.
HOW TO TELL IF YOU’RE AN ELITIST — SEE http://townhall.com/Columnists/BenShapiro/2008/10/21/you_know_youre_an_elitist_if.
.
Ivy League Moral Compass:
REGAINING SPIRITUAL BALANCE
AND MORAL DIRECTION:
America’s disproportionate prison population is symptomatic of our loss of moral balance and of mutual faith and credit. If we fail to regain balance, we, and our currency, will soon fall into something that is no longer American.
We will not regain balance by deriding all dedication to any stabilizing value or belief system that is higher than all of us. Ivy League institutions of science and hallowed institutions of organized religion are all failing us.
Yet, above all is a Compass of Spirituality. Of IT, we deride common respect at our common moral and mortal peril.
****
Snippets and comment from:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/mistress_of_disaster_jamie_gor.html:
September 19, 2008
Mistress of Disaster: Jamie Gorelick
By C. Edmund Wright
Imagine playing a central role in the biggest national defense disaster in 50 years. Imagine playing a central role in one of the biggest economic disasters in your country's history. Imagine doing both as an un-elected official. Imagine getting filthy rich in the process, and even being allowed to sit self-righteously on a commission appointed to get to the bottom of the first disaster, which of course did not get to the bottom of that disaster or anything else for that matter.
Imagine ending, ruining or at least causing significant quality deterioration in the lives of millions of people, most of whom will never know your name. Imagine counting your millions of dollars while people who tried to stop you from causing all this mayhem were getting blamed for most of the ills you actually contributed to.
Well, as un-imaginable as this is, there is one American who doesn't have to imagine it. One Jamie Gorelick is this American. And without pretending that she caused the loss of countless thousands of lives and countless billions of dollars of wealth by herself, she certainly did push some of the early domino's in catastrophic chain events that are a major factors in life in America today.
....
From what can be gleaned, it all comes from being well connected. She was educated (is that what they call it?) at Harvard undergrad and Harvard Law. From there, she kept getting appointed to positions above her experience level where she could flex her liberal muscles, add a resume item, and move upward.
Sound familiar?
Commenter — STIII:
The number of dishonest, deplorable, despicable dirtbags that come out of Ivy League schools would be impressive if it wasn't so destructive. Don't these institutions teach any morals, scruples or self worth? This woman was at the center of the worst attack this country has suffered, got payed 75 million for her "work" sending Fannie Mae into oblivion at tax payer expense and then the dog and pony show called the 911 commission. Where's the accountability? Why doesn't this woman go see a Judge and a Jury? Instead, she just gets a pass. The leadership we get out of the lawyers that are Democrat politicians is going to ruin this country. They can't lead, but they know the law just well enough to skate around it.
14 comments:
See http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/comparing_the_candidates_colle.html.
Ivy League snootiness is pretense for covering moral deceit. A pox on elitist clubbiness! If any Ivy League elitist defers to any practical standard of decency by which to profess or pretend guidance for what America "should" be about, I would like to hear what it is. America, collectively, should tell Ivy Leaguers to "pull my finger."
FUTURE SHOCK: Presently, the scale and pace of change seems to be exceeding the evolved, reasoning capacities of our passions.
Managing pre-planned panic: Who you gonna call?
Whatever the high-level money-people say, no matter how fast or deep they may push the rest of us into debt slavery, we appear poised to acquiesce right along, trained little puppets that we are!
SNL skit: http://sweetness-light.com/archive/saturday-night-live-sketch-actually-bashed-nyt
Political Incredulity:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20080930/us_time/thebailoutdefeatapoliticalcredibilitycrisis:
Nearly every major political leader in the U.S. supported the $700 billion financial-bailout bill. The President. The Vice President. The Treasury Secretary. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve. The Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Democratic and Republican nominees for President. The Democratic and Republican leadership of the House and Senate. All of them said the same thing: vote yes.
