While I find some of the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman‘s films tiresome, I’m always amazed by his capacity to write with light, how he frames a shot and captures an image.

When his movies are good, however, they are brilliant. I recently recounted how Fanny and Alexander moved me. I also find his films Wild Strawberries and Through a Glass Darkly while not as powerful at that flick, they remain meaningful meditations on our relationships to each other and to what lies beyond (or within).

Well, it turns out he wasn’t just a great filmmaker, he also was a champion of freedom, standing up to Swedish authorities who overtaxed him.  When they arrested him for tax evasion,

. . . the director ripped the ever-expanding Swedish government bureaucracy which, he wrote in a letter to the newspaper Expressen, “grows like a galloping cancer” and very publicly decided to abandon the country for West Germany. . . .  As one of his Swedish biographers noted, the Social Democratic press campaign against the director lasted into the late 1980s, after he had returned from exile.

And he didn’t much care for the radical movements of the 1960s.  According to Michael Moynihan at Reason.com, “in his 1988 autobiography The Magic Lantern,” he took issue with student radicals:

It is possible some brave researcher will one day investigate just how much damage was done to our cultural life by the 1968 movement…Today, frustrated revolutionaries still…do not see (and how could they!) that their contribution was a deadly slashing blow at an evolution that must never be separated from its roots. In other countries where varied ideas are allowed to flourish at the same time, tradition and education were not destroyed. Only in China and Sweden were artists and teachers scorned…

Guess it’s time to update my Netflix queue.  And to scoop up a few copies of that book to share with my liberal film-loving friends.

In his book The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University,” Brown University student Kevin Roose writes about his semester as transfer at Liberty University, the Virginia university founded by Jerry Falwell. In an article about that student and this book, AP’s Eric Tucker reports that “A roommate he depicts as aggressively anti-gay — all names are changed in the book is an outcast on the hall, not a role model.”

Even students at Liberty University, like patrons at a New Jersey sports bar, they have no truck for loud-mouthed anti-gay attitudes.  Not all young people may support gay marriage, but it does seem that the overwhelming majority are remarkably tolerant of their gay peers, even in socially conservative institutions.

We really have made a lot of progress in the last forty years.  And it’s important that we acknowledge it.

Bashing gay people is no longer a parth to gaining favor with one’s peers.  It’s just not cool.  And that, my friends, is something to cheer.

(H/t Instapundit.)

Maybe it was spending the evening yesterday with conservatives and talking politics into the wee hours of the morning, but well, today I found that when I was checking the blogs I normally do, my eyes glazed over as I read about politics.

It just didn’t capture my attention. And that’s probably a good thing.

Hope to get back to regular blogging tonight or tomorrow, but let this post remind you that there are more things in the world than politics, more topics for conversation, more subjects for consideration.

Just released today from GOProud Executive Director Jimmy LaSalvia….

(Washington, D.C.) — “In the next few days, the Democratic controlled House of Representatives will do exactly what the Republican controlled House in the 108^th Congress did — pass hate crimes legislation.  In their cynical never-ending quest to lower expectations, the gay left will undoubtedly hail the passage of hate crimes legislation as ‘historic.’  While the passage of hate crimes may be laudable, its passage, and indeed even its enactment into law, is not historic.

“The truth is that Democrats have spent no political capital on moving on important election year promises such as the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the partial repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act.  Instead of making excuses for the lack of action by Democrats in Washington, the leaders of the gay left should be demanding that Democrats commit to living up to the promises they made.”

That will be the day.  Oh, if you haven’t joined GOProud, please sign up and donate today.  Our group is the only one engaged in the issues that matter to gay conservatives in America.

I have committed $2,000 to the new organization.  Please help us spread the word!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

I just returned from a most wonderful evening. Along with two other blog readers and a banquet hall filled with Hollywood conservatives and libertarians, I celebrated the seventieth birthday of David Horowitz. What a night it was to celebrate this good man and to be able to talk openly about politics–and movies right in the heart of blue America.

