Mitt did the right thing by “suspending” his campaign.  Given his incandescent intelligence, he saw the writing on the wall, and was able to deduce that his chances of winning the nomination were slim after McCain took most of the heavily-populated East Coast states and Huckabee undercut him by taking the South on Super Tuesday.

       This recent development all but assures McCain the GOP nomination, and puts the pressure on Huck to be honest with himself in that there is no way he can win, though word around the blogosphere and talk radio has it that the Arkansas governor is vying for the Veep slot.

       It is true that the bass-playing, Baptist preacher from Hope, Ark., did Mitt no favors by siphoning off key voters because Huck appealed to a niche within the conservative coalition.  But that was not the only thing working against the former Massachusetts governor; let’s start with his own geographic origin.  The fact that Romney hailed from the Bay State is an automatic cause for concern for many GOP voters.  Massachusetts is the state of Kerry and the Kennedys, usually not the breeding ground for a Reagan conservative.  Sadly, most voters’ memories are too short to realize that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was the state of origin for Calvin Coolidge, arguably the greatest President of the 20^th Century after Ronaldus Magnus.

       As far as seeing Mitt step down, it is a rather sad after we conservative activists – i.e., the backbone of the GOP base – worked hard to spread the message on why he was the man to lead the party into the future, only to see things come to a premature end.  In hindsight, we are now able to recognize the obstacles Mitt and the rest of us were up against in helping to establish his crucial campaign, but it is safe to say that none of us regret having supported someone who did not win the presidential nomination.  Indeed, as Hugh Hewitt points out, all of us are quite proud to have supported such an extraordinary man.  Was the campaign a failure?  Heavens, no:  at least, not in the strictest sense of the word.  He won a large portion of the states, and his losses in key states such as Florida and California were by close margins.  John McCain had to pull off a strong rally just to win his home state of Arizona.

      But what about Romney now and for the future?  Is he now out in the cold?  Hardly.  His announcement at the C-PAC convention that he was stepping down, in many ways, solidified his conservative credentials, such that he struggled to establish during the campaign but was not quite able to get the proverbial ‘brass ring.’  The most ironic aspect of Mitt stepping down from the primary campaign is that this end, in a key way, has become a new beginning for someone destined to be an increasingly important player in the conservative Republican movement, as Matt Lewis explains in his blog.

      The clincher in this ‘new beginning’ for Mitt was his speech at C-PAC.  Free from the Drive-By Media scrutiny that accompanies a major campaign, he was finally able to let his full-blown, unapologetic, peddle-to-the-metal conservative core beliefs loose to a highly receptive audience.  Seeing things along those lines, these moves on his part are very much akin to Reagan’s primary campaign performance in ’76, with the idea that he is now the man to look to for the GOP nomination in 2016, or even, God forbid, 2012.  Meanwhile, the fact that he suspended his campaign means that he will keep his delegates in his back pocket and use them as leverage in the Twin Cities.  Could our man Mitt become the VP to McCain?  If so, then a lot of things we worked hard for could come to fruition after all…a new beginning indeed!

    As a rabid, unapologetic, right-wing Reagan conservative, a good deal of my friends (most of whom are also conservatives; surprise, surprise!) ask me why I have chosen Romney as my candidate of choice.  Most who know me best might suspect it is because of my Mormon faith, but it isn’t.
   
     First, look at the candidates’ records:  that is usually one of the best ways to gauge how they’ll govern in office.  Romney has an unparalleled record of excellence as an executive business manager, which is what the presidency essentially is -- CEO of USA, Inc.  He has turned around many a struggling company into a star-performing organization while heading up Bain Capital in Boston.  His turnaround performance at the Salt Lake Winter Olympics for 2002 – a mind-numbingly complex operation that was about to go asunder due to a management team in over their heads in the wake of accusations of corruption and graft after winning the bid in 1994 – was the stuff of managerial legend.  If there’s one candidate who knows how to get the job done and get it done right, it’s Romney.
    
    Some folks cite that he was not entirely kosher as a social conservative, but by that very token, he was governor of Massachusetts, the bluest of the blue states.  One thing that I particularly like is that he actually reduced the size of the Massachusetts state government while in office.  Even if that means simply laying off government employees, thus shrinking the state payroll, when is the last time you have witnesses a governor – or a president, for that matter – reduce anything in government?  If anyone knows how to run government like a business – which, need I remind everyone, is the way government should be run – it’s Romney.

