Brain Fertilizer

From 21 January:

- [The Inaugural] speech, my friends, should be chiseled on a wall. It is magnificent, because magnificently true and right. If ever anything deserved the adjective Lincolnesque, this is it.

- Of course the Left would disrupt the speech. That's what it does; it has certainly done it all of my life, on college campuses and beyond. For them, freedom of speech means the freedom to shut you up. They, naturally, are never shut up.

Letters:
- "Over my life, I have attended three churches: a liberal church in a liberal denomination, a moderate church in a liberal denomination, and a conservative church in a conservative denomination. Need I answer any of the following questions? Which church gives the most to missions? Which has the most volunteers for missions and community services? As a bonus — which is the most ethnically diverse?"

- "Jay, I'm tired of the suffix '-gate' to go with every scandal. I propose another one: '-quiddick.' Don't you think it's about time?"

From 19 January:

- I quote Coretta Scott King: "If Martin's philosophy had been lived out in Iraq, we wouldn't have bin Laden." I would think about that more, but I'm dizzy.

From 18 January:

- I have heard this baloney pretty much all my life: "You conservatives don't care about people, you're not interested in the world, you just want to sit by the pool smoking cigars." This charge is so inane, I can barely get my fingers to type in response. But . . .

When I was in college, "liberals" basically cared about three groups of people: South Africans (above all), Filipinos, and Chileans. But they didn't really care about them, as I saw it; they just used those people to attack the United States. Once apartheid fell, Marcos left, and Pinochet stepped aside, who cared about those countries' citizens?

You could not get anyone — anyone — interested in the peoples behind the Iron Curtain. If you tried to do so, you were a right-wing fanatic, or "poisoning the atmosphere of détente." That was the big catchphrase of the day; I heard it constantly. Solzhenitsyn — another conservative who doesn't care about people and is not interested in the world — was vilified as a fascist, a reactionary, a warmonger.

You couldn't get liberals interested in Nicaraguans, certainly not in the Miskito Indians, who were essentially an embarrassment to them. You could not get them interested in Grenadians — not in ordinary ones, only in "leftist thugs," as Reagan aptly described them. You could not get them interested in any black Africans who were oppressed by black strongmen. A rank impossibility.

And shall we get started on Vietnam? I don't think so. Why is it that, when I was younger, I heard about the boat people, the reeducation camps, and so on only from the lips of "right-wingers"? Has anything changed? And burned into the mind of every conservative is the New York Times's headline, when the Khmer Rouge took over in Cambodia: "Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life." Nice going, guys.

What about today? I am repeatedly praised — by Cubans and Cuban Americans — for my attention to Cuba, yet I do practically nothing. The reason I am praised is that I do a little more than nothing. The same with the Chinese, who are more than a billion people, aren't they? I once received an award from an exile group — a human-rights group. In my remarks to them, I said I was embarrassed to be receiving the award, because I had done so little — an article or two about Falun Gong, some acknowledgments of Laogai (the Chinese gulag), a few squibs about someone I know, Jian-li Yang, who languishes in some Chinese dungeon.

But many liberals think that to note persecution in China is, somehow, to give aid and comfort to Joe McCarthy. Really.

I think I've still got some considering to do about China, towards which I have such mixed feelings: love the people, hate the govt, and despite many friends, relatives, and contacts there haven't seen any oppression of the govt happen on anyone who wasn't breaking laws in nearly three decades. Unjust laws? Sure. But well-known laws nonetheless. But still, there's gotta be a better way for me to respond to those who call Communist China a pack of evil, oppressive commies.

They aren't, really, in many senses, but the people don't exactly enjoy freedom, either. More like a truce with the Secret Police as long as they don't cause too much trouble.

But should we nuke the country to free the people? Should we blame the people who are keeping the truce with the govt when someone deliberately chooses to breach that truce and is punished? Much progress has been made under the truce, especially toward the Rule of Law. Let it be established first, then start the counter-revolution, or you end up with difficulties in implementing liberty-based democracy. (more on that, specifically in regards to Iraq, soon)

...but back to Impromptus, same day, continuing on with the discussion of liberal vs conservative compassion:

It's hard to get liberals interested in the Sudanese, massacred as they are — because they are not massacred by the "right" murderers — and you really can't get them interested in Arabs. They care about Palestinians to the extent that they can cast Israel as a monster, and the United States as the monster's Frankenstein (Great Satan/Little Satan). What the PA does to Palestinians is of no interest to virtually any liberal. You couldn't get liberals to care about Kuwaitis, except to mock them as rich and languorous. They left the impression that they thought Kuwaitis deserved invasion, rape, and subjugation. (Do you remember Alexander Cockburn, from December 1979? "If any people deserves rape, it's the Afghans.")