But a majority of those politicians anointed by the Constitution to reflect the will of the people voted no. This is a remarkable event, the culmination of a historic sense of betrayal that Americans have long felt for their representatives in Washington. The nation's credit crisis on Monday exposed a much deeper and more fundamental problem: a crisis of political credibility that now threatens to harm our nation further, should the markets freeze up and more companies begin to fail, as many experts predict.
....
Years ago, the trust between the people and their politicians was broken. Credibility was lost. The reserve of goodwill went bankrupt. And when they needed it most, our nation's leaders found that they had squandered their ability to exert influence over the people who chose them to lead.
Good Will and Doodad:
HOW CAN PARENTS TEACH CHILDREN NOT TO SINK TO GANG LEVEL TACTICS WHEN OUR POLITICAL SYSTEM LOOKS THE OTHER WAY AND OFTEN PROVIDES ENCOURAGEMENT FOR SUCH TACTICS?
http://www.newsmax.com/timmerman/Obama_fundraising_illegal/2008/09/29/135718.html?s=al&promo_code=6BD9-1:
In a letter dated June 25, 2008, the FEC asked the Obama campaign to verify a series of $25 donations from a contributor identified as “Will, Good” from Austin, Texas.
Mr. Good Will listed his employer as “Loving” and his profession as “You.”
A Newsmax analysis of the 1.4 million individual contributions in the latest master file for the Obama campaign discovered 1,000 separate entries for Mr. Good Will, most of them for $25.
In total, Mr. Good Will gave $17,375.
....
Similarly, a donor identified as “Pro, Doodad,” from “Nando, NY,” gave $19,500 in 786 separate donations, most of them for $25. For most of these donations, Mr. Doodad Pro listed his employer as “Loving” and his profession as “You,” just as Good Will had done.
....
Following FEC requests, the Obama campaign began refunding money to Doodad Pro in February 2008. In all, about $8,425 was charged back to a credit card. But that still left a net total of $11,165 as of Sept. 20, way over the individual limit of $4,600.
....
The FEC has compiled a separate database of potentially questionable overseas donations that contains more than 11,500 contributions totaling $33.8 million. More than 520 listed their “state” as “IR,” often an abbreviation for Iran. Another 63 listed it as “UK,” the United Kingdom.
....
Unlike McCain’s or Sen. Hillary Clinton’s online donation pages, the Obama site did not ask for proof of citizenship until just recently. Clinton’s presidential campaign required U.S. citizens living abroad to actually fax a copy of their passport before a donation would be accepted.
With such lax vetting of foreign contributions, the Obama campaign may have indirectly contributed to questionable fundraising by foreigners.
....
In July and August, the head of the Nigeria’s stock market held a series of pro-Obama fundraisers in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city. The events attracted local Nigerian business owners.
At one event, a table for eight at one fundraising dinner went for $16,800. Nigerian press reports claimed sponsors raked in an estimated $900,000.
....
Though Gadhafi asserted that fundraising from Arab and African nations were “legitimate,” the fact is that U.S. federal law bans any foreigner from donating to a U.S. election campaign.
The rise of the Internet and use of credit cards have made it easier for foreign nationals to donate to American campaigns, especially if they claim their donation is less than $200.
****
This begs a question: Was the Snopes-faux-Dowd article prescient?
PARTY OF DEFEAT:
Snippets from http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=A14B6072-1DDE-4EC6-AB2C-8A9728BC0861:
We do not believe “an anti-war leftist clique has seized control of the levers of power” in the Democratic Party, nor do we believe that such a hypothesis is necessary to explain the worst betrayal in time of war by a major political party in the nation’s history. Much of the Democrats’ irresponsible, reckless and yes, anti-American behavior can be ascribed to political opportunism run amok: Democrats as a party benefited if a foreign policy disaster could be attributed to Republicans. The difference between the Democrats and Farley’s leftist clique is this: Democrats want to win elections even if it means losing a war; leftists want America to lose its wars whoever wins the election.
....
