With the hornets nest of conservative and libertarian anger which Colorado Governor John “I’m a moderate” Hickenlooper stirred up by supporting a raft of anti-gun legislation in this once-red state, I thought there was little chance he would pardon or commute the sentence of Nathan Dunlap. Particularly since Hickenlooper made sure that a bill ending the death penalty in Colorado did not get a vote in the state legislature. Today, with a “temporary reprieve,” the governor may have just done the politically unthinkable: He has made it possible for a Republican to beat him in 2014. Nathan Dunlap shot five people, killing four of them, in a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant in Aurora, Colorado in 1993. He later said that killing the people was “better than sex.” Hickenlooper says that the time since the conviction has given “the benefit of information that exposes an inequitable system.” Whether or not the system is inequitable is not relevant. There is no question as to Dunlap’s guilt. Zero, nada, zilch. He did it, and he was proud of it. He deserves to die. George Brauchler, the recently elected District Attorney of the judicial district where Dunlap was convicted, and where the mass-murderer James Holmes is soon to face trial, has argued that “justice demands the death of Nathan Dunlap.” I couldn’t agree more. The parents of Dunlap’s victims are rightfully furious . Furthermore, if Dunlap doesn’t deserve death, then what is the purpose of having a death penalty in Colorado? How about also pardoning the other people on death row here, including one who murdered the son of Colorado State Representative Rhonda Fields? As usual, Hickenlooper wants to have it both ways: By doing this by executive order, and as reprieve, it means a future governor could undo today’s move and send Nathan Dunlap to his just reward unless Hickenlooper does something more permanent before leaving office. My prediction: This will make many Coloradoans, not just Republicans, extremely angry. And it will cause several Republican gubernatorial hopefuls who had been on the sidelines because Hickenlooper had seemed extremely difficult to beat now put their hats in the ring. The number one campaign slogan for the eventual Republican nominee: “I promise that Nathan Dunlap will get what he deserves.” One thing which occurred to me when the anti-gun legislation was being shoved down the throats of unwilling Coloradoans was this: Hickenlooper is aiming to get a high-paying job working for Michael Bloomberg. Today’s events make me think I may not have been unduly conspiracy-minded after all. John Hickenlooper just stabbed his state, and the justice system, in the back. Now it’s time to hope that voters do the same to his political career in 18 months, and return this state to some sense of sanity.
Continued here:
Colorado Governor Gives “Reprieve” to Murderer
With the hornets nest of conservative and libertarian anger which Colorado Governor John “I’m a moderate” Hickenlooper stirred up by supporting a raft of anti-gun legislation in this once-red state, I thought there was little chance he would pardon or commute the sentence of Nathan Dunlap. Particularly since Hickenlooper made sure that a bill ending the death penalty in Colorado did not get a vote in the state legislature. Today, with a “temporary reprieve,” the governor may have just done the politically unthinkable: He has made it possible for a Republican to beat him in 2014. Nathan Dunlap shot five people, killing four of them, in a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant in Aurora, Colorado in 1993. He later said that killing the people was “better than sex.” Hickenlooper says that the time since the conviction has given “the benefit of information that exposes an inequitable system.” Whether or not the system is inequitable is not relevant. There is no question as to Dunlap’s guilt. Zero, nada, zilch. He did it, and he was proud of it. He deserves to die. George Brauchler, the recently elected District Attorney of the judicial district where Dunlap was convicted, and where the mass-murderer James Holmes is soon to face trial, has argued that “justice demands the death of Nathan Dunlap.” I couldn’t agree more. The parents of Dunlap’s victims are rightfully furious . Furthermore, if Dunlap doesn’t deserve death, then what is the purpose of having a death penalty in Colorado? How about also pardoning the other people on death row here, including one who murdered the son of Colorado State Representative Rhonda Fields? As usual, Hickenlooper wants to have it both ways: By doing this by executive order, and as reprieve, it means a future governor could undo today’s move and send Nathan Dunlap to his just reward unless Hickenlooper does something more permanent before leaving office. My prediction: This will make many Coloradoans, not just Republicans, extremely angry. And it will cause several Republican gubernatorial hopefuls who had been on the sidelines because Hickenlooper had seemed extremely difficult to beat now put their hats in the ring. The number one campaign slogan for the eventual Republican nominee: “I promise that Nathan Dunlap will get what he deserves.” One thing which occurred to me when the anti-gun legislation was being shoved down the throats of unwilling Coloradoans was this: Hickenlooper is aiming to get a high-paying job working for Michael Bloomberg. Today’s events make me think I may not have been unduly conspiracy-minded after all. John Hickenlooper just stabbed his state, and the justice system, in the back. Now it’s time to hope that voters do the same to his political career in 18 months, and return this state to some sense of sanity.
