The other day I posted something on the new rackets popping up from Conservative Inc to re-brand conservatism. My view is that Conservative Inc and the Republican Party are struggling to come to terms with the neo-con years, particularly the Bush years. The “new” conservatism was supposed to do all the things Reagan failed to do by appealing to a broad audience on liberal terms. Instead, it turned the GOP into the Democratic Part circa 1975 and ripped the lungs out of the conservative movement. The latter was the result of purging the Old Right, for the most part.

Anyway, The American Conservative is featuring a long essay from Brain Patrick Mitchell. His “new” contribution to the hyphen party is ethical-conservatism. It actually starts out on an interesting footing.

The modern age is an age of anarchy, an era of habitual rebellion against old ways and existing order in the name of liberty, equality, enlightenment, and progress. It began as a rebellion against religious hierarchy, burgeoned into a rebellion against political monarchy, and finally boiled over in a rebellion against social patriarchy, leaving in its wake a new civilization endlessly at war with civilization itself.

Raised to rebel, the modern, anarchistic, progressive personality is always impatient with the world as it is and ever insistent that it change to suit him. Believing himself innocent, he blames others for the suffering he sees, indicting Society, Civilization, the Church, the State, the Establishment, the System, the Corporations, or the Man for crimes against the People and the Planet. Consistent with the age’s Luciferian culture of grievance justifying rebellion, the progressive lives passionately and impulsively as the hero of his own personal revolution, in which anything that stands in his way—that limits his autonomy, inhibits his self-expression, frustrates his ambitions, convicts his conscience, offends his sensibilities, or denies him satisfaction—can be condemned as unfair, unjust, intolerant, and therefore intolerable.

That’s some fine writing and a rare attempt to take an honest look at the Rousseauist cult running America since WW2. I don’t agree with his analysis, but I don’t think he is too far from the truth. It is rare to see an attempt to understand the Left on its own terms so that’s encouraging, even if it misses the mark.

This is the spirit riling the two competing passions of our age, libertine individualism and envious egalitarianism. Both deny the moral relevance of the objective other to the subjective self. Both insist on the self as the point of origin and reference for all definitions of goodness, truth, and justice, in effect replacing the First Person of the Holy Trinity with the selfish first person—the singular “I” in the case of individualism, the plural “we” in the case of egalitarianism.

This is where this type of analysis falls down the stairs. The writer sets up a false dichotomy and then uses it as a launching pad for his own opinions that he thinks are unique and different from whatever else is kicking around today. It has always struck me as a get out of jail free card. If you can dismiss current reality, you’re free to indulge in whatever you like. Libertarians tend to do this by pretending Left and Right are two sides of the same coin.

That said, I’m all in favor of rejecting the left-right model of describing political thought. That is nothing more than a tarted up version of the Left’s us-versus-them world view. It is how you end up with Hitler on the Right, alongside Burke and Reagan. Somehow we are to believe that the polar opposites are Hitler on one end and Marx on the other. The truth is that all of these sects are the sons and daughters of the marriage of Rousseau and Hobbes.

The one thing I think he needs to explore more deeply is the Left’s impulse to destroy. He gets into it a little, but can’t seem to bring himself to accept that it is destruction for its own sake. The old 1960′s rallying cry of “burn, baby burn!” is instructive. There are no rallying cries from the Left that bring images of anything other than destruction. Whatever Utopian fantasies are at the start of the movement, the end is always about pulling the roof down.

It’s what makes all of these attempt to slap a new coat of paint on the Baby Boomer Conservatism pointless. White Americans are throwing in the towel on their race and culture. People who stop having children are saying it is better to have never been born than to carry on the traditions of their age. You’re not turning the tide with ten point plans and clever tax reform proposals. At least this brand of hyphen philosophy gets a little closer to the truth.

Way back in the olden thymes I lived near a Hari Kirsihna center. Despite their reputation for extreme weirdness, they were excellent neighbors. You only saw members when they were headed out to annoy people in a public place. That is one of their primary methods of spreading their faith. They make a big fuss in a public area.

Otherwise, they kept to themselves and avoided all contact with neighbors. A key characteristic of cults is the adherent’s “us” versus “them” view of the world. Everyone and everything is either inside or outside the group. In the case of groups like the Krishnas, that results in complete isolation from outsiders.