Oh, and, I did get to talk about the blog. And, well, gosh darn it, hate to disappoint our liberal readers again, but I had the same sort of experience I have pretty much every time I come out as a gay man to conservatives, so what? You know the opposite experience I get when I come out to a good number of gay liberals as a conservatives.

After the dinner, over drinks with Ann Coulter, a few people did make a joke or two at my expense, but then, well, we were all making jokes at everyone else’s expense. This was the first time I had seen Ann since she attended the Federalist Society’s 1994 Annual Symposium at the University of Virginia, an event which I directed. And while I’ve criticized her from time to time on the blog, in person, she is as funny, gregarious and friendly as she was the last time I saw her.

She definitely has as a presence and is witty even without prepared notes or a teleprompter to guide her. And while she doesn’t mince words (which made the conversation all the more enjoyable), she does listen. And listen very well. In fact, that was the quality I found most remarkable about her. While she was clearly the “star” among the group who retreated with her to the bar after the event, she didn’t hog the limelight, let other people speak and addressed their points in her responses.

She was most interested in people’s stories about Hollywood and the bias they encountered in the industry and seem particularly interested in the work and experiences of a screenwriting friend of mine (who sometimes comments to this blog).

Because Dr. Nigel Ashford, a distinguished British political philosopher, whom we believe to be the only openly gay man honored by Dame Margaret Thatcher, will be paying homage to that great lady’s colleague in bringing down communism, we’ve had to reschedule his Los Angeles dinner to next Tuesday, April 28th.

The current plan is to meet in Santa Monica for dinner at 7.  If you’d like to join us, please RSVP to me for complete details.

I had planned a post last night on the President’s comments yesterday where he left the door open “to prosecuting Bush administration officials who devised the legal authority” for intensive investigations of terrorism suspects.  Yet, given that other conservative bloggers had posted on the topic–and far better than I ever could–I decided to, in the limited time available to me, focus on other topics.

Yet, in considering the first post I wrote this morning, I realize how the two topics are linked, the president’s refusal to close the door on prosecuting officials of his predecessor’s administration and his failure so far to show acknowledge the legitimacy of the Tea Party protests.  To shut the door on such prosecutions and to address citizens’ concerns about a rapidly growing federal government would allow him to rise above the fray and speak out in the national interest.

He could unite the nation by refusing to consider the demands of some of his most vindictive supporters and by acknowledging the concerns of some of his harshest critics.  Instead, he has chosen to throw a bone to the former while his minions badmouthed the latter.

These angry supporters are out for blood.  Not content that their nemesis has left the White House, they’re still seething.  They “don’t just want to defeat conservatives at the polls, they want to send them to jail.”  Should the Administration attempt this prosecution, I believe it will backfire.  While those targetted rack up huge legal bills, they will prevail a the courthouse and, should they invest in a public relations team, in the court of public opinion as well.

The Administration will appear vindictive, particularly as the Bush Administration officials defend their actions in the context of the times and their concerns for preventing another 9/11.  Not just that,  the prosecutions will exacerbate partisan differences, further dividing the nation.  Unifying presidents work to mitigate not aggravate such divisions.

(more…)

In writing about the reaction to my fellow Williams students to a lecture by Phyllis Schlafly, I recalled thw while students welcomed a controversial speaker, a number of factulty members either urged me to rescind our invitation to the speaker or angrily decried her presence on campus.  Perhaps that recollection has led me to speculate that we might see less intolerance on campus were professors to do their job, promoting respect for those holding different politic viewpoints and strongly discouraging intellectual intolerance.

Yet, more often than not, professors seem to be the most intolerant people on university campi.  To be sure, many times, they are the most tolerant.  Kurt Tauber, an avowed Marxist was quite possibly the most broad-minded Political Science Professor when I was at Williams.  Every (that’s not an exaggeration) thoughtful conservative student who taken a course from him held him in high regard.