About the Afghans: There are liberals who would rather homosexuals be stoned to death than that they be freed by George W. Bush and the U.S. military. The latter is the greater insult.

As I said, I should perhaps have left this topic alone. The theme of "Conservatives don't care, they're insulated, they're incurious," blah, blah, blah, has been sounded all of my life, and it will be sounded until I die, I have no doubt. A person can't react to every offense.

But, you know? One of the reasons I migrated right is that I sensed that the Left didn't care about people, while "conservatives" — who were often genuine liberals — did. [...]

I don't wish to be naïve, or as categorical as Peter Beinart: Some of the conservatives' caring, no doubt, is opportunistic, as some of the liberals' is. But most of the best, most humane, and (frankly) most worldly people I know are political conservatives. I look back and think, Who were the ones who connected me to the lives of people around the globe? Solzhenitsyn, Pryce-Jones, Conquest, all the writers in Commentary, all the writers in National Review. In fact, Pryce-Jones, who is regularly denounced as anti-Arab, is now and then contacted by Arabs themselves, who, communicating furtively, say, "Why do you care about us, that you should write about us so honestly?"

Perhaps conservatives aren't credited with caring because they blather about it less; they are less self-congratulatory about it. Beinart, in his column, writes that President Bush "tries to see as little as possible of the countries he visits. (When Bill Clinton went to Africa, in 1998, he visited six countries in 11 days; when Bush went in 2003, he visited five countries in five days.)" So we're counting countries and days.

Maybe the lesson is that conservatives aren't so good at biting their lips and tearing up and otherwise emoting. Maybe conservatives are better at deeds than at words and emotions. But consider the millions whom Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have liberated. (I speak broadly — too broadly — but not inaccurately.) Isn't that a little better than biting your lip and tearing up? A little?

- By now, you surely know how Ted Kennedy referred to the new senator from Illinois, Barack Obama: "Osama bin . . . Osama . . . Obama." All I can say is, Thank goodness it was a prominent liberal who said this — an iconic, untouchable liberal. Can you imagine — can . . . you . . . imagine — if a right-winger had done this? The media outcry would have lasted a week, ringing with "How can you be so insensitive?" and "So, all the darker people look alike to you, huh?" and "So typical of the Right: Illinois elected a [partially] black senator, and you immediately equate him with Osama bin Laden."

And a letter from Armando Valldares that all Che Guevera fans should memorize:

Communist icons inevitably are found out. We need to look no further than the deaths of some 5,000 Polish officers, murdered by Communist firing squads in the Katyn Forest. The Kremlin laid the blame for this act on the Nazis, and succeeded in convincing nearly the entire world.

When those of us who knew better voiced the truth, no one listened. We, and the 5,000 murdered, would have to wait until the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the Kremlin finally admitted blame for the atrocity.

It is the same with Che Guevara. I knew Che Guevara. He was an assassin, unscrupulous to the core. Many died at his hands, and many more died on his orders. His legend is pure fiction, masterfully crafted by his fellow Communists and the nostalgic Left. Add to their numbers every misguided liberal, a gullible multitude resembling the deluded masses who believed the cowardly lies of the Communists about the Katyn massacre.

[I interject to say that, when I was in college and graduate school, to finger the Soviets for Katyn was to start a furor.]

Che adulators and fans miss the logical conclusion. Had the object of their adoration and his ideology triumphed, their victory would have unleashed the Communist system worldwide, resulting in the bitterest fruits: total loss of personal freedom, execution by firing squad for dissent, concentration camps, an end to religious expression, and to a free press. Stalin's Russia replicated across a global stage.

That is the legacy Che Guevara intended for us — including for those who adulate him.

The cult of defending dictators and their henchmen is a repeating, albeit illogical, phenomenon. Stalin and Hitler, Pinochet, Castro, and Hussein ruthlessly purged millions of their compatriots and enslaved millions more. They heaped misery and horror on their own people, and yet their defenders vie with impunity against the truth. So it is with Che — a tired old tale.