Sure, the med-industrial folks like Paulsen, probably that monster big insurance leech UnitedHealth loves the guy, as their man in Washington. When the populace is not the constituency, but special interests are, it is broom time to sweep out the mud. Slinging the mud, no. Sweep it.
Strib has early polling favoring Walz for governor over Johnson. One likely thing is Pawlenty was the guy the current Paulsen advertising money favored. Where besides Paulsen is that money to buy propaganda being invested now? Johnson was a surprise, apparently. And the investors in candidates they can trust to deliver has noticed Paulsen, with Pawlenty rooted out by caucusing and primary voting. Hooted out by the DFL. Back to DC, or wherever.
Walz, unfortunately, is not anywhere near Erin Murphy on the progressive end of the DFL spectrum, but he is a solid and decent candidate, as is Johnson. Walz is the more broadly experienced and level-headed, Johnson the more doctrinaire. Walz leading is a good sign.
Why polling on the AG race is not being done, or if done is not being reported, is mystery. Ellison has gravitas. Experience and an eye toward a more progressive people-oriented outlook; an inclusive one, not just wanting to represent churchgoers with a hostile agenda toward women wanting reproductive choice to continue from now on to be law of the land with doctors protected for rendering medical services wanted by their patients. It is interesting how the women in need are not targeted as incessantly as the service providers are. Private sector market choice, that lodestar of feigned Republican rhetoric, is disdained in practice by those chasing abortion providers with pitchforks and torches and guns, bibles and preachers.
Anyway, the good old Cuckingstool days, way back in 2011, Timmer on Wardlow, two video links, one Wardlow proving his "stuff" and the other a tune Timmer suggests Wardlow called to mind. It is worth a note that Wardlow does not hold exclusive rights to claim the point of the tune as his. Others fit. One sees an outward manifested effect and has to be cognizant and apprehensive of what might be causation factors underlying a misdriven persona.
To close, great news from City Pages, with a truer than most final pair of paragraphs. We should expect the best from those holding the future. And at the very best, we can hope for a wisdom a large part of their elders may have lost by day-to-day grinding political and economic
____________UPDATE____________
Per the song, this link.
__________FURTHER UPDATE_________
WWFS - What Would Freud Say?
Those big "marine 26 combat missions, retired Lt. Col. 29 years," boots to fill, that could accompany an impressionable growing up into stern ways, where flexibility of mind and spirit might be less valued than absolute unwavering tunnel vision. Or not. Guesses are only that.
Ellison's background has been a Republican speculation trove, so what about stern, humorless Douglas as an apple falling from the giant tree, son of Lynn the Lt. Col.? How did he the younger Wardlow get shaped, and is it better or more scary than Ellison's growth to where he is now? Walz served, but has preserved to himself the openness of mind we should respect in those entering official service via elective effort. Fitness for that duty might, in governing vs. fighting, arguably require different criteria. Inflexibility is a questionable trait in the give and take of presently too partisan politics. In such a context Mike Obermueller's being sandwiched between the two Wardlows in the Minnesota House is interesting. Lynn, three terms; Obermueller unseating him for one term; Doug unseating Obermueller, also for one term.
Why voters switched from Obermueller after a term, and then had buyer's remorse next chance after that change, might be food for thought where DFL continuity in the AG office has been such a good thing, tobacco settlement and such, a continuity not to be undervalued, and not to be easily conceded to anyone's Alliance Defending Freedom extremist agenda. If there is any polling, Ellison vs. Wardlow, it would be interesting to see.
____________FURTHER UPDATE____________
AG Polling: Gary Gross has discovered and linked to a polling item, Ellison/Wardlow, online here. Make of it what you will. It is KSTP reporting it's polling, with KSTP being the flagship of Republican millionaire contributor Stanley Hubbard, so factor that. Hubbard backed Carly Fiorina, really, and contributed to Friends of Roy Blunt and Republican Party of Wisconsin. MinnPost has published of Hubbard as a Koch brothers' donor. Editorial and polling reliability can be an uncertain thing, early or late, and at best actual polling questions get published to see if push polling gimmicks are afoot. The KSTP item does not present the actual poll questions, nor how sampling was done. Likely it was a poll by telephone without even a sample size reported. However it did assert a dead heat, which each party should weigh between now and voting. The KSTP folks used the report to again drag the allegations against Ellison in front of the public; Wardlow's extremist religious background with his Alliance Defending Freedom engagement not being mentioned. Nor was there mention that Wardlow during his one term in the Minnesota House submitted right-to-work-for-less as a proposed ballot constitutional amendment issue, so reporting rang as one-sided in such ways. Cherry picking is what it is, so decide how you weigh the thing. Sample size and question wording at the very least would be helpful things to know. Yet, again, a report of a "dead heat" is a report; whether delinquent in relevant facts, or not.
