In the last few years, as the war in Iraq grinds on and America faces internal inquiry on both sides about motives and goals, we’ve all heard the words ‘Unpatriotic,’ ‘un-American,’ and ‘traitorous’ used to describe people on both sides of the aisle. From the 21st century’s Hanoi Janes to the fingers pointing at Rumsfeld for failure to properly arm and equip soldiers in combat zones, it seems nobody can agree on what a patriot is, but everyone has an idea of what it isn’t.

A patriot is, in the most basic sense, someone who supports the ideals, attitudes, and culture of his country. An American patriot would be one who lived, thought, and behaved in the spirit of the country’s founders. American patriots speak with dignity, intellectual and moral honesty, and courage. They act with those same virtues in times of stress.

Unfortunately, it seems that both wings of our public discourse cannot agree on what these terms mean. Which is why I have decided to publicize a small primer.

Dignity, in terms of American patriotism, is an unwillingness to shrug off responsibility. It is accepting one’s duties to maintain the freedoms that have built this country and in many ways have shaped the destiny of Western Liberalism. By this definition, no one who has committed a crime and not served their sentence can be a patriot.

Courage is, of course, the willingness to stand up for what you believe in, and defend it with all your capacity. We see this every day on both sides of the squabbles about patriotism - soldiers going off to Iraq or Afghanistan and angry anti-war protestors both - and both of them exemplify the virtue of courage.

The truly lacking one, the one that everyone seems to forget, is intellectual and moral honesty. It is a willingness to criticize one’s own beliefs as well as others, and ask whether or not consistency and moral virtue are present in the acts a person undertakes. Is someone claiming that all cultures are equally valid and thus allowing Islamic jihadists to behead people because ‘that’s the way they are’? There may be a lapse in thinking here. Is someone against the war in Iraq because of how many soldiers have died in it - and the number is a paltry few compared to the amount of good that has been done in the face of the anti-civilization barbarisms those soldiers are facing - and yet turns a blind eye at facts like Hussein’s genocide of the Kurds?

Being a patriot does not mean lockstepping your views to the rationale of the current majority. It is not a ‘my country, right or wrong’ mentality. That is a black hole of wishful thinking, a subordinating of one’s duty to think for oneself and contribute to the public discourse in favor of mental laziness. A patriot speaks his point of view, argues as hard as his evidence will allow him to, and if he is shown to be wrong, changes his mind. America is a marketplace of ideas, where the opinions of one person are no more or less important than the opinions of another, and are evaluated and judged equally.

In that case, anyone who is acting in what they believe to be the interests of America is thereby a patriot. It is difficult to accuse someone who wants fewer American soldiers to die of being unpatriotic. It is just as difficult to accuse someone who wants to bring freedom to the rest of the world of being unpatriotic. They are two ideas wholly supported by American founding philosophies. The only issue is which is more effective at achieving the aims of those philosophies.

In the old days of the catholic church, after one confessed to a sin, it was possible to purchase an indulgence from the church which would aid in relieving your guilty conscience. Let’s fast forward to today and focus on the church of environmentalism. When one sins against the environment by driving to work, turning on the air-conditioning or exhaling, no need to worry, because they’ve got indulgences for that too.

Carbon credits they’re called, and they’re not cheap. $8 will excuse you from the sin of owning a pet cat. $23 will buy you forgiveness for flying cross country. And $10 will grant you a pardon from the digusting environmental effects of your own respiratory system.

On the Foxnews show Hannity’s America, Sean did an expose on the “learjet liberals”, left wingers who preach carbon nuetrality as scripture but who fly around in private jets that burn more in one flight than any normal person could burn in a year driving their personal automobile. Naturally, being fair and balanced means you have to bring on some liberal apologists and let them make their…points. When he posed the question, “Does that make them hypocritical?” the answer was a resounding “No way!” It’s not hyporcitical, they say, because people like Al Gore, while admittedly horrible polluters themselves, make up for it by purchasing indulgences…er, carbon credits to offset their pollution. The message I take from this is that it’s OK to pollute as much as you want, provided you’re a multi-millionaire who can afford to shell out for redemption. The rest of us peasants will just have to suck it up and walk to work and we damned well better like it because we can’t afford the carbon credits.