In the past week alone, I have read two stories of attempts by campus leftists to silence conservative speakers.  While they succeeded at the University of North Carolina (UNC), they failed at the University of Texas (UT).  In both cases, faculty were involved, indeed, may have spearheaded the opposition.

So, I wonder, how much different the situation might have been, had the faculty, in the true spirit of a university, encouraged the students to be civil, to listen courteously to the speakers and to ask probing questions afterwards.

When David Horowitz spoke at UT, he

was greeted — if that’s the word — by a raucous protest organized by a professor and self-styled Bolshevik, Dana Cloud. Forty protesters hoisted placards high in the air and robotically chanted “Down With Horowitz,” “Racist Go Home,” and “No More Witch-hunts.”

Emphasis added.  Fortunately, a representative of the university administration threatened “the disrupters with arrest if they continued on this course.”

Tom Tancredo, who spoke last June at the Santa Barbara retreat of Horowitz’s Freedom Center, was not so fortunate when he traveled to Chapel Hill to address students at the UNC.  There,

Hundreds of protesters converged on Bingham Hall, shouting shouting profanities and accusations of racism while Tancredo and the student who introduced him tried to speak. Minutes into the speech, a protester pounded a window of the classroom until the glass shattered, prompting Tancredo to flee and campus police to shut down the event.

During the speech, “geography professor Alpha Cravey joined protesters in chanting the names of Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus.”  She should have been quieting them down, telling them to listen and raise their objections later.

(more…)

There are days when our critics do our work for us.  By their very words, they discredit their own criticism (in some cases, criticism is a euphemism for what might more accurately be called name-calling).

In reply to my post on how some on the left go through life with blinders on making it tough for them to see conservatives, one of our regular critics offered that my partial listing of our posts taking issue with then-President Bush and free-spending Republican Congress “doesn’t refute [his] point about conservatives failing to criticize George Bush, it proves it.”

In Levi’s universe, we prove a point by showing it not to be true.  And that listing was hardly an exhaustive survey of conservative criticism of W.  (It didn’t even represent the complete universe of my criticism.  Like I said in the post to which he attaches his criticism, “If you take a gander at archives of any number of conservative blogs, you’ll find a great variety of posts criticizing Bush and any number of aspects of his Administration.”  (Emphasis added.)

He’ll find enough criticism to make his head swim.  It was essays by my friend libertarian friend David Boaz of the Cato Institute and editorials in the Wall Street Journal which first made me aware of W’s failure to hold the line on domestic spending.  And this before I started blogging.

But no bother to Levi.  He’ll just look at what I linked, take a stroll through our archives during a period where I was blogging less than I am at present and say, “Is that all?”  He didn’t bother to review other conservative blogs or the archives of conservative editorial pages.

For this critic his memory more accurately reflects reality than facts.  ”I’ll trust my memory of the first six years of the Bush administration over yours.”  I never asked that he trust my memory, but that he, to quote my followup comment, “check the archives of any serious conservative blog.”

Recall, he contends that conservatives failed to criticize W, that we were somehow wedded to him.  Um, Levi, I refused to vote for George W. Bush in the California primary in 2004 and wrote in Rudy Giuliani which I have stated numerous times on this blog.   (more…)

One of the reasons our economy enjoyed continuous economic growth throughout the 1990s was because President Clinton kept his campaign promise to get free trade agreements ratified.  In his first act of political courage and steadfastness in the White House, he dared defy part of the Democratic base by standing firm on the North American American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which he helped push through Congress in 1993.

The following year he “convened Congress to ratify” the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), an agreement which further reduced barriers to international commerce.

Now, it looks like his successor is be following in his footsteps.  While most people were paying attention to the theatrics of anti-American demagogues at the Summit of the Americas, the President made some quiet, but quite possibly significant gestures, to one of our closest allies in the hemisphere, President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia.  After listening to Uribe:

Obama then seemed to realize that the long-stalled Colombia free trade agreement should have been passed yesterday.

