I Have No Words

Cathy Siepp is losing her battle with lung cancer. Please think about her and her daughter Maia.

Default Assumption

Michael Barone examines the "blame America first" crowd and how they got that way. His conclusion is probably familiar to all conservatives or those who lean somewhat to the right: institutional radicals in academia are the primary carriers of the disease (as it were).

"They always blame America first." That was Jeane Kirkpatrick, describing the "San Francisco Democrats" in 1984. But it could be said about a lot of Americans, especially highly educated Americans, today.

In their assessment of what is going on in the world, they seem to start off with a default assumption that we are in the wrong. The "we" can take different forms: the United States government, the vast mass of middle-class Americans, white people, affluent people, churchgoing people or the advanced English-speaking countries. Such people are seen as privileged and selfish, greedy and bigoted, rash and violent. If something bad happens, the default assumption is that it's their fault. They always blame America — or the parts of America they don't like — first.

Where does this default assumption come from? And why is it so prevalent among our affluent educated class (which, after all, would seem to overlap considerably with the people being complained about?). It comes, I think, from our schools and, especially, from our colleges and universities. The first are staffed by liberals long accustomed to see America as full of problems needing solving; the latter have been packed full of the people cultural critic Roger Kimball calls "tenured radicals," people who see this country and its people as the source of all evil in the world.

It comes down to a fundamentally flawed take on history and America's place in it. Barone is not arguing that the US is perfect. But for all its flaws, the US has done far more good in the world than the blame America crowd will ever admit. Barone calls this "America = bad" a default assumption that far too many people have programmed into them in schools. And that is sad.

If The Shill Fits

James Martin, writing in the Charlotte Observer, takes Joseph Kennedy II to the woodshed today for Kennedy's acting as a shill for (T)Hugo Chavez. Touting the beneficence of a tyrannical thug who is turning Venezuela into a police state is not something to be proud of.

Former Massachusetts Rep. Joseph Kennedy II has been playing a strange game of political footsie with the virulently anti-American Venezuelan caudillo Hugo Chavez, who is in the final stages of turning a once-flourishing democracy into a South American replica of Fidel Castro's Cuba.

He is willing to turn a blind eye to the repression of 26 million Venezuelans because Chavez ordered state-owned Citgo to donate millions of gallons of discounted heating oil to Kennedy's non-profit Citizen Energy Corp. for distribution to low-income households.

Kennedy has been featured in Citgo TV ads running in 16 major markets touting the heating oil program as an example of a socially conscious corporation helping the downtrodden.

The ads show grateful elderly Americans bemoaning their inability to buy heating oil at "affordable" prices. Kennedy then steps forward as a shining knight of altruism saying: "I'm Joe Kennedy. Help is on the way …heating oil at 40 percent off from our friends in Venezuela and Citgo."

As the head of a national senior citizen's organization, I have testified before Congress on the need to increase energy funding to help low-income senior citizens stay warm in the winter. Yet aiding and abetting a thug who hates America ought to be well beyond the pale.

Kennedy's timing is less than impeccable. He ought to know that Chavez already has moved to nationalize most of Venezuela's industries and is brow-beating their owners to accept pennies-on-the-dollar compensation.

Kennedy calls Chavez a "true friend of America and social justice". The lights are going out in Venezuela and Kennedy sings the praises of the man who is killing that nation. That's pretty shameful. Not exactly what America is supposed to stand for, either.

Turnabout

I've been laughing - a lot - at the sudden scrutiny that has been turned on Al "Gorezilla" Gore and his phony, hypocritical message. The mainstream media, as John Fund points out today, has turned on the former Vice President and current shrill alarmist. They are really putting the screws to Gorezilla, too. And people are starting to notice.

The media are finally catching up with Al Gore. Criticism of his anti-global-warming franchise and his personal environmental record has gone beyond ankle-biting bloggers. It's now coming from the New York Times and the Nashville Tennessean, his hometown paper that put his birth, as a senator's son, on its front page back in 1948, and where a young Al Gore Jr. worked for five years as a journalist.

Last Tuesday, the Times reported that several eminent scientists "argue that some of Mr. Gore's central points [on global warming] are exaggerated and erroneous." The Tenessean reported yesterday that Mr. Gore received $570,000 in royalties from the owners of zinc mines who held mineral leases on his farm. The mines, which closed in 2003 but are scheduled to reopen under a new operator later this year, "emitted thousands of pounds of toxic substances and several times, the water discharged from the mines into nearby rivers had levels of toxins above what was legal."

All of this comes in the wake of the enormous publicity Mr. Gore received after his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Oscar. The film features Mr. Gore reprising his famous sighing and lamenting how the average American's energy use is greedily off the charts. At the film's end viewers are asked, "Are you ready to change the way you live?"

The Nashville-based Tennessee Center for Policy Research was skeptical that Mr. Gore had been "walking the walk" on the environment. It obtained public records showing that for years Mr. Gore has burned through more electricity at his Nashville home each month than the average American family uses in a year–and his consumption was increasing. The heated Gore pool house alone ran up more than $500 in natural-gas bills every month.

Mr. Gore's office responded by claiming that the Gores "purchase offsets for their carbon emissions to bring their carbon footprint down to zero." But CNSNews.com reports that Mr. Gore doesn't purchase carbon offsets with his own resources, and that they are meaningless in terms of global warming.

The offset purchases are actually made for him by Generation Investment Management, a London-based investment firm that Mr. Gore co-founded, and which provides carbon offsets as a fringe benefit to all 23 of its employees, ensuring that they require no real sacrifice on the part of Mr. Gore or his family. Indeed, their impact is also highly limited. The Carbon Neutral Co.–one of the two vendors that sell offsets to Mr. Gore's company, says that offset purchases "will be unable to reduce greenhouse gas emissions . . . in the short term."

That last bit is actually news to me. I had no idea that not only is Gorezilla purchasing medieval indulgences for himself, from himself, but that it is an employee benefit as well! It's a triple play! Read the whole thing. Fund beats heck out of the Tennessee strip-mining baron and his sanctimonious admonitions for others to change their ways. (Apparently, that will leave more for Gorezilla to consume.) I predicted that Gorezilla and his Oscar would end up backfiring on the true believers of the First Church of the Presumptuous Assumption of Global Warming®. It's happening even faster than I thought it would.

Surefire Way To Get Upgraded To First Class

Tired of sitting in the cheap seats on that airline flight? Lack sufficient frequent flier miles to cash in for an upgrade to first class? No good enough at conning airport ticket agents? Here's a sure-fire, never miss way to get that luxurious over-sized first class seat you've always dreamed of!

Die in mid-flight.

Paul Trinder, 54, said cabin crew moved the body of the elderly woman from the economy section where she had died after take-off, the Mirror and Sun tabloids said.

"The corpse was strapped into the seat but because of turbulence it kept slipping down on to the floor," Trinder, a businessman, was quoted as saying. "It was horrific. The body had to be wedged in place with lots of pillows."

The woman's daughter was also upgraded and spent the rest of the nine-hour flight from Delhi to London grieving next to her dead mother, the Sun reported.

Hey, it could have been worse. Just imagine opening up the overhead in……….