        Those are just some things from his past record.  But to be successful as a candidate, one must look at the present and to the future.  One of the most important things to look for in a candidate is temperament, for that is how they’ll govern once in office, too.  The antics of John McCain during recent debates have demonstrated that he’s an arrogant, condescending know-it-all, which betrays a temperament that makes for the worst kind of executive in the Oval Office (think of the worst aspects of FDR and LBJ…combined!).  As Dr. Thomas Sowell points out,

    “When it comes to personal temperament, Governor Romney would rate the highest for his even keel, regardless of what events are swirling around him, with Rudolph Giuliani a close second.

“Temperament is far more important for a President than for a candidate. A President has to be on an even keel 24/7, for four long years, despite crises that can break out anywhere in the world at any time.”
    
Nor is Dr. Sowell fooled by Sen. McCain:

            
    “John McCain trails the pack in the temperament department, with his volatile, arrogant, and abrasive know-it-all attitude. His track record in the Senate is full of the betrayals of Republican supporters that have been the party's biggest failing over the years and its Achilles heel politically.”

            
    Let us not forget that McCain’s betrayals led to our loss of the Senate in ’06, for such betrayals drained the energy from the Republican base to the point of a body going into shock when that Election Day came around.
    
    But that aside, when you combine Romney’s record as a successful executive and leader, his prudent governorship in the Bay State, his uncanny ability to organize, to say nothing of his steady temperament (remember, we’ll be electing someone who will have his finger on nuclear triggers), it all adds up to why Romney is MyManMitt.

    Regarding his stellar executive record, part of being a good manager is delegating, and part of being a good delegator is knowing whom to put where.  All Mitt has to do is promise to appoint John Bolton to the post of Secretary of State, and he'll instantly lock up the lion's share of support of the GOP base!

    As an addendum, it’s worth noting that despite second-place finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, he’s actually leading in the current delegate count, which is actually what leads to the big prize, that being the nomination.  It is also worth noting that polls currently indicate he has taken the lead away from McCain in the Michigan primary.  Go Mitt Go!

    Surprise, surprise, yours truly is in total concurrence with the conservative talk show heavyweights Rush, Laura, Hannity, Medved and Hewitt, that Romney hit the ball out of the park with his speech entitled “Faith In America”.  The fact that he made this [hopefully] historic speech was made at the Bush-41 library on the Texas A&M campus, just a couple hours – of that -- from Houston, site of JFK’s corresponding speech in 1960, was a nice touch indeed!

Here’s the thrust of the message of the speech, for those of you who missed it:
    “We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders- in ceremony and word,” he said. “He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history, and during the holiday season, nativity scenes and menorahs should be welcome in our public places…I will take care to separate the affairs of government from any religion, but I will not separate us from ‘the God who gave us liberty.’ Nor would I separate us from our religious heritage. Perhaps the most important question to ask a person of faith who seeks a political office, is this: does he share these American values: the equality of human kind, the obligation to serve one another, and a steadfast commitment to liberty. They are not unique to any one denomination. They belong to the great moral inheritance we hold in common. They are the firm ground on which Americans of different faiths meet and stand as a nation, united.”  
    We are now in the early days of the 21^st Century, a time where we must be diligent and vigilant in vanquishing Islamofascism for our very survival as a society/civilization.  This murderous ideology and theology – that of Islamism -- is one that has been virtually unchanged since the 7^th Century.  The last thing we as Americans need is to weaken ourselves by re-fighting some variation of the European Protestant Wars of the 16^th Century. 

    The genius of the marriage in American society and politics is that while we’re politically secular, we’re socially/culturally Judeo-Christian.  Overall, the quibbling over theological details from sect to sect is a relatively small matter; what matters is that we share the major values that make up the big tent of Judeo-Christianity.  That’s the basic message, in one form or another, that both Michael Medved and Jonah Goldberg offer in their editorial pieces regarding this crucial speech.  Could it have raised Romney’s stock in the process?  Possibly; as Medved points out, “he not only looked and sounded like a President – he actually looked and sounded like a great one”.  Still skeptical on whether or not this was a great speech with a meritorious message?  Hugh Hewitt provides us with the perfect litmus test:  “When was the last time that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Medved, Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer and me all focused on the same subject and all agreed on the merits?”

    Gotta love Terrible Ted Nugent! The Motor City Madman has been a wonderful advocate for the Second Amendment – one of many amendments that leftists would love to conveniently do away with if they could – in particular and a funny, provocative conservative voice in an otherwise degenerate entertainment community in general. If that’s not enough, he has an article, published on OpinionJournal, reminding us that much of today’s social problems stem from a defective ‘60s sub-culture that was fueled by drugs (among other things), and today is the source for so much irresponsible behavior of Baby Boomers and some – though thankfully not all – of subsequent generations. Not only does Nugent eloquently point out the problems with hippies and drugs, but makes an important mental connection for the readers that being a liberal means never having to learn from your mistakes.