The president announced that his team must find a way to pass the agreement. With world trade down 80%, the pact opens new markets to the U.S. He demanded immediate action, asking Colombia’s trade minister to fly to Washington this week.

Then it got even better: Obama invited Uribe to the White House and promised to visit Colombia himself, allowing the Colombians to lay out for him their vast economic and social progress, and their desire to integrate into global trade.

Good move, Mr. President.  You’re building on the success of your two immediate predecessors, Clinton for promoting free trade and Bush for forging a strong relationship with Uribe.

(H/t Instapundit.)

During the better part of the transition, it seemed that then-President-elect Barack Obama would truly live up to the image he put forward during the campaign, a post-partisan figure able to transcend the divisive politics which had defined national politics for nearly twenty years.  Once in office, he would use his formidable gifts to unite us as a nation.  He appointed competent people to his cabinet (or so they appeared at the time), spoke in measured tones, was gracious in relationships with the-then incumbent Administration, refraining from criticizing George W. Bush and his team.

He reached out to his campaign rival, John McCain, inviting him to Chicago shortly after the election and hosting a dinner in his honor the day before his inauguration.

Yeah, there were a few fumbles and stumbles along the way, but on the whole, a class act.

That all changed almost from the moment he took office.  During the inauguration, he bypassed an opportunity to stand up to the hate on his side of the aisle when he failed to silence those who booed his predecessor.  What a gesture that would have been!

And then in (what I believe was) his first meeting as president with a bipartisan congressional delegation, he snapped, “I won” to defend the “stimulus” he was then pushing.  Shortly thereafter, he starting blaming his predecessor on a pretty regularly basis.  In a very short amount of time, President Obama forfeited the chance he had to truly bridge the partisan gap and unite the nation, moving us toward an era of less intense political acrimony.

Well, today, one week after nearly one half-million people rallied to protest increased government spending and the tax increases we fear will follow to pay for them, he has a chance to recover the ground he lost in the days immediately after the election.  All he need to is acknowledge the sincerity of the Tea Party protesters and fault those who would question it.

(more…)

Those who read my posts on gay marriage can expect me to repeat what has become a constant refrain, that all too many advocates of gay marriage would rather trash opponents of state-recognition of same-sex unions than defend the social change they promote.

Whenever I discover a solid argument in favor of gay marriage, I do try to highlight it.  More often than not it is Jonathan Rauch who has made that argument.  Seemingly alone among gay marriage advocates, he has made the social case for gay marriage, primarily in the chapter, “What is Marriage For” in his book Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America.

In introducing and recommending Jonathan’s latest essay on gay marriage, Commentary‘s Pete Wehner shares my sentiments about the quality of his arguments:

Unlike other advocates of same-sex marriage, who routinely brand those with whom they disagree as bigots and worse, Rauch presents his arguments in a careful, measured, and analytically rigorous way.

Indeed, what is most impressive to me is that Rauch presents something close to a model of what public discourse should be. For example, according to Rauch, “for Burkean conservatives same-sex marriage is a particular conundrum because it presents so many competing narratives and so many uncertainties. Rauch then lays out two competing narratives — what he calls the ‘Jonathan Rauch narrative’ and the ‘Maggie Gallagher narrative.’ He does a splendid job of encapsulating both views in a single paragraph each; and having done so, he asks, ‘Confronted with these two starkly opposed narratives, what’s a Burkean to do?” He proceeds to offer his views in the remainder of the essay.

Wehner gets at one thing which distinguishes Jonathan from all too many advocates of gay marriage; he takes the time to understand the arguments he intends to refute.  He doesn’t reject them out of hand or insult those who advance them.

I’m delighted to find yet another conservative blogger/pundit show respect for Jonathan’s ideas on gay marriage and his manner of expressing them.  This indicates that smart conservatives take gay marriage more seriously when its advocates make a rational case for their cause.