We tend to think of cults as having a charismatic leader with a messiah complex. That leader has some grand vision of the future. Maybe it involves space aliens or God. Maybe he thinks he is God. Of course, the cult of popular imagination always follows the same arc. The leader acquires some followers and it all seems innocent and wonderful. The thing grows as the leader becomes increasingly deranged. At some point he either leads them into mass suicide or into some crazy act that brings the wrath of society down upon them.

As we see with the Krishnas and Scientology, obliteration is not the outcome in all cases or even most cases. The guy who started the Hari Krishnas has been dead for years and his movement keeps going. Scientology thrived after the death of L. Ron Hubbard. As far as I know, neither is plotting mass suicide or trying to launch a revolution.

The famous UFO cult, The Seekers, fell apart, reformed a few times until Dorothy Martin died. The point being that cults and religious movements don’t always end in obliteration. In fact, most either stabilize into a viable ongoing concern or they fall apart and the followers find a new movement. Those that survive their founders tend to get good at drawing bright lines between themselves and everyone else.

I was reminded of all that when I saw this posted on MR the other day. On a regular basis, a gaggle of social scientists release a study telling us why liberals are good and conservatives are bad. Sometimes it is just a focus on why conservatives are bad and other times it is a study on some essential goodness of liberals.

The gold standard for this, oddly enough, led to the Goldwater Rule. In 1964 a bunch of liberal psychiatrist, during the 1964 presidential campaign, declared that Barry Goldwater was clinically insane. After all, only a crazy person would deny the essential goodness of the Progressive movement. Some version of this pops up every few years, masked as social science.

An obsession with the moral differences between “us” and “them” is a hallmark of mass movements. It is fair to say they are fanatical about it. Oddly and maybe even counter intuitively, members of mass movements are not very good at understanding the differences between the array of groups not in their group.

A good example is the Amish. As far as they’re concerned, everyone else is English. They could no more tell a Catholic from a Jew and they don’t care. Muslims see nothing but infidels outside the world of Islam. Scientology, from what I understand, has similar labels for people outside their faith. Jews call non-Jews gentiles and, oddly, Mormons call non-Mormons gentiles too.

Anyway, these are the things that come to mind when I see something like this.

Progressives are by any reasonable definition, a political cult. Like Islam, it is aggressive and intolerant, particularly of Christianity. Not unreasonably, it sees Christianity as its chief threat. Not that Christians are automatically a bunch of freedom loving Burkeans. The Pope, after all, is a Marxist. That does not matter to the Left. They have a long hatred for Christians.

The mandates in ObamaCare were not put in for health reasons or cost reasons. Their intent was to make life miserable for those Christians who oppose contraception and abortion. That’s why progressives have gone berserk over the Hobby lobby case. If you imagine yourself in a life and death struggle with your chief rival, even tiny set backs seem like the end of the world.

I’ll wrap this rambling post up with a short story about an Iranian I once knew. This was back in the Iran – Iraq War days. He had been drafted into the Ayatollah’s army and sent to fight the Iraqis. A commander called for volunteers to clear a minefield. Immediately a bunch of young fanatics volunteered. They were sent out into the minefield, finding the mines the old fashioned way. Behind them the infantry, followed the now clear path through the field.

Shortly thereafter my Iranian friend went AWOL, got a fake student Visa and found his way to Belgium. He hooked up with other Iranian ex-pats, mostly Christians and Jews. They helped him get his paperwork in order. Because of the chaos in Iran at the time, his parents were able to claim he was missing in action so they could avoid trouble from the fanatics.

That’s life in a land where a cult takes over.

America’s ruling elite is divided into two camps when it comes to foreign policy. One side, the neo-cons, sees the world as a collection of American provinces. Maybe administrative districts is a better term. They really thought they could turn Iraq into a fully functioning representative democracy.Not only that, they thought it could be a model for the rest of the Arab world district.

The other camp is composed of people who think the other camp is dangerously wrong, but have no earthly idea why and they have no sensible alternative to offer. It is why Obama pulled the plug on the Bush deal in Iraq and went tromping off to Afghanistan. He and his flunkies had no idea what they were trying to accomplish. They just knew the old Bush hands hated it so that was enough.