    Forget the so-called “Summer of Love”. How about a “Summer of Work and Responsibility”? The latter might not have the sexy ring of the former, but it will pay wonderful dividends for our society well into the future. Nugent, in his unabashed criticism of liberalism and proud advocacy for individual responsibility, has been a great voice in championing this crucial ethic. Rock on, Ted!

            Today, Dec. 5, 2007, marks the 75^th Birthday of Richard Penniman, a.k.a., “Little Richard”, the real King of Rock n’ Roll!  For you under-educated boobs out there who think that popular music for young people begins and ends with Britney Spears or the less-than-masculine N’Sync, or whatever aural holocaust Rob Zombie pumps out, I have news.  Little Richard’s music was the Holy Grail of rock.

            He drilled down to the purest essence of the genre with a rather simple formula.  Accentuate the boogie-woogie in 2/2 time, throw in some downright devilish sax solos, and, most importantly, have the drums, saxes (yes, saxes as in ‘plural’) and piano work in sync to create a special syncopative shuffle beat, sounding like that of a train barreling along the tracks.  The definitive sound of rock n’ roll can be found in Little Richard’s “freight train effect”.

            Want examples?  Look no further than Long Tall Sally from 1956.  The core cast of the 1987 sci-fi action flick Predator (Arnold Schwartzenegger, Carl Weathers, Jesse Ventura) were right to rock out to this tune while flying in a UH-1 helicopter while awaiting arrival at the secret drop-off point at night.  While almost all his hits have some form of the “freight train effect” (save for a few power ballads), The Girl Can’t Help It, also from ’56, actually starts with the saxophones emitting notes that mimic a train, while the drums aid and abet them.

            Tutti Frutti from 1955 helped launch the Rock Era; All Around the World (1956) speaks to the universal appeal of this youthfully exuberant sound (and has one of the greatest closing riffs of all time to boot!), and though of a slightly more moderate tempo, Lucille from 1957 became one of his most recognized hits.  Although Ready Teddy and Heeby-Jeebies (both from ’56) were recorded on separate singles, the two are so close in tempo and melody that you’d think they belonged on the same record; both make for perfect endzone dance music to this day!

            Little Richard was not above using the occasional electric guitar, and on one occasion, recorded another of his more memorable rock hits that have withstood the test of time, Good Golly Miss Molly (recorded on Oct. 15, 1956).  His characteristic scream was never better defined or timed than on that track.  Just when you think he couldn’t get any more hard core, he surpassed our expectations and cranked the intensity up one notch higher with heart-pounders that could really rock the house down, such as Keep A-Knockin’, Ooh My Soul (both recorded on Jan. 16, 1957), and Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey (Nov. 29, 1955).  All three must be heard to be appreciated!  A particular favorite on the part of yours truly is True Fine Mama (recorded same date as Hey); his music already enjoying a reputation for being particularly raw, he dials up the funkiness factor in a major way by implementing an early Drifters-style “call-and-response” on that track.

            But enough talk.  If you’re a serious music fan, your CD library is downright bare as a snail out of its shell without at least some of his tunes from the early, purer days of Rock n’ Roll.  Two CDs I particularly recommend are Little Richard – 18 Greatest Hits (a CD I’ve had for the past 12 years) and The Georgia Peach (he was from Macon, Ga., originally).  If you’re a hard-core Oldies junkie like yours truly and appreciate the true roots of rock, then an absolute must-have is The Formative Years:  1951-1953.  Yes, he was recording that early!

            During his heyday, he also had a number of live performances on TV under his belt.  Although this particular performance took place after he recorded the bulk of his supremely energetic body of work (the gig was in the UK in the early 1960s) this is actually a superior rendition of Lucille.  Watch and hear for yourself to ascertain why Little Richard was, and always shall be, in a class by himself.

Oh brother, here we go again, another pointless, meaningless, Middle East “peace summit”.  A more apt term for this little crony convention would be “piece summit”, as the usual solutions/demands are for Israel to carve up more pieces off its country until there’s nothing left.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Winston Churchill warn us that “[A]n appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile in hopes that it will eat him last”?