____________FURTHER UPDATE___________
On the Mike Olbermueller - Doug Wardlow House contest a few years back, Strib gave Olvermueller a back-pat on the way out, quoting Mike in conceding defeat:
“Over the course of a campaign, you get to learn a lot about your opponent and I’ve seen firsthand that Doug Wardlow is a hard worker who cares deeply about our community and our state. While we have very different ideas about how to get things done, I have no doubts about Doug’s sincerity and his commitment to putting Minnesota back on track.
“I congratulate him on a hard-fought, well-earned victory and I wish him and his family the best. They’re about to begin an amazing journey in public service and I know they’ll make us proud.”
Wardlow won 52 percent of the vote to Obermueller's 48 percent.
Mike is a gentleman, but the opinion here is that Timmer's tune-linked assessment of Doug Wardlow rings truthful. And here is another new part of why: Having discovered this yesterday evening, after the Vikings-Packers tie, a big hat tip goes to Dave Mindemin for a Sept. 3, 2018 item which might have gone under reader radar, as it did with mine. Mindemin begins:
Republicans, in their desperation, have decided that they want to make Keith Ellison the face of ALL Democrats in the 2018 election. Now, granted, Keith Ellison has a definite problem to deal with – but when Republicans choose to ignore all of their own little skeletons, it doesn’t really carry much weight. And Keith Ellison is still a very popular figure with the Democratic base. He will be answering for his domestic situation but the electorate will be the judge on that – not the MN GOP.
There is also one other problem with the MN GOP strategy. And that would Doug Wardlow, their GOP candidate to oppose Keith Ellison for the AG position. Wardlow is a homophobe, a anti-gay rights zealot and he was counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, which sought to put laws into effect to discriminate against transgender individuals. Wardlow is another of those theocratic Republicans who would use a position like Attorney General to force “Christian” values in government. And I use the term “Christian” loosely, because his values do not comport with the ideals of very many people who believe in the love of God for all people.
That sets the table for Mindemin, but is nothing new to Crabgrass readers. Mindemin, however, has a sense of history and ethical conduct, where but for his posting the history would have been unknown here. And Mindemin is correct on the ethical conclusions:
As an officer of the court, he is sadly lacking in ethical values. I’m going to take you back to 2010 and reissue a blog post I put together on the background of Wardlow. He once clerked for the Minnesota Supreme Court and I was given information about a blog he was posting to while clerking for the court. His post were partisan Republican and even referred to electoral races in which he trashed Democratic candidates. This is an ethical violation of court procedure. No partisan writing or public pronouncement are allowed. Wardlow tried to hide his posting by supposedly making his blog anonymous – but people that worked with him were disturbed enough that they outed this devious methodology. The following is that 2010 Post in its entirety…….
Mindemin does repost, and the link is above to go and read and deliberate over what Wardlow did while employed in a Minnesota court position where publishing political commentary was wrongful. The allegation is Wardlow anonymously published a Rostra blog,
http://therostra.blogspot.com/
(forgive if it gets misspelled Rasta in the following), the point being it appears Wardlow has not disavowed the claim the Rasta blog is his, nor has the blog been removed from the web as of Monday, Sept. 17, 2018. Mindemin's highlighting of blog posts differs from what is posted next. So read his item. This blog author Mindemin noted has written:
11/22/04
Liberal secularism disavows the role of the transcendent in political life instead positing that humanity is sufficient in and of itself for the task of ordering society on earth. Without the overarching, architectonic concept of a creative and organizing force, their philosophy 'frees' humans to assume that role themselves, to become the architects of society. This is the highest folly and the worst conceit of mankind -- that we might divorce this world from the next, and assume the role of God here on earth. Thus, according to liberals, humans are not meant to praise or glorify something higher, but to praise and glorify themselves through their 'useful' works. The extreme of this is the godlessness of communism -- atheistic hubris that, even as it exalts the power of man to build design and build utopia on earth, debases the dignity of man by unanchoring humanity from creation metaphysics. The path is thereby opened for the powerful to blame the failures of their grand designs on those charged to implement them, and what results is the 'purging of the saboteurs' -- the deaths of millions of innocents. On a lesser scale, liberalism has the same vain defect here in America -- that that man can utilize power without fearing its corrupting effect as long as the intention is good. It too readily casts away the collective wisdom manifested in our traditions for its mechanistic fixes for acute societal problems. But the cure is often more deadly than the disease.