The rest of the world is not willing to wait around for America’s elites to figure out what their doing. Russia, in particular, is taking advantage of the Obama administration’s petrified paralysis. Last year they made Obama look foolish by outflanking him in Syria. Putin followed that up with a stunning success in Ukraine. Now they are taking advantage of Washington’s bungling to return Iraq as an ally in the Persian Gulf.

The first delivery of Russian Sukhoi fighter jets arrived in Iraq on Saturday, the country’s Defense Ministry said. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is hoping the jets will make a key difference in the fight against ISIS.

The Iraqi Ministry of Defense on Sunday confirmed receiving five Su-25 fighter jets in accordance with the deal with Moscow. The jets were delivered by a Russian An-124 transport plane in a dismantled state, and are expected to be set up and become operational within 3-4 days.

Until Bush the Lesser dethroned Saddam, Iraq was a Russian client state. Their military was equipped by the Russians and trained in Russian tactics. It is why they were good at running a secret police, but clownishly awful at large set piece combat. The Russians were never good at this type of warfare, which is why the Germans drove them to the gates of Moscow.

Now, the Russians have Syria, Iran and Iraq on board and that means they can build their pipelines without too much interference from the West. Running gas from the Persian Gulf through Iran to the Caspian Sea was never ideal and would allow the GCC-Saudi deal to compete on economic grounds. Running a pipeline over Iraq into Syria puts them in the Mediterranean. The only thing they must now do is get rid of ISIL.

The other bonus for Russia is they get to work on their modernization efforts. The Russians have been revamping their military and their tactics to face the threats of this century. They know they will not be fighting a tank war in Europe. Instead they will be fighting insurgents from their southeast. They saw how the Americans adapted and they are doing the same. Iraq is good practice.

“The Sukhoi Su-25 is an air-ground support and anti-terrorism mission aircraft. In these difficult times, we are in great need of such aircraft. With God’s help, we will be able to deploy them to support our ground forces on a mission against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant militants within the next 3-4 days,” Iraqi Army Lieutenant General Anwar Hamad Amen Ahmed told RT’s Ruptly news agency at an airport receiving the jets.

The modern battlefield is four dimensional. Air assets attack ground elements with the help of specialized ground forces. That means choppers and jet aircraft that can be coordinated with those ground forces to bring timely and potent firepower on small targets. It takes practice to hone these skills and this provides the Russians with a chance to gets some saddle time.

There’s also the fact the Russians will increasingly rely on mercenaries. Demographics are reducing the number of Russian males available for military service. The Russian military is close to being majority Muslim at this point. The solution to this is to create a military with a Russian elite and a Muslim militia. I doubt that works, but Iraq provides a training ground for how they intend to adjust to the demographic realities they face.

I’ve been arguing for a while now that Fake Indian will run and win the Democrat nomination in 2016. I’m not even sure Cankles runs again. She is old, fat and sick. Democrats generally hate old people, which is why they are always dreaming up ways to kill them. The only way they back Cankles is if they think the Stupid Party candidate is going to win. Given the state of the GOP, they will not be nominating a sure thing in 2016. Instead it will be some establishment man who does not scare the horses.

Anyway, it looks like Jonah Goldberg has joined my side on this one.

In 2007, Democrats were delirious with rage about the Iraq war. Hillary Clinton, the “inevitable” presidential front-runner, had voted for the war and refused to apologize for it. Other leading candidates, including Joe Biden, John Edwards, and Chris Dodd, voted for it too. This left a huge opening for a credible antiwar candidate. Barack Obama, inexperienced and underqualified, nonetheless jumped into the vacuum. The rest, as they say, is history.

Today, the issue that obsesses the base of the Democratic party is income inequality. I think that’s foolish. The underlying causes of inequality — miserable economic growth, stagnating wages, poverty, etc. — are vastly more worthy challenges. Though, in fairness, many people actually have those problems in mind when they talk about inequality.