As you ponder the quality of Jonathan’s arguments and the respect he has gained for the way he makes them, wonder with me why other advocates of the social change Jonathan seeks remain unwilling to recognize how significant a change it is.  Consider how they could better serve that cause by making more rational arguments.

Among gay marriage advocates, Jonathan stands out because he carefully makes the case why state recognition of same-sex marriage is a good thing.  If others follow suit, they may find the same respect that he enjoys not just in conservative intellectual circles, but also among conservative voters.

In response to a piece of mine crossposted an another blog, a reader would like to know if there are “other conservatives that challenge the current brew of Bushism/Cheneyism/Republicanism these days“.  He’s a little bit behind the times given that Messrs. Bush and Cheney have since left office and gone into retirement.

Like all too many in the netroots and among those who use our comments section to criticize conservatives and Republicans in general and us in particular, he’s under the assumption that all conservatives fell into line and blindly followed George W. Bush over the last eight years.  Does he only get his information about conservatives from left-wing blogs and MSNBC?

How often do we hear that refrain that we blindly supported W and failed to criticize him?

If you take a gander at archives of any number of conservative blogs, you’ll find a great variety of posts criticizing Bush and any number of aspects of his Administration.  Most of us took him and congressional Republicans to task for not holding the line on spending.  (The National Review even ran a cover story on the Bush Administration’s competence problem.)

When I point this out, it falls on deaf ears.  All too many repeat their mantra about how monolithic and unquestioning we were in our support of W.  To make it easier to some of our critics, I did a piece providing a partial listing of posts where we took issue with the former president’s (and congressional Republicans’) profligacy, they remain unswayed, so strong is their conviction about conservatives.

They criticize us while remaining clueless about our ideas.  A line from the theme song from a 70s sitcom, Alice, come to mind as I consider their narrow-minded attitude toward conservatives.  ”Going through life with blinders on, it’s tough to see.”

They blind themselves to contemporary conservatives because they define us not by our ideas and the things we have written, but by their prejudices and things leftist bloggers and left-of-center “journalists” have written about us.

Clearly, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s former top political aide, Mark Penn, knows something that many of us don’t.

It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year.

REALLY?  No, REALLY?

Here at GayPatriot, where we have reached that benchmark (though not every month), we are about $69,999 short of Mr. Penn’s declaration.

I therefore plead to the Obama Administration for some TARP bailout money so this blog can continue.   Since GayPatriot is a minority voice in the gay community then, according to US Rep. Barney Frank, we represent a SEVERELY discriminated minority being preyed upon everyday by bigots and religious zealots.  We need our TARP cash now!  And perhaps a civil rights lawsuit against those eeeeeeevil bigots & zealots to boot?

PS — Read the rest of Mickey Kaus’ complete gutting of Mark Penn’s view of the blogosphere.  It is awesome.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

The Tea Parties showed how conservative and libertarians could use new media to organize and promote their ideas. Now, Glenn provides us with an example of how conservative students are using the web to protest their school’s choice of a mean-spirited partisan to deliver a commencement address:

About 130 American University students have signed an online petition of sorts asking the school’s administration to withdraw an invitation to Barney Frank, who is slated to deliver a commencement address at AU’s School of Public Affairs in a few weeks.

It seems these students are smart enough to read beyond the headlines and the MSM coverage of the financial meltdown.  They know that Republican politics and corporate greed did not cause the collapse, writing on their Facebook page

As young Americans across the country continue to lose their jobs and “rising” college graduates struggle to find employment post-grad, should American University honestly be honoring a man who helped lead us and the world into a global economic meltdown?

In addition, Frank is excessively partisan and notoriously divisive during times when compromise and bipartisanship is needed the most.

Well said.

While I believe Mr. Frank has a right to speak on a university campus should the school, one of its departments or student groups, invite him, I wonder at the school’s choice of such a partisan figure to speak at a commencement celebration.

Whatever the result of their online petition, we have an example conservative students are using the web to make their concerns known.  Let us hope that this is the harbinger of more challenges to the biases in American academia.

