We Win, They Lose
The Wit and Wisdom of Three Guys Named Brent, Mark and Mike
Monday, September 17, 2007
Constitution Day
Not that you'll see any mention of it in the mainstream press, but today is the anniversary of the day on which the delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the Constitution and sent it to the Congress of the Confederation, and the Convention officially adjourned. I found this piece, which ends:
When the Constitutional Convention assembled on the morning of September 17, 1787, the completed document was read aloud to the delegates for one last time. Thereupon Benjamin Franklin, the eighty-one-year-old patriarch of the group, rose to speak. He declared his support for the new Constitution—"with all its faults, if they are such"—because he thought a new government was necessary for the young nation. Franklin continued:
I doubt too whether any other convention we can obtain may be able to make a better Constitution. For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an Assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies. . . . Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best.
As the delegates came forward, one at a time, to sign their names to the final document, Madison recorded Franklin's final comment, just before the Constitutional Convention was dissolved. Referring to the sun painted on the back of Washington's chair, Franklin said that he had
often in the course of the Session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun.
"The business being thus closed," George Washington recorded in his private diary, the delegates proceeded to City Tavern, where they
dined together and took a cordial leave of each other; after which I returned to my lodgings, did some business with and received the papers from the Secretary of the Convention, and retired to meditate on the momentous work which had been executed. . . .
Steyn Gets It
Read Mark Steyn's article, "Survival Instinct Slippage." As always, hilarious, and dead on. The key graph:
Why do radical imams seek to convert young Canadian, British and even American men and women in their late teens and 20s? Because they understand that when you raise a generation in the great wobbling blancmange of Deval Patrick cultural relativism nothing is any better or any worse than anything else. If people are "mean and nasty" to us, it's only because we didn't sing enough Barney the Dinosaur songs at them. In such a world a certain percentage of the youth will have a great gaping hole where their sense of identity should be. And into that hole you can pour something fierce and primal and implacable.
Another good piece, making somewhat the same point is this one, by Thomas Krannawitter:
The keystone of multiculturalism is the hypothesis that what ordinary people believe is "true" is nothing but their own cultural prejudice. The real test of multicultural education is whether one has freed one's mind from the trappings of one's culture—especially if one's culture happens to be, like American culture, more powerful and prosperous than others. Celebrating foreign cultures and rejecting America are two sides of the same multicultural coin; it is the way American multiculturalists demonstrate their own multicultural sophistication to each other. From their perspective, the most anti-American Americans are the most educated because they are the most multicultural Americans.
Multiculturalists fail to understand, however, that America is more than mere culture or tradition. America's foundation is much firmer: the self-evident truth that every human being possesses equal rights by nature, the very premise of constitutional government by consent and the free society the multiculturalist enjoys. An American multiculturalist might woo and wow fellow multiculturalists by denouncing America- [Professor Ward] Churchill, for example, might besmirch fallen Americans as "little Eichmanns"—but he dares to speak that way only in the free U. S., where he quickly ducks for cover under the Constitution's protection of free speech.
Sunday, September 09, 2007
Bella
I first noted this movie back in February, and again in March. Looks like it's finally going to come out in October. Go see it, I have a good feeling about it. Movie site here.
Thursday, September 06, 2007
The "Milan Mistake"
Father Frank Pavone notes:
Well, there was “outrage” in Italy recently when the news broke that abortionists in a Milan hospital who were asked to kill a Down Syndrome twin in the womb made a “mistake” and killed the baby without Down Syndrome instead.
My own comment in the media was, “If you’re ‘pro-choice,’ save your outrage for something else.”
The “mistake” here was not that they killed the wrong twin, but that they thought they could kill the “right” one. As soon as “choice” takes precedence over life, then there’s no need for outrage. All is permitted.
This article notes that "The foetus with Down’s syndrome was also aborted subsequently," before reporting:
The mother, who has a small son, said that her life had been ruined. “Neither my husband nor I can sleep at night,” she told the Corriere della Sera, which first reported the blunder. She said that the happiness she and her husband had experienced when they learnt that she was expecting twins had been transformed into heartbreak.