There’s another, more important reason. In the 1990′s, the Left radicalized and, like Africanized honey bees, became very aggressive. They were convinced Clinton was too timid and let the Gingrich led extreme right-wing extremists push him around. Loyalty to the cult kept them from revolting against the Clintons, but the resentment turned into rage by 2000. Just as fundamentalist Muslims went violently crazy after the end of the Cold War, the American Left went bonkers when the Clintons left town.

In 2008, the most anti-Bush candidate was Obama. In 2016, the Left will embrace the most aggressively liberal candidate in the field. The Left largely feels Obama has not been aggressive enough, particularly with the Wall Street crowd. That’s what makes Fake Indian’s faux populism so appealing.

There’s another component to the inequality obsession: populism. People increasingly feel that economic and political elites are enriching themselves, not by making great products or selling valuable services, but by cutting backroom deals and selling influence. This rage is remarkably bipartisan. It is the one theme that loosely unites tea partiers and Wall Street occupiers alike.

Goldberg, like most of the Conventional Right, instinctively rejects anything that smacks of populism. That’s why they tend to get it wrong as we see here. Fake Indian’s faux populism is the sort you see in the faculty lounge or the coffee shop at Whole Foods. It’s overly credentialed bobos bitching about the rich guys who sign their paycheck. They may have it good, but someone with fewer diplomas has it better and that’s just unfair.

It’s why Fake Indian sounds so weird to working class types. If you are a part-time teacher at your kid’s Montessori school, hearing a rich white woman complain about inequality sounds inspiring.  If you’re working two jobs so your kid can go to the local state college one day, hearing an old rich woman talk like that sounds phony. But, the Democrat party is the party of Montessori school parents, not plumbers with two jobs.

Obscure economics professor David Brat toppled House majority leader Eric Cantor in a Virginia primary largely by tapping into that populism, particularly on such issues as immigration and Wall Street bailouts.

Senator Warren owes her left-wing hero status to the Democratic version of this kind of populism. She’s been talking for years about how the well-connected “rig the system” for their own benefit. Now, I find many of Warren’s proposed solutions — more regulation, more taxes, more government, etc. — abhorrent. But, believe it or not, I am not a Democratic-primary voter. Those who are love what Warren is selling.

I’ve been pointing this out for years. It used to be that the parties were easy to define. The Democrats were mostly the party of the working class. The Republicans were the party of the shop owner. Both parties tried to fashion a majority around policy and both parties could compete in all regions of the country, based on a message aimed at the middle-class voter.

That’s not the case today nor has it been for a long time. Here’s a quote from a 15-year old Sam Francis colums:

Today, the main political line of division in the United States is not between the regions of North and South (insofar as such regions can still be said to exist) but between elite and nonelite. As I have tried to make plain … for the last 15 years, the elite, based in Washington, New York, and a few large metropolises, allies with the underclass against Middle Americans, who pay the taxes, do the work, fight the wars, suffer the crime, and endure their own political and cultura1 dispossession at the hands of the elite and its underclass vanguard.

Fake Indian’s faux populism is an attempt to tap into this, but she is a product of the managerial class and her message is aimed at members of that class. Clinton crying poor mouth is a similar attempt. Brat is different and comparing his appeal to that of Fake Indian is a category error by Goldberg. Brat is aiming at the Middle American Radical.

The question is whether any of it really matters at this point. Fake Indian is no populist. She is an old rich broad willing to lie for money. While I think her shtick will work for her in 2016, nothing much will change in the Democrat party. It is and will remain the party of SWPL-ville. The GOP is just a collection of rejects with no where else to go. Maybe if enough guys like Brat win election, the MAR’s will have a party again.

In the mean time, I welcome Jonah Goldberg to the Fake Indian Express.

I read a lot of econ stuff, mostly for entrainment purposes. That habit started back in the go-g0 90′s when the new economy was belching forth one new sot-com firm after another. Most of these new companies made nothing, fixed nothing and provided no service anyone would want. The dot-com boom was, in many respects, a big waste of time and money. But, I got a lot of yucks listening to lectures about how things were different.

After the crash and the dust settled, we were left with a parasite economy. By that I mean the only people making money were doing so by leeching off of someone doing real work. Google is a case in point. A search engine is not much use without the infrastructure of the Internet and the billions of content providers. Google provides nothing, other than a convenient way to find some of the sites. Mostly what they do is operate as a protection racket. If you want to be found you have to play ball with Google and that costs money.