What really gripes me is that there have been so many of these Mid-East “peace summits” (or “piece summits,” take your pick) over the past 25-30 years – the list of which could fill a page or two – and yet none have produced any tangibly positive results.  On the flip side of the coin, many of these meetings have produced disastrous results for our dear friend and ally Israel.  How many worthless pieces of paper did the late thug Yassir Arafat sign, pledging to end violence towards the Israeli people?  At every chance, he used the newly-acquired land for the fictional “Palestine” as staging points for future terrorist attacks (read: cold-blooded murders).  Are we to suddenly think that things are going to be different now that Hamas, an avowed terrorist organization, is now running that pitiful excuse of a country?  Let us not forget Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity; doing the same thing over and over again, thinking you’re going to get a different result than the previous time.  It’s more than worth noting that the Saudi representative at this summit in Annapolis, Md., refused to shake hands with the Israelis.  Some peace.  This only proves my suspicions that a sizeable number of Muslims are so virulently anti-Semitic, they make Nazis look downright tolerant.

Speaking of insanity, what on Earth are our dear President and our most esteemed Secretary of State thinking?  Have GW and Condi taken leave of their senses?  The only reason that Slick Willy staged one of these pointless summits in the twilight of his second term was that he was desperate for some sort of “legacy” aside from his protein stain on Monica’s blue dress.  Bush-43’s legacy (fighting terrorism abroad, sewing the seeds of democracy/freedom in the Middle East, appointing Justices Roberts and Alito to the Supreme Court, etc.) is well in place, and one that history will in time see as one that is positive on balance.  There is no need for some pointless summit that will only threaten a key friend and ally, one that is constantly under siege from forces hostile to them as well as to us.

So what gives?  My guess is that this is the State Department’s bright idea.  As supremely intelligent, motivated, patriotic, and ueber-talented as our esteemed Secretary of State is, Condoleeza Rice, God bless her, has seemingly been consumed by Department minutiae, rendering her susceptible to agenda-driven holdovers from the previous administration.  These bureaucrats are not on the same page as the President and do not share his foreign policy vision; indeed, they are actively opposed to it.  One thing that I learned while hearing Hugh Hewitt interview John Bolton was that the State Department is more concerned about process than actual results, which is a classic sign of a bloated bureaucracy that is oblivious to administration objectives.

Whether the next president be Mitt or Rudy, the Secretary of State they should appoint should be someone dedicated to cleaning house and re-tooling the place for a cohesive effort in favor of a strong, conservative, muscular foreign policy.  I cannot be more adamant in nominating John Bolton for that job.  Let the Dems howl like the Pavlov’s dogs that they are in response to such a suggestion!

In the meantime, rather than have Israel give up more of its own land, we ought to support them in totally taking over “Palestine” and annex it into one unconditionally unified country on Israel’s own terms.  In so doing, they should declare Hamas an enemy of the state and exterminate any and all members.  To make this work, we the United States have to have the guts to tell the rest of the Middle East to stay out of this affair, go jump in a lake, and if any of them threaten us by cutting off our oil supply, we’ll go after them next!  Goodness knows we could go through Saudi Arabia like fecal matter through a goose.  Peace doesn’t come through signing meaningless pieces of paper – just ask Neville Chamberlain!  Peace comes through strength and victory.  Vite Victoriaque!

Now that’s what I’m talking about! You might recall an earlier blog entry where I pointed out that one way to solve our current energy “crisis” of sorts – it’s really more of a quandary; an energy crisis was like what we had in the ‘70s with price controls at the pumps – is to specialize our use of oil. As far as electrical power is concerned, the only solution, as far as I can see, is to go nuclear. It’s suicide to use vast amounts of oil and natural gas to produce the heat/energy needed to power steam turbines (to turn the generators) when we could use a greater supply of both commodities at the gas pump and for home heat, respectively. Nuclear technology itself continues to improve, not only with greater output, presumably, but also with better disposal methods.

The opening of this nuclear plant in the Sovereign State of Alabama is, to my mind, the greatest development regarding the electrical sector of our energy policy in years. Assuming that this is a harbinger of more nuclear plants to come, we will eventually turn the corner for the better in this new energy quandary we now face. Oh by the way, this is another thing we can thank President Bush for having the foresight to champion (in addition to tax cuts, Social Security reform, appointing Constructionist judges, leading the way in the War on Terror, etc.; there are still many reasons for which to support our President during this challenging time).

Gas prices are on the rise once again. Already they have surpassed the highest prices we experienced in July and August of last year. At the time I write this blog entry, the prices have thankfully stabilized some, but the current price is still higher than even previous summers. There are reasons for these high prices, and they do not involve conspiracies or “price-gouging” by one of the left’s favorite bogeymen du jour, Big Oil (cue the whisper-voices chanting “Big Oil” in a George Soros-MoveOn.org-sponsored radio ad!).