I believe that Barney has been so nasty toward his critics, in large part because he has, over the years, escaped criticism for and censure of his mean-spirited attacks.  The MSM has fawned all over him and refused to hold him account not just for his angry rhetoric but also for policy mistakes.

With the new media, we can bypass the gatekeepers who once blocked criticism of this unhappy man from appearing in print, and hold his rhetoric and his record up to scrutiny.  Just as these students at American University are doing.  Kudos to these young people.  May the right learn from their example.

While we on the right side of the blogosphere spent the better part of last week promoting the Tea Parties and celebrating their success, this week, many of us are (once again) considering the phenomenon of the angry left. Perhaps that’s because their hysterical outbursts reached fever pitch with the success of those parties.

A grassroots movement at odds with their ideology was being born.

If they were as confident in their ideas as we conservatives were in the 1980s, they would welcome such challenges as giving them another chance to make the case for the programs the President proposes–and which they supposedly support. Shouldn’t they welcome this opportunity to defend Obama and his policies?

Instead, despite their victories last fall, they appear increasingly angry. Byron York wonders why:

These should be happy times for liberals and the Democratic party as a whole. They control the White House and both houses of Congress, while opposition Republicans are leaderless and lost. So why do some Democrats, particularly those farther to the left, appear so angry?

Just look at the tone of some of those who comment to our posts.  If they had more confidence in their ideas and Democrats’ further political success, they would likely be more gracious to their adversaries, knowing we were just crying in the wilderness.  More confident victors wouldn’t need slur their adversaries; they would know that their arguments would help sustain their success.

Instead, they’ve been sore winners.   (more…)

As President Obama returns from what some have called his second apology tour abroad, Victor Davis Hanson asks,

One wonders whether President Obama, for all the soaring rhetoric, grasps why certain nations really do hate us. Does he think a Grozny, Darfur, Rwanda, Serbia, or Tibet happen in reaction to US global sinful conduct? Does he appreciate why hot spots like Cyprus, Taiwan, or Georgia, do not boil over—or under what conditions they might? Does he really believe that in the pre-Bush era we all got along (cf. his al Arabiya interview); then Bush’s strutting, unilateralism, and preemption, presto, caused anti-Americanism.

He seems to think that it’s his predecessor’s policies rather than our adversaries’ ideologies which is their source of their animus.  If only we would change, well, then so would they.

All too many on the left seek the answer to the question, “Why Do They Hate Us?” in the object of the question rather than its subjects.

Sometimes, it seems our critics do the same sort of thing.  They attribute the bile they spew against us to something that is detestable about us, never considering that the ardor of their animus may stem from some inner “need” of their own.  Maybe that’s one reason they so readily defend the President’s rhetoric abroad.  The same means by which they find the roots of anti-American animus in America allows them them excuse their own bile.

Anti-Americanism, however, is part and parcel of the ideology of our adversaries abroad.  They need something to run against, to deflect attention from their failed policies and to exaggerate their own messianic standing, as the hero defending his people against an evil which would otherwise overwhelm them.  Or, as Hanson puts it:

Why does Hugo Chavez hate us? Is it because Bush’s ‘dead or alive’ed him or ‘with us or against us’ed him? Hardly. Chavez wants to end democracy in Venezuela for good, turn it into a Cuba-like communist dictatorship, use his oil revenues to whip up liberationist, anti-Yanqui feelings throughout South America, and end up with himself as some sort of messianic caudillo of the entire socialist continent.

Perhaps, as Max Boot offers, the President’s handshake with Chavez was just a handshake which “could actually be a smart strategic move.”  I hope he’s right.

By this explanation, the handshake was thus the least of Obama’s errors abroad.  It was his apologies which were really disturbing.  Not just because of how they weaken his nation’s standing in the comunity of nations, but because of what they reveal about his understanding of the world.

He needs understand that without America, there would still be evil in the world, indeed, there would likely be more of it. Much more.  Much, much, much more.