It used to be that if you built a better mouse trap, the world would beat a path to your door. Today, building a better mouse trap means a whole bunch of freeloaders and highwaymen litter that path to your door, robbing all those folks trying get your better mousetrap. Television is a good example of this. It used to come over the air free. Now, you pay the cable guy and then you pay the tax man for the abatements the cable company needs. You have to rent a special box and maybe sign up for other services like telephone and Internet to get television.

Maybe it has always been thus and I’m just catching on now that I’m in my dotage. Anyway, that’s what came to mind with the news the court was busting up Aereo. Conceptually, I love the idea of local channels over the Internet. I’ve moved around a lot and getting the home town news, for example, would be worth a  few bucks a month. Getting the local football games or hockey games, even though you’re not local, would be great. The technology to do it is in place and mature, but the local broadcasters don’t do it. That’s where Aereo thought they could make some money.

That’s also where the problem starts. They don’t own the Interwebs and they don’t own the content. They were borrowing it and renting it out to their customers without getting permission from the owner. That’s generally called theft, but in the new new new economy, it is called “disruptive.” The court called it illegal and our nine robbed masters are the final say in the matter.

That may or may not be the right answer, but there’s no doubt that Aereo is (was) a parasite company. But, they were trying to make money from other parasite companies. The local broadcasters get special rights not available to everyone. They strike deals with the cable companies who have struck special deals with state and local government. Between you and the guy making your very sitcom is a long line of rentiers. I spend more in a month on telecom than my father spent in his lifetime.

Now, that’s not to say no one is doing real work. It’s just that the big money seems to be in coming up with a way to transfer your cost of doing business onto others and charging rents for access to the work of others. Facebook is a great example. They don’t pay a dime to the ISP’s and telcos. You pay for the mobile access and you pay for the Internet. They harvest your personal data and sell it to others. Their big contribution is to provide a crude interface for you to see pictures of the grandkids.

It’s all perfectly legal and maybe even moral. I don’t know. I do know you can’t have an economy based on it. Someone has to be making stuff and fixing stuff. Someone has to actually be making better mousetraps. Instead we have our best minds working on new ways to charge you for television.

The Interwebs brings word that LeeBong has opted out his contract with the Miami Heat. This means LeeBong will spend the height of the summer getting wined and dined by rich Jewish guys promising him the world. ESPN will then have a special broadcast to announce where LeeBong will play next year.

James indicated that he welcomed the opportunity to become a free agent and have the same level of flexibility he was afforded in 2010, when he signed with Miami after spending his first seven years in Cleveland.

“Being able to have flexibility as a professional, anyone, that’s what we all would like,” James said last week. “That’s in any sport, for a football player, a baseball player, a basketball player, to have flexibility and be able to control your future or your present. I have a position to be able to do that. … There’s a lot of times that you’re not in control of your future as a professional.”

In his four seasons in Miami, the Heat have gone to the NBA Finals four times, winning two championships. James could join Shaquille O’Neal as the only players in league history to lead the NBA Finals in total points scored and then play for a different team to start the following season, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. O’Neal played for the 2003-04 Los Angeles Lakers, who lost to the Detroit Pistons in the NBA Finals, and was traded to the Heat in the offseason.

If James departs, he would be leaving a historic opportunity on the table. Only one team in NBA history has appeared in at least five consecutive NBA Finals, the Boston Celtics, who reached 10 straight from 1957 to 1966.

With James and Carmelo Anthony officially opting out of their contracts, multiple teams — including the Cleveland Cavaliers, Atlanta Hawks and Lakers — have begun the process of exploring roster moves that would create sufficient salary-cap space to sign 2014′s marquee free agents in tandem, sources close to the situation told ESPN.com.

I’ve long contended that the NBA is the worst run sports league on earth. In every other sport, good owners willing to pay competent managers can build solid, profitable franchises. In the NBA, you either hit the “lottery” and get a great young player or you get picked as the next stop on the traveling caravan of stars. Why in the world would anyone want to own an NBA team under those conditions? I guess the asset appreciation is enough.