Let’s get one thing straight, carbon credits, and the global warming scare tactics in general have nothing to do with the environment. They are merely another tool at the socialists’ disposal for use in dismantling western capitalism (especially in the United States). The cover story is that the goal of carbon credits is to manufacture a tangible cost of doing buisiness for industries that pollute. This, they say, will move pollution from the realm of being an unquantifiable externality, directly onto business financial spreadsheets.

The real purpose as I see it is the same purpose as everything socialists try to do: take money away from the productive and give it to the non-productive. Productive societies generate more pollution (we also do more to mitigate it, but that’s beside the point). Non-productive societies generate less. Given our current technology and utilization of resources, this dichotomy is universal and inescapable. This may change in the future. But as it is today, the only way for industries to become less carbon polluting is to produce fewer goods and services. Period. You can’t create cement concrete with windmills. You can’t smelter steel with solar power. You can’t make plastics, asphalt or many other things without the byproducts gained from refining petroleum.

The socialist puppetmasters of the international community get together and arbitrarily select an amount of pollution that is acceptable, and use this figure to place upper limits on the amount of pollution that developed countries may produce, i.e. the Kyoto accords. All other nations, including developing nations, are pretty well excluded from these constraints. Nations which work to reduce their carbon emissions below their required levels (by becoming less productive) are rewarded with carbon credits which they can then sell to other nations which produce more. Periodically, the upper limit for pollution will be lowered, providing further incentive for reduced productivity and levying an even more ponderous taxation upon the productive. If you extrapolate this model out to its logical conclusion, what you end up with is a world without pollution, because all the productive economies have been destroyed and their wealth redistributed to the non-producing societies. In this world, devoid of property rights and free enterprise, everyone is dependant upon the state for survival. Make no mistake, this is the real goal.

The church of environmentalism is giving Islam a run for its money in terms of being the most sinister ideological threat to civilization as we know it.

Lieberman Says War Vote Could Prompt Party Switch

By: Carrie Budoff
February 22, 2007 06:33 PM EST

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut told the Politico on Thursday that he has no immediate plans to switch parties but suggested that Democratic opposition to funding the war in Iraq might change his mind.

Lieberman, a self-styled independent who caucuses with the Democrats, has been among the strongest supporters of the war and President Bush?s plan to send an additional 21,500 combat troops into Iraq to help quell the violence there.

“I have no desire to change parties,” Lieberman said in a telephone interview. “If that ever happens, it is because I feel the majority of Democrats have gone in a direction that I don’t feel comfortable with.”

If you ask me, Joe Lieberman is the most powerful man in the senate at the moment in terms of opposing defeat in Iraq. Given his freedom to choose which party to caucus with, he essentially holds a veto over democrats’ efforts to defund the war. His victory over the far left’s anti-war candidate Ned Lamont gives him a mandate to wield said veto and join the republicans if necessary, especially considering that he received only 33% of the democrat vote while raking in 70% of the state’s republicans. Anti-war democrats should take heed and consider these statements a shot across the bow. You may find yourselves in a position where you have to decide which is more important: securing American defeat in Iraq or keeping your party in control of the senate.

Hugo Chavez accuses us of planning to wreck the Venezuelan economy before his socialist policies have a chance to.

Chavez, speaking Thursday on his newly scheduled prime-time TV talk show, predicted that “one of the fiercest battle fronts” was coming ahead as Washington readied to destroy Venezuela economically.

He said that recent comments by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accusing Chavez of “destroying” his country’s economy meant that “the imperialist plan of the moment” had turned to economic sabotage.