*UPDATE:  As I look at this title the day after writing it, I realize a better title would have been, “Does Obama Understand why Certain World Leaders Hate us.”  At least with Chavez and Ahmadinjihad, the hatred comes from from them than their people.

I’ve been a huge fan of the former VP since I first heard of him during the first Gulf War in the early ’90s.

His steady hand and unwavering professionalism over a tremendous career of public service includes serving in both Richard Nixon’s and Gerald Ford’s White Houses, the House of Representatives, leading the Department of Defense, and of course his excellent service to George W. Bush as Vice President.

Between his duties as SecDef and Vice President, he had an incredible private-sector career serving on the American Enterprise Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations (where he had previously served as director), and of course Chairman and CEO for Halliburton.

Through all of this, the draw to him was twofold: First, he was and has since been a great mind. He is a huge thinker and very methodical in his decisions and advice he’s given as a trusted confidant for three presidents (directly, not to mention his work with Ronald Reagan while Cheney was a congressman). One of the most measured and thoughtful Vice Presidents of our Nation’s history, were it not for the inexplicably unhinged detractors’ fantasies, he’d probably go down in history as the brightest man to ever hold that office. But even Cheney-haters will have to agree that he was by far the most influential and powerful Vice President of the modern era, attributable by his admirers to his wonderful mind, and by his detractors to his devious nature.

Secondly, Cheney also combined two very admirable traits into exactly what you’d want in a confidant. He was equal parts blunt and unassuming. I have no doubt that, when asked, he gave all the great men mentioned above his most honest opinion, and because they came to expect it, they trusted and appreciated it. At the same time, the former Vice-President was never one to pipe-up and just offer his opinion. He was a serene and gentle man, a vast contrast to the caricature his adversaries tried so hard (and, unfortunately on too many occasions, thanks to the media who also had no love for him, were all too able to succeed) to portray of him.

Which is why it is so difficult to see him since he left Washington continue to openly question the current president. (more…)

Of the events I organized when I was an undergraduate at Williams, one lecture stands out as genuine accomplishment.  It made a difference in campus dialogue and so helped define the quality of the college U.S. News and World Report regularly names the nation’s finest liberal arts college (the tie resolved in the older school’s favor by a football game).

Offended that angry feminist Mary Daly spoke at the college, yet refused to take questions from men, I spearheaded a group of conservative students to set up the James A. Garfield Society (named in honor of the President shot on his way to his Williams reunion).  We raised money from the Political Science Department, the college’s Lecture Committee, College Council and the Young America’s Foundation to bring Phyllis Schlafly to Williamstown.  Mrs. Schlafly agreed to take questions from male as well as female students.

The Women’s Studies program refused to support the event while a number of left-wing faculty members, one since denied tenure, threw a hissy fit, upset that this leader of the movement to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment would speak at our college.

While these faculty members couldn’t bear to hear an opposing point of view, students, including many left-of-center ones, were preparing for the lecture.  My peers checked out all her books from the library.  Some searched out her articles and public statements through the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature–how we tracked down news in the days before the Internet.

They were helped out by one distinguished professor.  Rosemarie Tong, a feminist professor of Philosophy, alerted them to articles by and about Mrs. Schlafly.  Professor Tong joined conservative students at the dinner we held before the lecture.

Liberal students prepared themselves to “do battle” with this conservative icon by familiarizing themselves with Mrs. Schlafly’s ideas.  And when she spoke to a crowd of well over 1,000 (we will never know the exact number because the hall was filled beyond capacity), they listened.  There were no cat-calls, no hissing, just a polite silence.

(more…)

Is David Axelrod on the outs with President Barack Obama? Witness a Washington Post article this afternoon that quotes the White House advisor as saying:

What’s happened is anti-Americanism isn’t cool anymore.

Really? Maybe someone should tell the president. After all, he’s the one on the Badmouth America World Tour.

- Nick (ColoradoPatriot) from HQ