That said, LeeBong is a good star for the millenials. Their’s is a transactional existence. Like LeeBong, the past has no grip on the present for them. Loyalty to the hometown in the case of Cleveland or loyalty to the men who put together the Miami deal means nothing to LeeBong. All that matters is what he can get next because, after all, all that matters to LeeBong is LeeBong. That’s a quality you see with the millenials. They are so self-absorbed they barely notice there are other human beings around them.

If LeeBong was just chasing the money, it would be understandable. These guys have a short time to make millions. Most of them are morons who blow their money on flunkies and baby-mommas so getting as much as they can makes sense. It is harder to blow through $100 million than $80 million. But, that’s not what it’s about with guys like LeeBong. He’s just a megalomaniac seeking the next pat on the head.

Imagine a generation of LeeBongs with absolutely no loyalty to anything, rushing about looking for the next pat on the head. Think of that when you hear how the millenials want “self-actualizing careers” rather than just making money. It’s what the Clinton piglet meant when she oinked out this nonsense the other day. Most people think piglet is lying and Leebong is really just chasing money, just a different way. Maybe. They certainly seem to believe their bullshit.

I don’t know know, but at least I have the Summer of LeeBong to find out.

Anyone voting for Republicans thinking they are significantly different than the Liberal Democrats is deluded. The Evil Party hates you and wants you dead. The Stupid Party wants to help them do it.

Great nouns need no adjectives and good philosophies need no hyphens. In the former case, the word itself conjures all the imagery needed to convey meaning. That’s not to say adjectives are useless. Quite the contrary. The point here is that nouns like lion or lunatic easily stand on their own. Lesser nouns need helpers to get their meaning across.

In the latter case, the hyphen tells you that the old cause is no longer working and this new thing is an attempt to replace it. Neo-Conservatism, for example, was a cosmopolitan revolt against the traditional bourgeois conservatism of the previous era. More precisely and practically, it was an attempt to fuse the worldly liberalism of the first half of the 20^th century with the traditional, American social conservatism of the second half of the 20^th century.

It was a complete failure.

I’ve thought for a long time now that the Left will have a free hand until the Right comes to terms with the Bush years. A similar dynamic was in place in the 1970′s after Nixon, but the emerging conservative movement was ready to take the stage, even before Nixon imploded. The overthrow of Nixon was the Old Left’s last gasp, aided by the young Turks from the New Left. In a way, they did Conservatives a favor by discrediting the accommodationalist wing of the GOP for a generation.

I think there are a lot of parallels between Bush the Lesser and Nixon. I’m not talking about character or their conduct in office. I strictly mean as far as their impact on the political landscape. Nixon was an inflexion point for the political class. Both parties were different after Watergate and the nation was different. In the Bush years the Left radicalized and seized control of the Democratic party, making it an ideological party. Now, it is the GOP’s turn to change itself.

That’s the problem. After Nixon, it was easy for the Conservative Movement to sweep in and take over the GOP. Nixon resigned in disgrace and that wing of the GOP was in no position to challenge the highly popular Reagan and his sizable coalition. Bush served out both terms and many on the Right still defend the guy. What’s going on now is a fraternal battle between groups claiming to be authentic “conservatives”  and the heirs to Reagan.

Libertarians have been let out of their box and represent one strain of the reformist/reconciliation effort. They have been allowed to mix with the main stream Right lately, only because they keep it interesting. Of course, Rand Paul is carrying the banner of that branch of libertarians that supported his old man. How much influence they have is debatable. it still looks like a fringe groups of weirdos to most people.

The newest entrants are from within the Establishment Right. Ramesh Ponnuru is pushing something called Reform Conservatism. His old lady is drawing a paycheck from it so you can guess where that is heading. They have a book out which is mostly a bunch of policy proposals that have been kicking around for years. These guys are the folks who learned nothing from the Bush years, but think they can form a new coalition to challenge the Left.

Then we have Post-Modern Conservatism, which seems a bit muddle to me. I get the sense the adherents spent some time reading Mencius Moldbug. It has that vibe.