Conservatism, as opposed to holding the mechanical-utopian view of modern American liberalism, is organic. Life is like a garden, traditions grow and evolve over time. There is an absolute good, the growth and flourishing of the garden, and there is an absolute evil, the weeds that spring up and attempt to choke the light away from the things that grow. Things move slowly and change takes time, but the change that occurs is good and lasting. Incentives, like fertilizer, are chosen over more rash options, and the natural laws governing the life of each plant, written in genetic material, are recognized and allowed to operate, not stymied and blocked. The garden may not be very useful, it may not have a purpose like that of a machine, but it is beautiful. And that's why its valuable.
Pompous? You decide. The post was fleshing out the post of the day before, stating in ending:
We should celebrate that we are not tools for our fellow man but a toy for our Creator.
Imagine that we men and women are, for our God, like music, which has no value other than its cathartic value, its ability to replicate our emotions, evince them. Music is beautiful. It is aesthetic. Insofar as beauty and aesthetics are 'useless', they too are more valuable, for earthly beauty, whether it be music or a woman or a landscape, is a partaking in the pure beauty that is God.
The love between a man and a woman is beauty as well, and the sense of wholeness we derive (or yearn for) from a well-matched relationship is really just a fuller sense of being -- separated from our Creator, we find the beauty of Him in each other. And in finding beauty in each other, in enjoying each others' human uselessness, we become more human, we live fuller, less secularly meaningful but more transcendentally meaningful lives. We search for a lifemate with whom to 'grow old' -- and that is because we unconcsciously know that when we inevitably become old and useless, we will still be able to enjoy the wholeness that comes from that pairing of souls precisely because what we derive from relationships transcends usefulness.
Also -
11/4/2004
The most common and shared values are reflected in the very constitution and form of our society -- namely, democracy and liberty. I like to call them constitutive values. Non-constitutive values are decided within the structure endorsed and legitimated by our constitutive values.
A sizeable portion of the left has now given up on America's original constitutive values. They subvert the ordering of American values, putting their own views on lesser political issues above the interests of democracy and liberty. The first sign of this has been with us for some time -- the use of activist courts to subvert the will of the people and foist liberal social values on society by fiat. The Massachusetts same-sex marriage decision is a prime example, as are the Texas sodomy case, Roe v. Wade and even Griswold v. Connecticut, the seminal contraception case.
Now that the left has been shown its views are clearly in the minority, they seem to be abandoning our higher value -- the rule of the majority. In explaining their loss, liberals are saying that the moral conservatives of the bible belt drove the election, voting on issues like gay marriage and partial birth abortion. The election showed the world that Democrats' views on these issues are clearly in the minority, and now extreme Democrats are picking up a new mantra which goes something like this: "We liberals are enlightened, and our views on these cultural and moral issues are superior to those of the people populating red states. The fact that red state-types can be so easily swayed by dangerously simplistic religious and moral appeals makes us doubt that we could ever get them to see the truth of our views -- they are too stupid." From this sickeningly elitist stance, the next step is the subversion of democracy by claiming the 'stupid' red state members ought to be disenfranchised. For now, they hope the courts will do that job. But if conservatives continue to dominate court appointments, who know to what mechanism liberals will turn.
Also -
Friday, June 25, 2004
Islamo-Sophist Tyranny
Can Western political philosophy contemplate Islamism (the ideological-extremist brand of Islam preached by Islamic radicals)? Can it understand Islamism or address the Islamist ideologue-politician? Simply put, the answer is no. And in that answer lies the reason we fight.