The general reason for the rise in gas prices over the past few years boils down to basic market forces of supply and demand. Simply put, demand for oil is at an all-time high. Why? Worldwide economic growth, that’s why. China’s and India’s economies alone are bursting at the seams, largely because after decades of socialist economic policies (more so in the case of China, to be sure), their respective governments have eased certain controls and have allowed more market forces to take hold, thus allowing those countries to prosper more. Same thing with Eastern Europe. With Soviet repression still fresh in the minds of the good citizens of, say, Poland and the Czech Republic, Eastern Europe has embraced capitalism and the rising standard of living that inevitably follows.

Naturally, there’s a small catch. Growing economies require increased energy usage, which is why oil is in great demand. The solution is not to hinder economies; doing so would cause untold human suffering around the globe. Rather, the solution is to find more sources of energy; it’s not as if we’re about to ease our consumption anytime soon, much to the chagrin of the environmentalist whackos and other flavors of socialists.

No, the solution is not price controls, either. The predictable calls of “price gouging” by Democrats and their ilk sound as enticing as the Sirens’ Song, but that course of action will lead to gas shortages and long lines at the pump that are thankfully an aging memory from the 1970s. Dr. Thomas Sowell, one of the great thinkers of our time, has a wonderful recent column on price controls and related issues concerning current gas prices.

The solution concerning the United States’ current energy issues comes in two parts. First off, we have to acknowledge that we’re an oil-based economy, and therefore we need as much of it as possible in order to keep things running smoothly so as to maintain our high standard of living and superior way of life (e.g., driving cars that are not crinkly tin cans like in Europe or East Asia). Second, the wise approach towards oil usage would be to focus/specialize in oil consumption.

There are a number of ways to increase the supply of oil itself. Contrary to the environmental alarmists out there, we’re not about to run out of the Black Gold any time soon. Canada alone has enough oil to feed our current consumption rates for the next 50 years, and that’s barring the discovery of any major new deposits (we get more oil from our friends up north than we do from the Middle East, FYI). Our biggest problem at home has been liberals and their Democrat allies blocking the exploration and drilling of new oil sources at home, such as sites at ANWR in Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico. Naturally, these restrictions do not apply to Mexico or even Cuba, who have been allowed to beat us to the punch since they’re not beholden to the same arbitrary restrictions that environmentalists shackle us with at home. It also doesn’t help that certain residents of coastal California and Florida won’t let us drill off-shore there, either, because they might actually see an oil rig in the distance on the clear day. The horrors!

In addition to drilling for more oil, we do have other sources of oil that may come to our advantage in the world market in the future. There are two other major geological sources for petroleum; shale and coal. The former of which we have plenty of in Utah and Colorado (take a piece of shale, put it up to your nose and sniff; you can practically smell the oil in that gray rock!). Next, and more importantly is coal. We as the United States are the Saudi Arabia of coal, producing more of that bituminous rock than any other nation on Earth. Kentucky leads the way in coal production, with West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and even Tennessee close on its heels. A fair amount of coal also comes from out west, in states such as Wyoming and neighboring areas. At current market conditions, coal gasification is a very feasible energy policy, and is one that should be pursued so as to put pressure on OPEC and lessen our dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

Second, we need to specialize/focus our use of oil. Currently, we use it for practically everything; heating our homes and businesses, fueling our power plants, as well as for gassing up our cars. The best way to leverage the market so as to put downward pressure on prices at the pump is to focus oil usage on vehicular fuels (gas for cars, diesel for semi trailers, and kerosene/jet fuel for airlines). Naturally, there will always be some uses of home kerosene heaters, but that’s always a small fraction of kerosene usage compared to jet fuel consumption. This need for fuel specialization includes the use of natural gas to for an energy source in power plants. At current market rates, it’s economic suicide to use the vast amounts of natural gas needed to provide our electricity; it’s one of the reasons your natural gas heating bills keep skyrocketing each winter. Indeed, the best way to get our electricity in the future is to go nuclear. France already uses all-nuclear plants to get their electricity; it’s one area where the French are actually ahead of the game compared to where we are in our energy policy. Are we going to stand for this?

As far as “alternative fuels” go, going nuclear also has a great ancillary benefit, that of hydrogen production, which is a result of the nuclear fission that provides the energy for electricity in the first place. This hydrogen production can thus be used to for the fuel cell-powered cars that some folks think might replace the traditional internal combustion engine in the coming decades. In addition, new research is coming up with other sources for hydrogen, which could be the way of the future.