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Colorado Governor Gives “Reprieve” to Murderer
While driving to work this morning, I heard an ad (on Fox News’ Sirius Satellite channel — not sure if the same ad was running on Fox News television) from the Conservative Majority Fund urging people to sign a petition supporting the impeachment of Barack Obama. A quick look at their web site shows that they’re still angry about Obama’s “forged birth certificate.” Personally, I think it’s most likely that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, though it wouldn’t completely shock me if that were not true or, more probably, that he applied to schools and perhaps got financial aid, as a foreign student. Politically, all of this stuff is a huge loser for Republicans and should be studiously avoided by any group which really aims to create a “conservative majority” in Congress. The same must be said of talk of impeachment. First of all, unless Barack Obama actually ordered the IRS targeting of Americans, which is extremely unlikely, he is guilty of many things including incompetence, a lack of understanding or appreciation of the nation he leads, a lack of leadership, etc. But none of this is a “high crime” or otherwise impeachable offense. Indeed, even if he personally ordered that no help be sent to Benghazi, again unlikely, that would not strike me as impeachable. Few sane Americans would see discussion of impeachment as anything but hyperventilating hyper-partisanship. Furthermore, many Americans remenber the impeachment of Bill Clinton. He may or may not have deserved it, though I’d argue that he was a much better president than Barack Obama. But it was a political disaster for Republicans. So sane Americans would wonder about the sanity of Republicans who want to go down that same path, against a president whose personal popularity remains stubbornly high. Americans basically hate Congress. That will not begin to improve until they see its members as working on behalf of the people rather than the political parties or their own power. The current raft of “scandals” surrounding the Obama administration shines a perfect spotlight not just on the incompetence of the current administration but on the inherent risks in gigantic government. Behind the light on government failure is the pall cast on those politicians, namely Democrats, who support ever-larger government with the specific example of Obamacare and its pending enforcement by the IRS. In order to create a conservative majority, Republicans and conservatives, and others (like me) who are neither Republican nor conservative but would much prefer a conservative majority to what we have now, must continually remind Americans that current events are a natural symptom of big government, and that they’re just the beginning of the abuses we will see if Democrats’ government-uber-alles vision for America takes even greater hold than it has so far. Impeachment talk is an unnecessary, and frankly idiotic, distraction from what must really be done to try to regain Republican control of the US Senate. It makes Obama’s opponents look unserious and allows the media to use the silliness of groups like the Conservative Majority fund to paint all of us with a broad, unflattering brush. Even for the most anti-Obama partisan, I urge you to avoid, and publicly oppose, discussion of impeachment. Once you support it, those moderate/independent Americans whom we most need to influence will no longer listen to anything you have to say.
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Impeachment Talk is a Mistake
Despite my well-deserved international reputation as a coward, I occasionally get into arguments with people, mostly on Facebook where no one can punch you. It was during such an argument recently that someone actually implied that I was a liar, one vice for which I don’t have a reputation, as far as I know. We were discussing…. never mind; that’s another essay. But when she asked me where I got my ideas about right and wrong, I said that I’d read the Bible. My opponent laughed that off. She’d never read the whole Bible, she said, and she was pretty sure I hadn’t either. It was one of those “taken aback” moments that come more and more often as you get older. I realized in a fresh new way that I’m a creature of another century. I have in fact read the Bible more than a dozen times, and I can remember a day when reading the Bible all the way through, though certainly regarded as an accomplishment, didn’t rank alongside claims to have climbed K2 or to have built a model of Graceland out of toothpicks. It’s a long book, I’ll grant you, but not that much longer than The Lord of the Rings . Now if you’re expecting me to lament the passing of Biblical literacy in our generation, well, I do, but my point here is a larger (or smaller) one. My fears for the future are many, but the one I’m thinking of just now is my fear of losing things that make participatory democracy workable. Some of you are saying, “This idiot thinks you need the Bible to have a democracy! Nonsense! We have the legacy of the Enlightenment! We have science! We have information and communications unheard of in history! We’ll do just fine without one old book, thanks for asking.” Still, I beg to differ. Here’s my case. I’ve written before in this space about the 18th-19th century Norwegian peasant revivalist, Hans Nielsen Hauge. In a book on Hauge’s life published in 1911, bishop and historian A. Christian Bang wrote (my translation): “Everyone knows that the monarchical officials were not accustomed to any contradiction from the people’s side; even when they did not have the law with them, and even when it was a matter of arbitrary and invented laws, they seldom encountered spoken opposition. The people’s congenital respect for authority, their characteristic loyalty, made them quick to submit.… But suddenly people all over the country are turning on the officials; the formerly docile farmers refuse to obey and set their own ideas above the initiatives of the wisest in the land. Men prefer to go to prison, to be martyrs, than to follow the exhortations of the officials.