To unpack these questions, one must first understand what political philosophy is and is not in the Western sense. Political philosophy is the address of the philosopher to the politician. Here, I use 'philosopher' as a normatively loaded term as one who exposes realities outside politics to the test of truth. The philosopher is he who seeks the truth of things in conversation with others with that same end, and seeks that truth for its own sake. The philosopher, like Aristotle, believes in truth and therefore concerns himself with metaphysics, the study of being. This, of course, is the opposite of the ideologue, he who entertains a theory, basing it on yet more theories, and ultimately ignores the truth of things, even to the point of rejecting the possibility of truth. The ideologue is the sophist who uses words to convince rather than to explore, he is Callicles in Plato's Gorgias, versus the uncorrupted youth who wills to know rather than knowing to will.
The political philosopher is the philosopher as he addresses the politician. In his most proper role, the political philosopher coaxes the politician away from tyranny, away from suppressing philosophy. The politicians killed Socrates, and the politicians killed Christ. Such were failures of political philosophy. Dangers arise when ideologue-sophists take up the role of the political philosopher. The politicians killed Socrates, but it is the sophist who prepared the politician to so act. The sophist as political philosopher (ignoring the oxymoron), like Machiavelli, coaxes the politician to tyranny rather than vice versa. The ideologue provides a theory for the politician to seize in his pursuit of his own ends. The classic tyrant, the ruler who rules only for the good of himself, the ruler who suppresses philosophy, uses ideology as a tool.
Now, however, we see a new, more menacing form of would-be tyrant. The philosopher-politician, like Plato's philosopher-king, in a world not corrupted like our own, would be the ideal benevolent ruler. Instead, in our mundane existence, the philosopher-politician is more likely to be the sophist-politician, the corrupted philosopher become king. Such a man adheres to an ideology, rejects truth save for what his ideology reveals, ignores contradictions with that which is, and seeks remorselessly to universalize the ideology. He is the root and bringer of evil, as evil begins with mistakes in thought and theory put into action and perpetuated.
In our era, this is the Islamist militant, seeking nothing but the universalization of his own religious ideology and ignoring truth and justice. The Islamist-sophist-politician makes a plea to the most base and diabolical in an impoverished people, promising heavenly reward, with the end of making the state a tool of the ideology. To this end he emphasizes the ungrounded and total will of Allah, detached from considerations of truth and reason, placing this will above that which is. In putting will before reason, revealed truth before metaphysics, the Islamist creates a vehicle for mobilizing men that cannot converse with or even contemplate a worldview based on philosophy and the truth of things, a national telos devoted to the truth of a core of values as fundamentally Good, Western political philosophy. There is a total disconnect -- the two can only fight.
In railing against sophistry, doesn't the man know what his own writing is? That he shows biases which would be hell on wheels in the AG office? More -
2/28/2005
here is a lot of other music that can also bring pleasure which I would not necessary call 'beautiful' in the same way I would label, say, choral music beautiful. Much popular music can bring a pleasureable experience, but where is the difference between it and the transcendent nature of human voices joining together in harmony? There must be a difference -- the two listening experiences are hardly comparable.
The answer, I think, lies in the appeal of each, and in the nature of humankind as between God and beast. Humans aspire to the Good. In Christianity, we are made in God's image. But we are also fallen creatures of the earth, and have instincts and desires akin to the animals and less akin to our Creator. We are 'between,' just as this world is something between the absolute joy of the transcendent and the sheer evil of what in Christianity would be termed hell. This is not to say that our baser instincts and desires are necesarily bad -- many are just good in a lesser way than the highest goods, and best when indulged in moderation. For example, the survival instinct and survival itself is a good thing, but it is a lesser good than, say, liberty, and thus arises the situation where someone sacrifices his life to preserve liberty. Likewise, sex is good. But so is beauty. The former relates to survival and our animal nature (here I mean sex in its most basic form -- it obviously can become something much higher) and the latter is an 'unnecessary' attribute. Beauty in its purest form is the divine. Beauty in this world is found in the measure that something (music, a sunset, a beautiful person) reflects that divine, perfect beauty. The interplay between the base and the higher is complex, as we desire both.
Music, too, is beautiful and can be pleasureable in one of two ways -- in its appeal to our more base side (sex) and its appeal to that which mirrors the divine (beauty). I think it safe to say that a popular song, say one of the hiphop variety, with suggestive lyrics, very base-intensive thumping rhythm, and suggestive dancing appeals to the base. A Bach invention doesn't. A Beethoven Sonata certainly appeals to beauty and the divine, but also may evoke emotions relating to the more basic side as well. Most things worth appreciating have a mixture of both aspects.
