboys and Indians

Not what you think, though, because you won't find Louis L'Amour, Crazy Horse, or even George Armstrong Custer in situ (as one cynic put it, "the stupid with this administration is epic.")

Would Pope Gregory the Great count as a cowboy?