… This is a matter of particular interest as the first significant collision between absolutism and a freer participatory order in our country.” What Bang is examining here is the first flowering of liberalism — what in Norway is called Venstre , the Left — in one European country. But note its source. This sudden burst of public courage doesn’t rise from the study of Rousseau or Voltaire, and certainly not from Marx, who was just being born about that time. It rose from newly literate peasants reading their Bibles. It was access to the Bible that began to turn ordinary Europeans from subjects into citizens. Every counterculturalist who ever wore a “Question Authority” button ought to thank black-clad 19th century pietists for coming up with the idea in the first place. “Historical trivia,” the skeptic will reply. “It could have been any book, the Koran or the Canterbury Tales, just as long as they were reading. It’s the fact that they read, not the particular book.” No, I don’t think so. Imagine that peasant, in homespun clothes and wooden shoes, facing the bailiff in his uniform and shiny boots. What gives him the right to talk back? Where does he get the confidence to believe that the bailiff’s brute power — which will certainly see him imprisoned in the short run — must eventually bow before his own common sense? It can’t be a firm belief in the rightness of his own heart. The bailiff has a heart too, as does the king, and they have steel to back them up. No, it’s a supernatural belief that God has spoken in words that simple men can understand, and that that truth has God’s support and must win in the end. Our modern worldview offers no such assurance. As Paul Johnson notes in Modern Times , moral relativism always leads to Totalitarianism. Because in a morally relative age, power alone can settle any question. “Well, you can’t appeal to the Bible anymore,” says the skeptic. “That day is over.” And that’s what I’m afraid of.
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The Book We Still Can’t Spare
An all too familiar scene was enacted on the campus of Swarthmore College during a meeting on May 4th to discuss demands by student activists for the college to divest itself of its investments in companies that dealt in fossil fuels. As a speaker was beginning a presentation to show how many millions of dollars such a disinvestment would cost the college, student activists invaded the meeting, seized the microphone, and shouted down a student who rose in the audience to object. Although there were professors and administrators in the room — including the college president — apparently nobody had the guts to put a stop to these storm trooper tactics. Nor is it likely that there will be any punishment of those who put their own desires above the rights of others. On the contrary, these students went on to demand mandatory campus “teach-ins,” and the administration caved on that demand. Among their other demands are that courses on ethnic studies, and on gender and sexuality, be made a requirement for graduation. Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok? At a prestigious college like Swarthmore, every student who trampled on other people’s rights could be expelled and there would be plenty of replacement students available to take their places. Although colleges and universities across the country have been giving in to storm trooper tactics ever since the nationwide campus disruptions of the 1960s, not all have. Back in the 1960s, the University of Chicago was a rare exception. As Professor George J. Stigler, a Nobel Prize winning economist, put it in his memoirs, “our faculty united behind the expulsion of a large number of young barbarians.” The sky did not fall. There was no bloodbath. The University of Chicago was in fact spared some of the worst nonsense that more compliant institutions were permanently saddled with in the years that followed, as a result of their failure of nerve in the 1960s. When the nationwide campus disruptions and violence of the 1960s gave way to quieter times in the 1970s, many academics congratulated themselves on having restored peace. But it was the peace of surrender. Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other “studies” were among the price of academic peace. All too often, these “studies” are about propaganda rather than serious education. Academic campuses have become among the least free places in America. “Speech codes,” vaguely worded but zealously applied to those who dare to say anything that is not politically correct, have become the norm. Few professors would dare to publish research or teach a course debunking the claims made in various ethnic, gender or other “studies” courses. Why did all this happen? Partly it happened because of the lure of the path of least resistance, especially to academic administrators and faculty. But there was no such widespread surrender to every noisy and belligerent group of student activists prior to the 1960s. Moreover, the example of the University of Chicago showed that surrender was not inevitable. The cost of resistance to the campus barbarians may not have been the only factor. Resistance requires a sense that there is something worth defending. But decades of dumbed-down education have produced people with no sense of the importance of a moral framework within which freedom and civil discourse can flourish. Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path of least resistance by others. Neither can sustain a free society. Disruptive activists indulge their egos in the name of idealism and others cave rather than fight. It’s not just academics who won’t defend decency. Trustees could fire college presidents who cave in to storm trooper tactics. Donors could stop donating to institutions that have sold out their principles to appease the campus barbarians. But when nobody is willing to defend civilized standards, the barbarians win. Whether on college campuses or among nations on the world stage, if the battle comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are bound to win. COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM
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Wimps Versus Barbarians
