Cynthia, what you say is true but you can’t blame Perry because the US has a broken border policy. After all, when a state (like Arizona) tries to do the right thing and pass anti-illegal immigration laws then they get slammed by the Feds.
]]>Mead, BTW, is a liberal but an honest one in the mold of Nat Henthoff and a few others. By that I mean that they have not lost the respect for conscience and liberty that used to define American liberalism before its moral collapse*. There are still some of them left and they are still worth listening to. I’d put Pat Caddell, Jimmy Carter’s pollster, in the same category as well.
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*When enough time has passed and a reliable cultural history can be written, I think the key element in the collapse of American liberalism will be sexual promiscuity and abortion. Once regular Americans compromised there (and many were brow-beaten into it by the left-wing cultural elites who took over the Democratic party after the McGovern defeat, IMO), the die was cast.
We are living in the collapse of the ideology of false promises promulgated by those elites in this decade I believe. It’s no accident that the flash point is homosexuality since the core of that issue is fundamentally anthropological, that is, it touches the deepest questions about what it means to be man or woman, and thus human. It’s a cultural struggle of the first order but also one that cultural conservatives like myself have not addressed adequately.
I’m old enough to remember a childhood without porn, rampant promiscuity, gambling — all the social vices that we don’t really see as vices anymore. I bought into the lie growing up that those prohibitions represented a kind of oppression, a denial of man’s real nature. Fortunately and only by the grace of God, I saw early on that my way of thinking was a grave error and changed it. I have no doubt that it spared me much sorrow.
Being a bit older now and in a profession where I see and deal with the wreckage that the removal of those barriers has caused in people’s lives, I see that the older generations had a wisdom we have lost. They intuitively obeyed the ancient proverb, “Remove not the ancient landmark” (Proverbs 22:28) or “Don’t tear down a fence until you first know why it was built” (Robert Frost). We celebrate those who “break taboos.”
Another good article, again by Walter Russell Mead: American Challenges: The Blue Model Breaks Down
]]>FYI, regarding the current insanity with the Trillion Dollar Deficits created and forced on the country by the Democrats and Obama, it is 100% a SPENDING problem. The reality is that even if we DOUBLED the federal income taxes for everyone in America, that would still leave the country approximately $400 BILLION shy of balancing the budget. DOUBLING federal income taxes for ALL taxpayers would raise only $1.1 TRILLION, still short $400 BILLION of the remaining YEARLY deficits. Yet, the liberals, leftists, and progressives persist in claiming that not increasing taxes is the problem. That is absolutely false! It’s a wholesale LIE!
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