Be that as it may, I doubt of internal combustion will go away completely. There are still millions of us out there who would still like to be able to drive our ’57 Chevys and ’59 Cadillacs, if only for recreational occasions, which brings me back to the earlier point I made about the need for a steady oil supply to preserve our superior way of life.

Don’t be seduced by the talk of ethanol, either. John Stossel has a wonderfully hard-hitting piece on the problems with ethanol. To sum it up, it takes a heckuva lot more energy to produce the stuff than it does to refine oil; you need to fuel the tractors to harvest the corn, and that does not even include all the energy used to convert the sugars in the corn into alcohol. Even then, the stuff doesn’t produce as much energy as gasoline, meaning you need to burn more of the stuff in order to get the same amount of power. Worse yet, by putting food -- and corn is food! -- into your gas tank, it means that the food supply goes down, while the demand stays the same.  This equates to food prices going up, as you no doubt have noticed while grocery shopping over the past couple of years.  Add all these problems together, and it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in Economics to figure out that ethanol makes for a lousy trade-off.

The bottom-line, Cliff Notes version of this lengthy piece, is thus: we need to drill for more oil (more refineries wouldn’t hurt, either!), and limit its use to vehicular fuel, going nuclear for electricity, and electric to heat our homes (with some possible natural gas exceptions). The environmentalist whackos have stood in our way of accomplishing much of this, so We the People need to rise up and tell these socialists to sit down, shut up, and stop trying to ruin our way of life.

Noted author and journalist David Halberstam has met an untimely demise in a car crash. While I have very mixed feelings about some of his books, it is nevertheless quite sad to see him – or anyone – die when he clearly had some productive years remaining. I personally enjoyed his book Summer of ’49 a great deal, being a huge Americana buff, a baseball fan and a Yankees fan (yes, I do like baseball; it’s a good time-killer until football season rolls around, you understand!), and this book rolls all three wonderful subjects into one great panorama of history.

That having been said, I’ve got a beef with some of his more famous books. Don’t get me started on The Best and the Brightest. Liberals have constantly gotten it wrong on why we “lost” Vietnam. It was not because we were somehow overreaching in our supposed arrogance/idealism (yeah, how dare we wish to protect millions of innocent Southeast Asians from the ravages of mass-murdering communists!). We “lost” Vietnam because of liberals, specifically liberal politicians at home who hamstrung our generals in the field of battle (sound familiar, Harry Reid?).  Meanwhile, liberals in journalism who tried to convince a befuddled nation we were losing when in fact we were kicking Charlie’s collective posterior, while taking his collective name simultaneously. The fact that Walter Cronkite and his ilk tried to spin the Tet Offensive into some great victory for the North Vietnamese communists when in fact it turned out to be a military disaster for them was clearly a massive breach of journalism ethics. But who is to let ethics get in the way of things when you’re convinced that you know what is best for everybody?

But I digress. My biggest beef with Halberstam’s writings – his clever use of vignettes as allegories for grander developments notwithstanding – is with his book The Fifties, a decade that has been near and dear to my heart for years (as many of my friends can quickly attest!). The very subjects Halberstam emphasizes in this lengthy book smack of revisionism; his mentioning of the rise of the so-called “military industrial complex” alone sends up big red flags immediately. Only lefties use this term as a back-handed way of getting down on our military. You didn’t hear liberals decrying the “military-industrial complex” when American industrial might and good ol’ Yankee know-how were being leveraged to help defeat Naziism and Fascism during WWII, do you?

And that’s just for starters. Halberstam’s emphasis on the rise of the “Beat movement” is another cause for concern. The beatniks in the ‘50s were a tiny, underground, fringe movement made up of malcontents who were too narcissistic to realize how good they had things. If this fringe element sounds familiar, it’s because we call them hippies today – that and sextogenarian English professors!

Need I mention that you can practically see Halberstam reaching orgasm as he wrote the section on Sen. Joe McCarthy? Liberals love to cite the former Wisconsin Ssenator’s efforts to purge the State and Justice Departments from spies on Joe Stalin’s payroll as an example of how horribly repressive things were 50+ years ago, when in fact, it was just an important turning point in having some old friends of the left exposed for who they were.

Especially irksom in the book is Halberstam's constant harping on great American hero Douglas MacArthur.  But this is indicative of Halberstam's jealousy in recognizing that MacArthur was an important leader involved in important historical developments, while the author himself was but a mere journalist, an insect in the grand scheme of things.

One can also sense the author's ideological slant by looking at what is missing.  For all the vignettes he uses to show the readers all the important developments that took place, there is no mention at all of William F. Buckley, whose book God and Man at Yale, first published in 1951, helped set the ball in motion for the modern conservative political movement in America to take hold and grow.  Yet one is not even to see a mentioning his Buckley's name or of his seminal work.  Interesting...