I see what he’s doing. Like it or not, Chavez is not an idiot. He is counting on socialism to ruin his nation’s economy and is using the now state controlled media apparatus to set the U.S. up to take the blame in the minds of his people. That way he gets an impoverished and therefore maleable population to control, as well as a scapegoat to shift all the blame away from his own regime.

Textbook. And those of us with our eyes open saw it coming.

Half of young children are anxious about the effects of global warming, often losing sleep [ed. Oh please] because of their concern, according to a new report today.

A survey of 1,150 youngsters aged between seven and 11 found that one in four blamed politicians for the problems of climate change.

Are you doing enough?

One in seven of those questioned by supermarket giant Somerfield said their own parents were not doing enough to improve the environment.

The most feared consequences of global warming included poor health, the possible submergence of entire countries and the welfare of animals.

Most of those polled understood the benefits of recycling, although one in 10 thought the issue was linked to riding a bike.

This is getting ridiculous. Polling children about their global warming concerns? They have no idea what they’re talking about. They are just saying what they hear.

This isn’t a result of “increasing awareness” as they say. It’s the result of indoctrination.

Populism, that ugly beast of base emotion and lowest common denominator “logic”, is on the resurgence again. One such issue, where the masses are beginning to swoon over the prospect of big government action, is that of health care. Front and center in this debate is the shiny-haired demagogue himself, John Edwards.

The ambulance-chasing trial lawyer begins with grim prognostications on the state of our health care system. The current system is “dysfunctional,” he declares, justifying his calls for a “dramatic transformation”. And I believe he is right in finding that need, it’s what he wants to transform us into that is of concern. Thus he doesn’t often bother to say what criteria he uses to determine the system is dysfunctional. And for good reason. If he were to point to rising health care costs as a specific problem, for instance, we could turn around and point at him as a specific cause. Rising premiums in the face of so many frivolous lawsuits by trial lawyers just like John Edwards has done a lot to drive out small practices and force others to raise prices. Though a problem that should be addressed, it should be noted this doesn’t quite reach the level of primary cause.

“The problem is the HMO’s”, he might exclaim, no doubt to vociferous applause. But then we could just point our fingers at Ted Kennedy and his big govenment peers, who forced managed care onto an unsuspecting populace with passage of the HMO Act of 1973. But the true problems with health care go back further than that. To understand the cause we need simply to look at the two other big government inventions, medicare and medicaid:

. . .The proliferation of managed-care organizations (MCOs) in general, and HMOs in particular, resulted from the 1965 enactment of Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor. Literally overnight, on July 1, 1966, millions of Americans lost all financial responsibility for their health-care decisions.

Offering “free care” led to predictable results. Because Congress placed no restrictions on benefits and removed all sense of cost-consciousness, health-care use and medical costs skyrocketed. Congressional testimony reveals that between 1965 and 1971, physician fees increased 7 percent and hospital charges jumped 13 percent, while the Consumer Price Index rose only 5.3 percent. The nation’s health-care bill, which was only $39 billion in 1965, increased to $75 billion in 1971. Patients had found the fount of unlimited care, and doctors and hospitals had discovered a pot of gold.

It was this Congress created issue of rising cost, in fact, that gave big government power-grabbers an excuse to stake out even more control over health care.

. . .This stampede to the doctor’s office, through the U.S. Treasury, sent Congress into a panic. It had unlocked the health-care appetite of millions, and the results were disastrous. While fiscal prudence demanded a hasty retreat, Congress opted instead for deception.

. . . Advocates of universal coverage saw this financial crisis as an opportunity to advance national health care through the fledgling HMO. Legislation encouraging members of the public to enter HMOs, where individual control over health-care decisions was weakened, would likely make the transition to a national health-care system, where control is centralized at the federal level, less noticeable and less traumatic. By 1971, the administration had authorized $8.4 million for policy studies to examine alternative health insurance plans for designing a “national health insurance plan.”