So too do human relationships. We seek the beauty of the divine in the relationships we form. The highest type of relationship may be the intimate one between man and woman, and this too can come to reflect divine beauty. A bad relationship, following this logic, would be the relationship driven solely by the base and not by the desire to find the beauty of the transcendent.
Also -
2/2/2005
I have now actually reached a point where I find it very, very difficult to watch the nightly news or read CNN's web page. Prior to the Iraqi elections, I could handle the mainstream media's pessimism, the nay-saying, and the Bush bashing. But now that the Iraqi elections have occurred in a way that exceeded everyone's expectations, the continued inability of many in the mainstream media (with a few notable exceptions) to acknowledge that the Iraqi people have taken a first, large, decisive step toward liberty and self-government has my blood boiling. [...]
They care more about their ideology than they do about what is actually happening to actual people. They value their belief that evil is not really absolute but rather a result of unfairness in the world too much to acknowledge that Bush's strategy of killing the evil-doers and incrementally building democracy is working and leading to real benefits for the Iraqi people. If liberals praise the courage and power of the Iraqi people to recognize and reject the insurgency, they would be admitting that the world is not the almost-utopia-but-for-global-systemic-unfairness they believe in, but rather is a place where absolute evil and good do battle for dominance. They would have to admit that real good can be achieved in the world only through sacrifice, and that war and hardship cannot be eliminated by a committee or a U.N. resolution. In short, their entire Utopian-pessimist worldview, which drives their views regarding things as disparate as welfare and foreign policy, would have to be wrong.
The naysaying and the pessimism of the utopian-liberals sounds utterly ridiculous to a thoughtful, realistic person. After this successful election, the liberal pundits wonder about the future for Iraqis, the strength of the insurgency, and worry about uncertainty. One must ask them: Do you think the oppressed Kurds 'worried' about uncertainty under Saddam? Do you think those filling his torture chambers would have traded their position for ean 'uncertain' democracy? Do you think even his own Baath party members feared purges and feared one day finding themselves on Saddam's bad side? Yes.
This utopian-pessism is not a philosophy without costs. Its pessimism, its naysing, its rejection of the possibility that any good could come from any kind of war has the potential to demoralize our troops and undermine the support of the American people. In fact, this is what the insurgents have been counting on. Luckily, the Iraqi people have stepped up to the plate. The insurgents are everywhere on the run. Good is winning. And President Bush will rally the nation to his realistic optimism (the opposite of utopian-pessism, this is a philosophy that understands the imperfection of the world, understands the necessity of sacrifice and hardship to create good, and believes that good cannot but come if we work at it) tomorrow night in the state of the union address.
Using words to state premises as outcomes of reasoned thought misuses words. More, perhaps enough to end -
Sunday, July 25, 2004
Faith: Bulwark Against Power
As I daydreamed a bit this morning, pondering our current battle against Islamist ideological terror and the presidential race, it struck me that two concepts more than any others clearly identify the inherent incorrectness of the Islamist (not Islamic) ideology and simultaneously counsel the reelection of the President. These two ideas or forces are, on a certain level, why we have governments in the first place -- one because we must erect bulwarks against our own flawed nature with respect to it, the other because we must organize society to encourage and facilitate it, for it leads to human flourshing. Respectively, they are Power (or more precisely, corrupting human greed for it) and Faith.
Both of these concepts also concern the hierarchy of being in this world we know, and in the world of the divine of which our knowledge is not direct. In accordance with Plato's Forms, that hierarchy we establish here amongst ourselves and between ourselves, animals, and God, is a mere shadow, or an imperfect reflection. Faith is our bridge to the divine. We can have a participation in that more eternal knowledge of the inherent rightness of God's ordering and its relation to our imperfect orderings in this world through faith -- and thus faith is the best and perhaps only possible weapon man has against the corruption and tempation of Power in this world, as Power is a corrupt human desire to become something 'higher' than human and therefore to alter the hierarchy of being. The temptation of Power apparently extends beyond this world -- for Christians, Lucifer fell prey to it. Thus, perhaps true salvation belongs to the souls which, when faced with the light of ultimate and final truth after walking over man's final threshold, can know and fully participate in the proper divine order, whatever it may be. Faith in life is indicative of that ability, knowing Truth and God when revealed. But returning to the more mundane, these thoughts counsel that our structural bulwarks against the rise of Power and its corruption may only slow the inevitable, act as a brake on the decline of Democracy into Tyranny that both Plato and Aristotle predicted and that history has proven.
