(if I were the) King of the Forest

Here is my take on Barack Obama and the Reverend Wright: most people and especially Obama partisans, have missed the point.

Anyone who has lived in a community with a large student population can tell you that they are admirably idealistic and will reflexively support any and all expensive or intrusive solutions to local problems that they judge to be of paramount concern. Unfortunately, their insulation from the community distorts their perspective on such judgments, and the fact that their relative poverty and short tenure means they will never live with the consequences of supporting such solutions, either monetarily or socially, blinds them to the tradeoffs involved.

In short, students learn their lessons about politics at the expense of the locals. They vote their ideals with no need to consider costs, free to congratulate themselves on their virtue and walk away from their mistakes when they graduate — while those left behind must live with the long-term consequences.

Has anyone noticed that those “unrepresentative” and “92 percent white, more rural and older than the rest of the nation” Iowans just favored the intellectual black man (and, by the way, a genuine “African American” given that he had an African father and an American mother) over the white populist by a rather large margin?

Recently the New York Times has taken to criticizing the newly ‘conservative’ U.S. Supreme Court for rulings that respect and enforce Constitutional limits on the authority of the Congress and of regulatory agencies and of lower courts and of individual citizens to extract money and penitence from “powerful” individuals and corporations for perceived misdeeds. […]

The complaint is not and has never been that judges are acting to enforce constitutional boundaries on the legislature; it is and has always been that they fail to act to enforce those boundaries — or act without constitutional warrant to make up new boundaries to enforce out of whole cloth — when reading the constitution rigorously would undermine some extralegal cause to which they have committed themselves. The complaint is not that judges act, but that they act in deference to some cause other than the rule of law that they have sworn to uphold.

Even before he took office those who hated George Bush (and hate is not too strong a word in this case) announced not only that they had no intention of treating him with any deference or respect, but also that they intended to apply equal disrespect and defiance toward the office of the Presidency for as long as he held it. That was bad enough coming from the political left outside the government, but when that attitude appears within the government as well — from those whose job it is impartially to implement the policies determined within the political realm by the Executive and the Legislature — it is closer to treason than to patriotism.

For your consideration, I would submit that such a move would have made it impossible for some relatively unknown and underfunded but charming southern governor — say someone like Bill Clintion — to have emerged as a serious candidate; and it would likely have prevented some brand-name candidate anointed and bankrolled by the political party establishment — say someone like George W. Bush — from having to confront any serious challenge or insurrection by the dissatisfied centrists who almost made John McCain the candidate in his place.

It has long been my contention that the first African American President and/or the first female President in America will be a Republican, for the simple reason that minorities and women who work their way up to levels of prominence in the Republican party tend to be there for reasons concerned with general economic growth, individual liberty, and social stability. Whether you think those concerns — and resulting platforms — are good or bad, they tend to be concerns and platforms that appeal to a broad centrist populace.

Would those calling now for confiscation of that “excess” through a windfall profits tax be equally willing to to make up the “shortfalls” through a windfall loss subsidy during the next down cycle? That would be “fair”, if perhaps unproductive. But I don’t remember any of them being in favor of that in the past. And I can’t imagine it happening in the future.

Rather, in their lexicon “fairness” seems, at least with regard to business, to mean “responsible for losses but not entitled to profits” — risk without reward.

So colleges are supposed to open minds unless it makes them open to this particular brand of religion?

Colleges provide a forum for expression of different opinions and varying religious views — excepting that those particular opinions and religious views are to be silenced?

Proselytizing and recruitment by a Christian group with no university affiliation or endorsement — but not proselytizing and recruitment on behalf of Marxism or Utilitarianism or Feminism or Afro-Centrism or any of the other myriad -isms that contend for the students’ attention and commitment in the classroom and through student organizations with the official imprimatur and blessing of the university — constitutes an appalling imposition of those views?