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a longtime advocate of national health care, proceeded to hold three months of extensive hearings in 1971 on what was termed the “Health Care Crisis in America.” Following those hearings, he held a series of hearings “on the whole question of HMO’s.”

Introducing the HMO hearings, Kennedy said,”We need legislation which reorganizes the system to guarantee a sufficient volume of high quality medical care, distributed equitably across the country and available at reasonable cost to every American. It is going to take a drastic overhaul of our entire way of doing business in the health-care field in order to solve the financing and organizational aspects of our health crisis. One aspect of that solution is the creation of comprehensive systems of health-care delivery.”

This seperation of consumer from payer has had a predictable market effect on health care. When cost is not an issue to the individual deciding which service to use, there is no force keeping costs down. And the inevitable conflict between payer and consumer that results from contrasting interests, quality care versus cost, only serves to frustrate individuals. The proliferation of third party payers is what makes our system dysfunctional. The litany of big government solutions currently being offered are only going to make this problem worse, resulting in a health care system offering even less quality for more cost. A true solution would involve empowering the consumer, not granting ever more control to big government.

Ted Kennedy failed. He did not deliver anything even remotely resembling a “system to guarantee a sufficient volume of high quality medical care, distributed equitably across the country and available at reasonable cost to every American.” John Edwards is a snake oil salesman offering the same failed concoction previously peddled by the likes of Ted Kennedy and later by Hillary Clinton. We learned our lesson in the 90’s, let’s not now forget it only a decade later.

GLOBAL Cooling will take a toll on children’s health, according to a new report showing hospital admissions for colds soar as days get colder.
The new study found that temperature decreases had a significant impact on the number of pre-schoolers presenting to emergency departments for colds and goosebump outbreaks.

The two-year study at a major children’s hospital showed that for every five-degree decrease in temperature two more children under six years old were admitted with colds to that hospital.

The University of Sydney research is the first to make a solid link between climate changes and childhood illness.

“And now global cooling is becoming more apparent, it is highly likely an increasing number of young children will be turning up at hospital departments with these kinds of common illnesses,” said researcher Lawrence Lam, a paediatrics specialist.

“It really demonstrates the urgent need for a more thorough investigation into how exactly climate change will affect health in childhood.”

Dr Lam said the results, collated from The Children’s Hospital at Westmead admissions, back up beliefs that children are less able to regulate their bodies against climate change than adults.

The brain’s thermal regulation mechanism is not as well developed in children, making them more susceptible to “freezing” and at risk of developing illness, he said.

“They’re particularly at risk of extreme changes, much more than other people.”

The study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Health Research, analysed several different climate factors, including UV index, rainfall and humidity, collected from the Bureau of Meteorology in 2001 and 2002.

Temperatures were the only negative risk factor, with findings linking cold to both colds and goosebumps but not to respiratory conditions.

Surprisingly, rates of gastroenteritis were lower on days with a high UV factor probably, says Dr Lam, because the rays “sterilised” the ground, killing more germs and reducing risk.

He said it was still unclear whether the cold directly triggered the illnesses or whether other cold-related problems, like blizzards, were responsible.

A longer-term study was needed add strength to the findings, Dr Lam said.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, all the words in bold were actually something else in the original article. They’re trying to convince people that global warming causes fevers in children.

Reread this nonsense:

“Dr Lam said the results, collated from The Children’s Hospital at Westmead admissions, back up beliefs that children are less able to regulate their bodies against climate change than adults.”

The children are less able to regulate their bodies against climate change. Sob. If the climate trendline ticks up by an average of .02 degrees in the next twelve months, there will be outbreaks of illness among the children. Because of global warming. This is idiotic. If temperature increase is such a boogeyman, then why the heck are we concerning ourselves with global warming? Global warming may warm the planet by .02 degrees this year, but the earths orbit will heat the northern himisphere by as much as 40 degrees by mid summer! Global warming isn’t the problem, the laws of physics are. So are high pressure zones that bring with them warm fronts which can heat an area by 20 degrees in just a few hours. How many fevers does that translate to? Somebody should do a study. But they won’t, because nobody can secure massive amounts of political capital by railing against warm fronts.