Postmodern conservatism appeals neither to the foundations of modern rationalism (a technological view of nature) nor to those of classical rationalism (the autonomy and superiority of the pure philosophic life). So in this sense it is skeptical of foundationalisms, which justifies the somewhat playful and retro name “postmodern.” At the same time, it recognizes the responsibility of reason and so cannot concede the adequacy of appeals to History, including Tradition. In this sense postmodern conservatism is neither Absolutist (dogmatic) nor relativist-historicist (skeptical); let us say it has a certain confidence in reason, or, in particular, in politics as reasoning together, but it does not claim to appeal beyond such reasoning to some finished system of reason, either modern or classical.

It is too soon to tell, but they too seem to struggle with the elephant in the room.

Starting fresh always sounds good, but you cannot escape the past. In this case, anyone not in the Cult of Modern Liberalism needs to reconcile themselves with that version of neo-con rule, particularly the Bush years. The period from 1994 to 2008, with a heavy emphasis on the Bush years was, allegedly, the time when the people in charge subscribed to all the main themes of the modern Right. The result was a disaster.

If you think that sounds harsh, take a look around at the post-Bush world. Foreign policy is a train wreck. Relations with the world are at a nadir. The Right’s claim to fiscal prudence was forfeited with the Bush spending spree. Any claims to good stewardship were also forfeited when the Bush clan sold out to Wall Street. Calling what goes on in the financial class “capitalism” or “entrepreneurship” is an affront to traditional American sensibilities. Before Bush, no one wanted to be called a liberal. After Bush, no one wanted to be called a conservative.

The Rousseauist cults are spent, but there’s nothing ready to replace them. American Progressivism is a collection of nonsense fads, bolted onto tribalism. It is the faith of one group of whites forever at war with the other group of whites. Despite its Utopian posing, it has no end and no purpose. In that regard, it is purely reactionary. Intellectually it has been bankrupt for so long no one even remembers the intellectual history of the American Left.

For an alternative to form from the wreckage of the American Right, they first must come to terms with the Bush years. I think we’re seeing that in dribs and drabs. The pending disintegration of Iraq and the general failure of the War on Terror has forced some tough discussion on members of the Right. The growth of the police state is giving libertarians room to land some punches on the Bush legacy.

As far as practical politics, the GOP itself will have to change and take on their past sins. Maybe the sacking of Eric Cantor is part of that process. You can’t be a political party if your most loyal voters want to hang your leaders. I’m less optimistic on that front simply because the people in charge are so uncommonly stupid. Replacing Cantor with an open borders fanatic says the GOP learned nothing and remains bought and paid for by financial interests.

Regardless, coming to terms with the great neo-con experiment may be upon us.

Long ago I was in a business that employed a lot of entry level labor. The pay was pretty good, given the requirements, but it was hard to get good help. White guys wanted indoor work and black guys rarely applied for any position. That means we mostly hired Spanish guys, primarily Puerto Ricans. Even so, the turnover was terrible. A big reason for it was the state family services lunatics. I forget the exact name of the division, but they were in charge of collecting alimony and child support, the latter being most of their work.

The department was all women, angry spiteful women. I’d hire a guy and within a month a letter from the state would arrive telling me to seize his paycheck. They would take most of his pay, based on some formula I never understood. There was no negotiating with them. I’d explain that the guy was not going to work for no pay so they would get nothing unless they relented, but they never relented. It was obviously not about the money for these women. It was spite.

As you get older, you learn that women often go crazy in their middle years, morphing into womyn. That’s probably the case with this batshit crazy judge in Michigan.

A U.S. Navy sailor from Washington State is currently serving on a submarine thousands of miles away in the Pacific Ocean, but a judge has ordered him into an impossible custody scenario: Appear in a Michigan courtroom Monday or risk losing custody of his 6-year-old daughter.

Navy submariner Matthew Hindes was given permanent custody of his daughter Kaylee in 2010, after she was reportedly removed from the home of his ex-wife, Angela, by child protective services. But now a judge has ordered him to appear in court Monday, or risk losing his daughter to his ex-wife in addition to a bench warrant being issued for his arrest, ABC News reports.

Hindes’ lawyers argue he should be protected by the Service Members Civil Relief Act, which states courts in custody cases may “grant a stay of proceedings for a minimum period of 90 days to defendants serving their country.”

But the Michigan judge hearing the case, circuit court judge Margaret Noe, disagrees, stating: “If the child is not in the care and custody of the father, the child should be in the care and custody of the mother.”