To be sure, there are good points to be made about the book. Halberstam does the early story of Elvis Presley justice, and his vignette on the growth of certain retail stores such as E.J. Korvette are a fascinating bit of insight into the nascence of modern “big-box” retailers. He also has an interesting take on the growth and development of cars in the 1950s. The noted journalist contends that car makers put pressure on the oil companies to produce higher-octane gas so the auto manufacturers in turn could turn out more powerful engines. If nothing else, such a contention provides wonderful fuel to the “chicken-vs-egg” debates about how horsepower grew in America, though one thing is for certain; power output set modern precedents and paces for automobiles, but that is nothing compared to the pace set by their styling of that decade.

Lest I start to bore even my most loyal reader base, I'll get to the point.  So many people overlook what was so wonderful about the 1950s, largely because their frame of reference for this special time is quite skewed due to that face that said frame of reference is the film-of-questionable-message Dead Poets Society.  What was so great about the 1950s was that we were all on the same page.  All of us believed in the greatness of America; we were optimistic about the growing prosperity, about the new technological developments that benefitted mankind.  We shared in our growing affluence with each new, stylish car that our neighbors just bought, all clothed in irresistable fins and dripping with chrome.  Youthful expression reached new heights with the explosion of rock 'n' roll and the development of R&B.  Pent-up consumer demand, held in check during the Depression and WWII, was finally let loose, and the efforts to fill this demand helped build the greatest middle class the world has ever known, one that continues to grow to this day.  I could go on and on, citing things such as how we had greater respect for our presidents back then; preaching sedition against our president to effete European socialists while we were at war would have been viewed as the poison it truly is.

The bottom line is, Halberstam's The Fifties is not the ideal vehicle for familiarizing oneself with this seemingly magical time.  It's a shame he is dead, but it's not a shame that we'll no longer have to put up with some of his pointless pontifications.  For those of you who are really interested in getting a feel for what the '50s were all about, download It's All in the Game by Tommy Edwards or Long Tall Sally by Little Richard (or Sh-Boom by the Chords, or Oh Boy by Buddy Holly, or Blue Suede Shoes by Carl Perkins, for that matter; preferrably all four tunes!) onto your iPod, and then listen to them while sitting behind the wheel of a '57 Chevy or a '59 Cadillac or the like.  You'll experience something wonderful and will get the gist of why that time was so great without having to trudge through an 800-page book that is mostly revisionistic anyways.

     
    Here is yet another reason why Mitt Romney is my man for the GOP presidential nomination.  He implicitly points out what I have felt for the longest time.  Jimmy Carter might not necessarily be the worst president we have ever had (though he's pretty darn close to the bottom -- indeed, the ever-wise Dennis Prager contends that he is the worst, and there is much validity in Prager's assertion), but he's easily the most morally confused president in our great nation's history.  Carter repeatedly has made constant apologias for evil, has bashes our current president for fighting the war on terror, and has criticized Israel, essentially, for the evil deeds of Hamas.
    So what does this have to do with MyManMitt?  He basically pointed out Carter's moral confusion in a speech made at Yeshiva University in New York:
   
     "What Jimmy Carter fails to understand is what so many fail to understand: Whether it is Hamas 
    or Hezbollah or al Qaeda, there is an overarching goal among the violent jihadists that transcends 
    borders and boundaries," Romney says. "That goal is to replace all modern Islamic states with a 
    caliphate, to destroy Israel, to cause the collapse of the West and the United States, and to 
    conquer the world."

    Sarge Sez:  It's about darn time that somebody in the Republican Party has the gumption to point out, however implicitly, what an embarrassment Carter continues to be (we can't exactly summon Reagan from beyond the grave, you understand!).  Yes, Carter is a decent man, and an absolute saint compared to William the Zipper.  But even Slick Willy did not make himself and apologist for Palastinian terror (though I'm open for correction!); the former peanut farmer from Georgia would better serve humanity by building houses than pretending to be the world's referee.