According to the article, the study was conducted at a major childrens hospital. My guess is that the hospital wouldn’t let its name appear in the story because they don’t want to be associated with such ludicrous garbage science.

The data from the hospital demonstrates that for every 5 degree increase in temperature, they get 2 additional patients with fevers. That’s what they’re basing these rock solid conclusions off of. OK, so assuming global warming causes the worldwide average temperature to increase at a rate of one degree every century, that means in about five hundred years hospitals will be forced to deal with a massive flood of two additional fevers. That is assuming, of course, that there are any hospitals left after 2.5 billion illegal immigrants enter this country over the next 500 years and receive their mandatory non-revenue hospital treatment. It is also assuming that hospitals will admit someone for a fever to begin with, after the seemingly inevitable trend towards liberalism has its way and socializes medicine in this country.

Ladies and gentlemen, fearmongering at its worst.

As has been said before, environmentalism is the religion of choice for secular liberals. And it appears they have chosen their prophet.

They came in their hundreds to hear him speak, and even those left standing outside the crowded hall would not be deterred from lingering in the proximity of the Baptist prophet from Tennessee.

It wasn’t any old-time religion that drew these believers to Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto, but a concept they feel is every bit as crucial to humanity — global warming — that made them want to get close to Al Gore, the impassioned former U.S. vice-president, as he delivered his now famous Inconvenient Truth about climate change.

Like many a bygone leader who happened along at a key moment in history, Mr. Gore — who has been sounding the environmental warning bell for years — has suddenly inspired the kind of faith and fervour in others that he insists will be needed to overcome such a monumental problem.

“From my perspective, it is a form of religion,” said Bruce Crofts, 69, as he held a banner aloft for the East Toronto Climate Action Group amid a lively prelecture crowd outside the old hall.

“The religion for this group is doing something for the environment.”

[…]

Victor Storm, who owns a chain of Toronto-area bedding outlets, went online Feb. 7 and offered a $40 duvet in exchange for a ticket. He wound up surrendering a $150 duvet instead, after a fair bit of questioning over thread counts.

“Because it was so cold, it was something people warmed up to,” Mr. Storm said yesterday.[ed. Ironic, no?]

[…]

There were vegans seeking new recruits, people calling for the closing of Ontario’s coal-fired power plants, a Greenpeace mascot dressed as a polar bear — even the UFO believers showed up.

“I know you won’t believe this,” one of them, a man named Victor Viggiani, said with a practised tongue, “but the extraterrestrial technology involved in this . . . it’s free energy, man. Absolute free energy, and it’ll be the end of fossil fuels.”[ed. I can’t decide which is crazier, beleif in global warming or in extra-terrestrials visiting earth. I guess they both appeal to the same gullible people.]

“Heed the Goracle.” Indeed.

I guess when you destroy God, you have to replace him with something. For these people it’s UFOs, Global Warming and Al Gore, the trinity of the deranged.

The Conservative Compendium is prepared to make an endorsement. No, not for the U.S. race in 2008, for the upcoming French election. We hereby endorse Olivier Besancenot, who represents the Revolutionary Communist League, for French President! Let’s take a look at his wonderful platform.

Olivier Besancenot wants:

• A 30 hour work week, but without a reduction of pay to match this reduction in productivity.
• Profitable companies to be prohibited to lay anyone off
• France out of NATO
• Voting rights for everyone, regardless of citizenship status
• An allowance of 1000 euros per month for all young people (For some reason, there just don’t seem to be any jobs…We can’t imagine why! - CC)

On and on it goes . . . Mr. Besancenot also calls for radically raising taxes on the rich and for a massive reduction in french military spending and capabilities. In other words, he’s the ideal candidate for anyone seeking the destruction of France. If this guy won, the Republic of France would be the Islamic Republic of France in short order. And that just tickles our funny-bone, so we offer Mr. Besancenot our endorsement.