The judge reiterated that regardless of Hindes’ assignment under the Pacific Ocean, he will appear in court or face contempt of court.

Judge Noe denied the motion for a stay under the Service Members Relief Act, ruling that he could have arranged for his wife to bring the child to her mother, saying, “At this point, I don’t think I have any alternative but to enter a bench warrant for his arrest,” Noe said.

When you have a lot of laws, you’re going to need a lot of judges. When you have a lot of judges, you end up with a lot of lunatics on the bench. This womyn strikes me as a bitter man-hater, so consumed with her hatred she tramples the laws she is sworn to uphold. Without a systemic way to filter out lunatics, cranks and the deranged, these judges remain in place for years after it is obvious they should be removed.

I no longer call myself a conservative. I’m not a liberal or progressive. I tend to think that’s the club for crazy people and kids. When you’re young you fall for all that nonsense about equality and justice. As you get older, you figure out all men are not equal, not by a long shot. When “you see fat man standing beside a thin one,” you stop thinking anything of it.

You also learn that justice is just the winner’s name for vengeance. Sure, the courts can put the criminals in jail, but that’s as far as you want to see justice go. Only madmen and maniacs think they can right the wrongs of the world. That’s why so many men have been killed in the name of justice.

If you have not figured that out by the time you reach adulthood, you’re probably a nut.

That said, the guys calling themselves conservative are not my cup of tea either. This is why.

The electoral upset of Eric Cantor last week — partially blamed on his squishiness about immigration, along with stories of immigrant children streaming across the US-Mexican border — have seriously dimmed the prospects of legislating immigration reform anytime soon.

That’s a shame, because normalizing the status of our millions of illegal immigrants, while clearly benefiting them, is also essential to the economic and social welfare of the country as a whole.

The writer claims to be a conservative. He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.You could be forgiven for thinking that someone with the title “senior fellow” could get basic facts correct and not lie to the reader in the first two sentences of his essay.

Cantor lost because he favored amnesty and open borders. That’s not a fact in dispute by people who pay attention to these things. Calling amnesty “normalizing the status of our millions of illegal immigrants” is intended to deceive. My bet is this guy is lying to himself first, but he most certainly is trying to deceive the reader. This is a conservative?

Let’s start with what is not going to happen — no matter who is the House majority leader. Most illegal immigrants will not be leaving the country, either voluntarily through “self-deportation” as suggested by Mitt Romney, or involuntarily through actual deportation, notwithstanding the current administration’s aggressive efforts in this direction.

So, we have only two options in dealing with these 11 million American residents: We can keep them in their current marginal status with all the negative effects that entails for them and their communities or acknowledge their ongoing presence among us and legalize it.

I’m going to go ahead and say that Peter Salins is an unbalanced fanatic. Unless he has been in a coma for the last decade, waking up only to pen this column, he most certainly has heard the many other suggestions to deal with the invasion from the south. We have lots of options, but open borders fanatics like Peter Salins are incapable of hearing them. That’s the nature of fanatics. They see only that which feeds their fanaticism.

Both they and the country will be much better off if we pursue the latter course.

For the opponents of immigration reform, there appear to be three major concerns. Illegal immigrants: 1) broke the law, and thus shouldn’t be rewarded with “amnesty”; 2) are harming the American economy by displacing American workers and burdening American taxpayers; and 3) are a threat to American culture and values.

I’m getting a whiff of the soulless materialism that is common with libertarians. The reason for that is there are two other reasons why Americans would like to pull the plug on immigration. One is we simply don’t want a bunch of foreigners in our towns. As citizens, that is our right. The other is men like Salins made these same arguments in the 1960′s and the 1980′s. In both cases, they were all wrong. Prudent people will wisely suspect that the third time is not the charm.

You can read his arguments. They have been made a million times by better men than this stiff. He concludes with this bit:

If congressional politicians in both parties can craft a tough and realistic “grand bargain” on these terms, they would be unleashing a human capital windfall not only for the affected immigrants but for all of American society.

Well, if we can conjure leprechauns riding unicorns with gold bars flying out of their arse, we can solve all of our problems! My goodness. How can you make it to old age and still have such silly nonsense in your head?