What caused Kerry and Edwards to change from war supporters to anti-war leaders was the fact that Howard Dean, an obscure anti-war leftist, was about to win the Democratic Party nomination and thwart their personal ambitions. So close was Dean to victory that Jimmy Carter and Al Gore had descended on Iowa to anoint him. That was why Kerry turned on his president and his country’s war: a political poll that went against him.
....
... Party of Defeat supports criticism of war policy. But it makes distinctions between criticism of policy within a democratic framework and sabotage of policy, often outside that framework, such as leaking national secrets.
....
... we make distinctions between critics outside of government such as Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore, and critics such as John Kerry who sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee with access to the same information as the president about Iraq. Knowing what the president knew, Kerry supported the war until Howard Dean’s anti-war candidacy threatened his ambitions. He then turned against the war and accused his own president of lying to the public in order to conduct a needless war of aggression.
“Feeling Your Pain In Order To Feel Your Wallet” is getting mighty old.
From Newsmax — Example of how cynical, soulless, single-minded power-lusters gain control over populations by diverting their attention to abstract promises of respect for natural or spiritual goodness, all the while picking their pockets, enslaving their minds, and forcing their loyalty:
The citizens of Ecuador have approved a new constitution that essentially gives nature the same rights as human beings.
“Persons and people have the fundamental rights guaranteed in this constitution and in the international human rights instrument. Nature is subject to those rights given by this constitution and law,” reads one article in the document, the 20th constitution in the South American nation since 1830.
The constitution also states that nature “has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.”
As a result of the new constitution, “drilling or exploring for oil in environmentally sensitive areas could become increasingly difficult” in Ecuador, where oil revenues account for more than half the nation’s export earnings, the American Spectator notes.
For advice on the nature’s rights language in its constitution, Ecuador turned to a public interest law firm right here in the U.S., the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund in Chambersburg, Pa.
The firm has already convinced some small municipalities in the U.S. to pass similar legislation to keep large corporations off their turf, according to the American Spectator story written by Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz.
The nature provision is not the only unsettling element of the new constitution.
President Rafael Correa will now be able to remain in office until 2017, dissolve congress at will, and seize and redistribute idle farmland. The constitution also enables him to take over control of the country’s monetary policy, and exercise exclusive authority over the budget.
The Spectator observes: “In other words, we are seeing the making of another Hugo Chavez-like Venezuela.”
OBSERVATION: Without experienced, empathetic, energetic skeptics, aided by carefully nurtured institutions for empowering strong checks and balances, the easily-duped, media-mesmerized masses are just ripe for the picking. America is at a dangerous tipping point. If we tip right, we may get a new lease on liberty. If we tip left, God help us, because power-lusting faux-socialists won’t.
IVY LEAGUERS:
Snippet from David Brooks, at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/opinion/10brooks.html?th&emc=th:
.... politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.
COMMENTS:
Republicans have, stupidly and unrelentingly, failed to address the widening gulf between middle class political independents and the affluents. And, for that stupidity, we all pay.
However, the class of “cultivated minds” is not so easily to be let off the hook. Why have its members not engaged in more introspection regarding their own guilt, and less in “I told you so” finger waggling?
Why have not more leaders among the “cultivated-mind set” gone on any sort of spiritual vision quest, to receive, learn, and inspire us with “shoulds,” rather than merely to dispense so much of the same old snotty snootiness, unenlightened by actual heavy lifting?
If the effete, coastal, cultivated minds among the “masters of the universe” cannot bring themselves to stand for any “shoulds,” can they at least get out of the way, or at least refrain from sinking us all into moral and financial oblivion?
Cannot more among them fill their empty suits and empty words by facing down some actual hardships, volunteering for military service, or by confronting purveyors of lopsided disinformation, to help wring some of it out of our lopsided, effete, excessively self-regarding media, academia, business, and culture?
RACIST:
From http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/10/the_numbskull_vote.html:
October 14, 2008
The numbskull vote
Rosslyn Smith
Howard Stern sends out people to poll Obama voters in Harlem, attributing all of McCain's positions to Obama. Those questioned didn't seem to recognize that positions such as being pro life and finishing the war in Iraq were the exact opposite of Obama's actual positions. And they all still support Obama.