Selwyn Duke at the American Thinker says Rudy has no chance.

Rudolph Giuliani for president? Please. There’s more chance I’ll simultaneously be made head of NOW and the NAACP and be invited to George Soros’ next soiree.

. . .Unlike the piece I wrote about the now listing U.S.S. Mitt Romney, I’m not herein trying to sound the alarm. Rather, I simply point out that Giuliani is a ship that only floats in New York Harbor. He is far too liberal to get the Republican nomination.

I’ve never witnessed a more laughable game of collective “Let’s pretend” than the media’s Giuliani coverage. Even Dick Morris, the erstwhile Clinton propaganda minister who fancies himself the Niccolo Machiavelli of the third millennium, has called Giuliani the man to beat.

I’ve no doubt that Mr. Duke has been an astute political observer for many years and he certainly can point to an impressive history to support his claims. The problem with listening without question to such people every year is that they almost always miss the boat when the prevailing paradigm shifts. Uttering such conventional wisdom “truisms” like “too liberal to get the Republican nomination” has no doubt made many commentators look like political geniuses over the years. And yet, that means absolutely nothing today because every election cycle deals with different realities, and there’s no guarantee this reality will even remotely resemble those of the past. In fact, the unique nature of the existential threat facing the country is strong reason to suspect this election cycle will show us something entirely different.

Unfortunately, Duke also had to play fast and loose with the facts, relying on a number of half-truths, to support his anti-Rudy screed. He points out that Rudy “never missed a chance to march in the ‘Gay Pride’ parade.” What he doesn’t bother mentioning is that Rudy never missed a chance to march in any parade he was invited to. He similarly lambasts Rudy for failing to outlaw partial birth abortion, implying that Rudy has no interest in doing so. But Guiliani has said that he does support outlawing that horrendous practice, he was merely not satisfied with the particular piece of legislation he had come before him on the issue, claiming that he wanted a provision to exempt situations where the life of the mother was threatened. Whether or not any such situation even exists, where partial birth abortion is the only option to save a mothers life, I don’t know. But that position is a far-cry from what Duke implies.

He then highlights Rudy’s statement that he would give his daughter money for an abortion, contrasting that in the same sentence with Guiliani’s assertion that he is personally against abortion. Duke seems to think these positions are at odds, but they are not. If one actually looks at the context of that discussion, what Rudy says is that he would encourage his daughter or anyone else not to get an abortion, but if she ultimately decided to he would have to accept it. In other words, he is personally opposed to the practice, but not convinced that strictly outlawing it is practical or desirable. The merits of this position I have no interest in discussing here, but those who do discuss it should do so on the merits of Rudy’s actual position, not on their own flimsy strawmen.

Interestingly, another article at the American Thinker, by self-described “staunch pro-lifer” and former “single-issue voter” Kyle-Anne Shiver, takes entirely the opposite position and endorses Rudy’s candidacy for the nomination. She correctly identifies the single most important issue of this election, which is the generational war against jihad that we are presently engaged in. Whether or not her case for Rudy in this regard is sufficient I’m not prepared to address definitively at this time, though it is compelling.

Nor am I really prepared to endorse any candidate at this point, though I readily proclaim that Newt Gingrich is my ideological choice. Nevertheless, I’d rather wait and let them make their respective cases and stake out their positions clearly before declaring official support for any candidate. Regardless of who I eventually decide to support in the primaries, I believe that Rudy can win the general election if he wins the nomination. And, unlike Mr. Duke, I also happen to believe that he can win the nomination; something that would have been unthinkable in previous years, but which I nevertheless believe to be true today. The important thing is that I am open to hearing Rudy make his case. And the preponderance of the evidence so far suggests that most other conservatives are as well.