Keith Burgess-Jackson

I leave you this fine evening with a column by Charles Krauthammer.

The editorial board of the New York Times wants to raise taxes. I have a better idea: Starve the beast.

Here.

What Michelle said!

Listen up, home boys (and girls). I want each of you to predict what will happen between now and November. You know that I will taunt you mercilessly if you mess up, so take it seriously. Here is my prediction:

Hillary Clinton stays in the race, despite calls for her to withdraw “for the good of the party.” She remains behind in both earned delegates and the popular vote, but Barack Obama comes increasingly to be seen as a loser in the fall, so superdelegates continue to defect to Clinton. By mid-June, she has more delegates than Obama, who sees the writing on the wall and withdraws from the race. Obama endorses Clinton, but it is widely viewed as insincere. Many people believe he endorsed her only to retain his standing in the party. There is outrage among African Americans and young people, who say that Clinton stole the nomination. MoveOn.org and other moonbat organizations announce that they cannot support Clinton in the general election and urge their supporters to stay home on election day. Many of them do. John McCain beats Clinton easily in the election. Democrats have another four years to snipe, which, truth be told, they prefer to governing.

Have at it.

This man has a rat problem. Speaking of which. . . .

To the Editor:

By repeating Barack Obama’s assertion that slavery is the nation’s “original sin,” has Roger Cohen forgotten what was done to the Native Americans?

While the enslavement of millions of Africans was certainly evil, the near obliteration of the native population through war, starvation and disease was also a racial sin of the gravest magnitude.

America has always professed its idealism, for instance in Thomas Jefferson’s phrase “all men are created equal,” but America’s sordid history of racism has always sullied that ideal.

Paul Helm
Lakeland, Fla., April 17, 2008

Note from KBJ: Native Americans fought the law, and the law won.

My beloved Detroit Tigers have gotten well at my adopted Texas Rangers’ expense. I can’t wait until my Tigers reach .500, so I can end my self-imposed moratorium on haranguing Yankee fans.

The second foundation of what I call Oakeshott‘s philosophy of modesty is a sense of piety, not in the Christian sense of being devout, but in the pagan sense of piety in which what it refers to is a respect for all those aspects of the human condition which are not of our making or choosing. Impiety is the theme of one of Oakeshott’s favorite stories, which is the story of “The Tower of Babel”—the story, that is, of how men scramble to get into heaven and loot it, without any regard for God’s wishes. In its modern form, Oakeshott thinks that impiety is expressed above all in our rejection of everything we have not made and shaped ourselves, in order to live in a world entirely of our own creation. This is the project Oakeshott thought lay behind the radical ideologies of the twentieth century. Oakeshott regards this enterprise as impious because, like Swift, he admires the bee rather than the spider: whereas the bee gathers the pollen from which its honey comes from flowers whose existence is quite independent of it, the spider spins its web from its own innards. Whether Oakeshott is right to have this preference is a hotly debated issue which I won’t go into here: I merely note that it plays an important part in sustaining his intellectual position.

(Noël O’Sullivan, “Why Read Oakeshott?” Society 39 [March/April 2002]: 71-4, at 72 [italics in original])

Thanks a lot, Carlos.

Here is our very own John Sullivan, whose only flaw (but it’s a big one) is being a Yankee fan.