Tell me again exactly who is casting a vote based on race.
*****
ACORN FRAUD:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/how_to_steal_ohio.html
ELITES: Not unlike theatrical value-added by the faux king and prince in Tom Sawyer, much of the “substantive-value-added” that elites specialize in selling, beyond snooty pretense and snobby conceit, just ain’t so. Hey, prideful “elites,” you ain’t special just because your mommies told you so. Grow up!
IVY’S:
Comment by Dlanor, at http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/11/a_place_where_only_liberal_spe.html:
I once read that it can be dangerous to allow domestic turkeys to walk about in a downpour, because, if they happen to look up, they are too stupid not to close their beaks and avoid drowning. That's probably an exaggeration, but it leads me to ask: What is the secret to how elite colleges are able to recruit so many human turkeys? I suspect elite Community Organizers recruit "leaders" depending on how eagerly they profess about victimhood and extreme entitlement. But making up crap and calling it a test for "eliteness" does not make it so. It appears many colleges have slipped the bonds of reason to transcend to an Orwellian ultimate: defining ignorance as wisdom. How elite!
Better question: How much longer are turkey parents going to finance this travesty?
Comment by Dlanor, at http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/kathleen-parker-and-the-oogedy-boogedy-blues/#comment-157510:
Oogedy-boogedy?
What about the "Black Liberation Theology" Obama listened to for more than 20 years? Did it not advocate the killing of any God inconsistent with Black values?
BTW, much of Christian theology is based on parables, metaphors, models --- as interpreted and made relevant to the context of one's life. Christians tend to be humbly receptive about praying to God for guidance, not for kool-aid or proof.
But, in all humility, what is Kathleen's favored flavor of kool-aid?
Kathleen, grow up. Please.
Snakes Among Conservatives:
To be anything, a thing needs to have defining features. For example, “America” is a country of boundaries that are physical, political, moral, and aspirational. “Conservatives,” wishing to conserve America, defend borders, restrict in-comers to legal immigrants, extol an informed electorate, promote family values, and fight for individual liberty. International “Socialists,” wishing to see America torn to bits and fed to ravening primatives, defend no borders, advocate “rights” to cross borders, whip up, mislead, and indoctrinate electorates, cede responsibility for rearing children to the State, and seek the security of mobs of protesters.
So, many Conservatives, out of sense of human morality: oppose blanket amnesty for invaders; detest the enabling of voter fraud; want State’s to decide how to regulate abortions; defend the authority of parents; and do not seek to undermine efforts to conduct the nation’s defense.
Faux Conservatives (what are they “conserving,” apart from self-delusion of elitism?), while denigrating homage to any basis for morality as “oogedy boogedy,” mock such concerns and values, even going so far as to argue, illogically (albeit in cutesy language), that Conservatives reduce their electoral power by actually standing for such things.
And so, this last election cycle, we ran a “Republican” who actually acceded to most arguments of faux conservatives. Problem: Democrats already own the monopoly on voters who lack moral values (i.e., unwillingness to defend partially born babies, unwillingness to defend borders, willingness to gather in groups in order to expropriate the production of others).
A Republican cannot defeat a Democrat by trying to out-do the trashing of moral values. (Well, duh!)
Modern Democrats (and faux conservatives) spend little time discussing moral values, except to ridicule values of Conservatives. Values of Democrats are not moral, but selfish. Yet, Orwellian Democrats take taxing others in order to vote for handouts for themselves as “unselfish.” Remarkable! Democrats: give less to charities; want government to take from workers to redistribute to layabouts; want or claim “rights” and entitlements to free health care, free college education, and free equality in income (i.e., “free lunch”). When Conservatives advocate the contrary, faux conservatives (spineless snakes) spit poison in our eyes and complain of splitting and losing the base.
But nothing could be more fork-tongued. One does not defeat the free-lunch crowd by joining them. One defeats them by joining with the non-free-lunch crowd.
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