 
    Paul Krugman is a wonderful reminder to all of us conservatives of many important points regarding economics.  Among the many dirty little secrets of the left (e.g., their Marxist ideologies and affinity for Stalinist tactics to implement them), one is that if they had their way, there would be no Constitution.  Why?  Because the Constitution, in a modern context, is essentially a conservative document.  With Economics, that's not so easy to abolish, as it is a process of study to ascertain the optimal allocation of scarce resources.  About the same time our Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, a Scotsman named Adam Smith articulated some of the fundamentals for optimal resource allocation in his groundbreaking book, Wealth of Nations, which, over 200 years later, is still regarded by those 'in the know' as the 'Bible of Capitalism'.  Smith's conclusions about allowing individuals to make their own decisions about what to buy and sell led him to the basic thesis that the free market is the way to go.  Thus, just as the Constitution is essentially a conservative document, Economics, if practiced properly, is a conservative academic pursuit.
    Which leads us back to Krugman.  As a subscriber to the local major city newspaper for this region, the Louisville Courier-Journal (in our house, we refer to it as the Louisville Communist Journal!), I am constantly harrangued with his angry writings in which he implicity complains that he and his elitist cohorts aren't handed over more power to decide how to run the lives of ordinary folks like you and me.  True, he can be funny, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, as angry pseudo-intellectual socialists are apt to be at times.  And is he ever angry; Bruce Bartlett -- formerly of the National Center for Policy Analysis -- must have had lots of fun writing a column pointing out just how angry a man Krugman is (http://www.townhall.com/columnists/BruceBartlett/2003/09/19/paul_krugman_is_an_angry_man).  Though, come to think of it, 'socialist' might be too soft a term to define this intellectual charlatan in question.  "Marxist" might be a more appropriate term, given that, according to his published commentaries, government should regulate everything at every interval.  Let alone that this has been tried before vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and failed miserably.  Considering that Krugman moonlights as an economics "professor" for Princeton (further reason to avoid the Ivy League schools like the plague!) when he's not using the New York Times as a conduit to vent his anti-capitalist diatribes, you'd think he'd be aware of this, and, alas, you would think incorrectly.
    His latest screed in the Times is a case-in-point (the C-J published it on April 30).  Krugman alleges that we are in a new "Gilded Age".  For the benefit of you IU Hoosiers, the "Gilded Age" was this late 19th Century period going into the early 20th Century where major industrialist like Rockefeller and Carnegie came into their own as examples of successful, big-time businessmen.  Krugman and his ilk label such industrialists as crooks, but how does making money by fulfilling legitimate consumer needs using legitimate, legal means qualify one as a 'crook'?  Again, pointing out such fallacies of revionism are for a different place in time.  The reason Krugman brought up the subject of "Gilded Age" is due to his fixation on income inequality.
    Adam Smith over 200 years ago implicitly recognized that people's productivity will vary from individual to individual.  Hence they're going to earn varying degrees of income as a result.  To pay them the same is called communism, and nothing will undermine the incentive to be productive than to regulate how much somebody can earn.  In Krugman's latest column, he openly complains that progressive taxation -- whereby the more one earn, the more one is taxed -- income inequality has widened in the past few decades.  One reason, he cites, is that "Taxation has become much less progressive".  The horror!  Heaven forbid that we be allowed to keep more of our own money.  Apparently, it never occured to Krugman that high-earners allowed to keep such money are using it to make more investments, which in turn are used to grow more businesses, thus provide no jobs.  This is the same reasoning used for tax cuts, from Reagan to Bush-43.  But the very mention of "tax cut" is enough to send Krugman into apoplexy.
    Of course, the pseuo-intellectual in question regails in President Bush's apparent failure to reform Social Security, clearly not grasping that the program is a scam; a rip-off beyond belief.  What a person earning an average wage in America is forced to pay into this system (yes, forced), the return on investment is horrible.  I could go on about how it's a pyramid scheme based on faulty predictions of a static, steady rate of population growth, but that's for a different blog entry at a different time.  Besides, most sane people and all conservatives see Social Security for the sham that it is, yet another Stone Age holdover from FDR's statist New Deal policies, so we'll leave it at that for the time being.
    But when you're so narcissistic to believe that you know what is best for everyone, then how such outdated programs negatively affect most people is of no concern to elitists such as Krugman.  His delusions go to the length of envisioning a revival of the New Deal.  "If history is any guide, one of these days we'll see the emergence of a new Progressive Era, maybe a new New Deal" (is this anything like being a "New Democrat" like Clinton purported to be?).  Though despite his extensive detachment from reality, he does acknowledge one thing:  "[B]ut it may be a long wait".
    With Krugman's obsessions over "income inequality", blatant historical revisionism, and his overly-emotional reaction to tax cuts, which have consistently served as catalysts for economic growth for more than eight decades, one has to ask why more students at Princeton haven't asked for their money back yet.  Indeed, as reknowned economics professor Walter E. Williams loves to observe, "Paul Krugman is a pretend economist".  Krugman's anti-capitalist screeds should be read accordingly.