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"The foundation of the United
States is the article of faith that all men are
created equal and endowed by their Creator with
natural rights. It is our gospel to the world,
the Necessary Religion of America, the creedal
core to which all Americans--Jews, Christians
and Muslims; polytheists, monotheists and
atheists--say 'Amen' each Fourth of July." [17]
"Philip Roth has
written one famous novel about masturbation,
and more than a few masturbatory novels about
fame." [18]
"Such passages remind us that
Maureen Dowd has never been more than an
inside-the-Beltway version of Erma Bombeck--a
comparison I make with reluctance only because
it doesn't do justice to Bombeck's sanity and
good humor. Dowd, after all, was at the top of
her game during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.
Why? Because for those fleeting months, which
resulted in her 1999 Pulitzer Prize, Dowd was no
longer holding forth on politics per se — a
conceptual realm in which she's so out of her
depth she should be wearing a snorkel at the
keyboard. Rather, she was writing about naughty
boys and naughty girls, about pee pees and hoo
hoos." [19]
"The common ground of rationality
has always been the playing field for competing
ideas; once it has been abandoned, debate
quickly degenerates into name calling." [20]
"In retrospect, perhaps the
kindest thing you can say about Michel
Foucault is that if he'd truly had the courage
of his convictions, he could have been the
Marquis de Sade." [21]
"If institutional racism is
defined as a concerted effort to deprive African
Americans of basic human and civil rights, it
does not exist. Let me repeat that:
Institutional racism does not exist. Let me
italicize it: Institutional racism does not
exist. Let me set it apart, a paragraph unto
itself . . . Institutional racism does not
exist." [22]
"The singularity of the
Holocaust derives not from its body count. What
makes the Holocaust unique is the methodology,
the step-by-step legal process enacted by the
Nazis which identified Jews under their control,
isolated them in ghettoes, deported them to
concentration camps, and then systematically
exterminated them. History is rife with shallow
graves. But only in the Holocaust did the
blundering ham-fisted brutality of the human
species take up a scalpel." [23]
"If you still haven't figured out
that there's a world war going on, that across
the globe Islamic values of pious submission and
spiritual purity are locked in a death struggle
with Enlightenment values of rational inquiry
and religious tolerance, then the last decade of
American foreign policy makes no sense to you
except in conspiratorial terms. Hey, maybe it is
all about oil, or about Zionism, or about George
W. Bush's Oedipal complex." [24]
"Since the war is not an
engagement between sovereign nations, it cannot
end with a peace treaty; it can only end with
the recognition that a worldwide Caliphate is
not a possibility, that sharia law is not going
to replace democratic government, that Islamic
values are not going to trump Enlightenment
values. The outcome of the war, on this level,
is not in doubt. What is in doubt is whether the
body count will number in the hundreds of
thousands — if we continue the long hard slog of
spreading democracy — or in the scores of
millions — if we retreat from the world stage,
defer the combat a generation or two, and
bequeath to our children and grandchildren a
bloodier but more recognizable world war." [25]
"Like every war before it, the
war on terror (or, to call it what it is, the
war against totalitarian Islam) is a nasty,
brutish endeavor. It is fraught with obscene
excesses and squalid idiocies because, like
every war before it, it looses the primordial
evils of tribalism and bloodlust to which the
human race, even at its current stage of
evolution, remains heir. No technological
advantage can render war antiseptic. No moral
high ground can render it glorious. War is
always wrong. Which is why its only
justification is the conviction that by going to
war you're avoiding an even greater wrong down
the road." [26]
"One of the ongoing mysteries of
American popular culture is why Communism is
merchandised more often and more effectively
than Nazism or Islamism.
Is it just a matter of public relations? Why
does an obsessive Nazi-hunter like Simon
Wiesenthal get
positive press while an obsessive
Communist-hunter like Joe McCarthy is vilified?
Why is Marxist Theory,
with its alternative view of individual versus
collective rights, an accepted academic
discipline — but Sharia Theory, with its
alternative view of female empowerment, an
insult to women? The truth of the matter is that
Nazism, Islamism, and Communism are all
totalitarian movements. All three stand in
direct opposition to Enlightenment values of
religious tolerance and rational inquiry. All
three seek to exterminate whoever stands in
their way. Nazism justifies its genocide in the
name of racial purity. Islamism, in the name of
spiritual purity. Communism, in the name of
socio-economic purity. One way or another, the
shallow graves get filled." [27]
"It is not the proper role of
government to dry one person's tears by
confiscating another person's tissues." [28]
"It's a fallacy to think Bill
Maher's
show or his studio audience is any more cerebral
than Jerry Springer's or his. The fact that the
former focuses on national politics while the
latter focuses on sexual infidelity doesn't
raise the level of debate. 'Puh-leeze!' is not
one whit more logically decisive than 'Yeah,
well f#@% you!' [29]
"If you dive head first into the
cesspool of black urban culture, through the
flotsam and jetsam of bling-bling jewelry,
designer sneakers, and 'Free Mumia'
T-shirts--through the Ebonic endearments
of 'nigga' and 'ho' and 'dawg'--and if you
struggle down past the snarling, muttering
studio-menace of gangsta rappers and the
haunch-spreading, butt-bouncing images of
'empowered' womanhood--and then if you plunge
deeper, past conspiracy theories about the LAPD
and O.J., about CIA agents and crack, and about
Jewish scientists and AIDS--and if you descend
deeper still, past the toxic notion of black
authenticity as the absence of white virtue, you
arrive at last at the thickest, rankest muck at
the very bottom, the foulest exemplar of what's
killing African Americans literally and
symbolically--which is roughly where you
encounter HBO's Def Poetry." [30]
"The political Left, both in
America and in Europe, has become a mindless,
wandering rabble, a coalition of 1960s retreads
and wannabes held together by a congealed
psychic-mucous of rage, paranoia, and
self-righteousness. They are desperate for Bush
to fail in Iraq. Their irrational hatred for him
resembles not so much the Right’s substantial
hatred of Bill Clinton but
the South’s pathological hatred of Abraham
Lincoln--who,
for the record, oversaw prisoner abuses far
worse than those at Abu Ghraib, and who took
liberties with the Constitution far beyond
warrantless wiretapping." [31]
17.
^ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/224930/necessary-religion/mark-goldblatt?page=2
18.
^ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/228904/roths-humble-pie/mark-goldblatt
19.
^ http://old.nationalreview.com/comment/goldblatt200512080844.asp
20.
^ http://ducts.org/06_05/html/reviews/goldblatt.html
21.
^ http://reason.com/archives/2002/10/01/dangerous-thinkers/1
22.
^ http://old.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-goldblatt060602.asp
23.
^ http://www.claremont.org/publications/pubid.700/pub_detail.asp
24.
^ http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2010/08/31/symbolic-victories/
25.
^ http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2010/08/31/symbolic-victories/
26.
^ http://spectator.org/archives/2008/08/07/bush-hatred-the-sequel
27.
^ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/226573/revenge-che/mark-goldblatt
28.
^ http://spectator.org/archives/2010/04/06/pity-party-logic
29.
^ http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2009/10/23/the-wise-mans-burden/
30.
^ http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0704/goldblatt1.asp
31.
^ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/217556/containment-context-mark-goldblatt
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