Applying these ideas to the issues of the day, we can see that Islamism (not necessarily Islam) is not a true faith. True faith is a bulwark against Power, not a tool to achieve it. True faith lifts ones sight to higher things, transplants higher values into the places material, earthly values fill. True faith is confidence that God's ordering will come, that seeking Power on earth for one's self is futile silliness in light of the more perfect, divine order of being. Islamism, on the other hand, is nothing but a tool for power. It expressly aims to destroy human goods and usurp all earthly power for itself and its dogma. Its belief does not conform to reason, but flies against it, asking men to do things reasonable people know from the natural law written on their hearts are wrong. And the promised reward, even its purportedly divine component, is inherently selfish -- virgins in heaven, pleasure and power. We must stridently oppose such a corrupt 'faith' (or more properly, dogma).
Second, men of faith being our best bulwark against Power and corruption, they can best lead the charge against corrupt Islamist ideology. While we can never trust ourselves to a rule of men, placing such faithful men in our positions of power reinforces the structures of our government and assists them in their central task, preventing the decline of democracy into tyranny. Men of faith, however, are men that both have faith and act in conformity with it. They are men whose faith supplements reason and leads to fuller knowledge and a more complete morality. These leaders must follow the guidance of their conscience when crafting and executing our laws.
If that is not Dominionism in a wordy velvet glove, wtf is it?
Let's for the sake of clarity quote one more -
Friday, July 02, 2004
Platonic Conservatism and the War
I have written quite a bit in this space regarding the political ideas of Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle is generally rational and deliberate, concentrating on politics and government as central the habituation of virtue and the development of opportunities for human flourishing. Man is a political animal, and as such requires a well-ordered community and political setting in order to individually develop into something more akin to what he or she should be. Plato in this respect says something similar: that there is such are such things as Ideas, that Good is real and absolute, and that in our lives we should all individually attempt to become more like that which we should be. However, this superficial analysis hides very deep divergences in the two great philosophers' thought. Plato, as emphasized in his cave analogy in The Republic, sees human goods as mere 'shadows' of what truly matters. Indeed, our competition for human goods, our desire for scientific knowledge, all of this is a degree removed from some true reality the average person does not ever come to know. When the man breaks his shackles and leaves the cave, ascending to the light above, he is blinded by the brightness of the sun, the Good, and cannot at first contemplate it. After his eyes adjust, he returns below to share his new knowledge with his colleagues still living amongst the shadows. They are startled and try to kill him, as he upsets their system of values based on the shadows they see before them on the wall. This discovery of the ultimate Good, which can be likened to the salvation of the soul, or perhaps redemption by faith in the Christian condition, seems unrelated to the skill with which the cave dweller identifies the shadows on the wall. Thus, Plato seems to be telling us that the shadows of this world are only related to the Good insofar as they have the same ultimate source -- light, the symbol for the Good, casts the shadows on the wall. But we all need to 'turn around' away from the shadows to really see the source of the light. Better yet, we need to come out of the cave. In a way, the more successful the shadow-makers are their business of creating a system of shadow-based values, the less people would ever come to know the source of the light of the Good. In order to avoid strife (recall that the person who leaves the cave and returns is threatened with violence), the shadows and that system of living is key. But it should also be the duty of those who run that shadow show to allow somehow for those who are prepared for it to turn around, see the light, and to leave the cave.
Analogizing to a system of government, the government which governs best seems to be the one which maintains an orderly 'shadow-show,' that is, promotes the more mundane human virtue and their practice, i.e., courage, moderation, consideration for others, etc. These lesser virtues are virtues in and of themselves, and they relate to the Good. Ultimate Good, however, salvation, must not be stymied by such a system. It seems that the practicing of the virtues cannot bring one to that salvation, that 'turning around' to see the true source of the light, even though to practice them is a good thing in and of itself. But government cannot be allowed to promote the shadows above what they are -- just shadows of what really is. And thus we must realize that government is a facilitator of something higher. While providing for order and earthly goods, it must facilitate and allow philosophy and revealed truth to bring souls to that higher Good. It must not kill the philosopher, kill Socrates or Christ. And it must not put other things in the place of the philosopher, or of Christ (as an aside, it was perhaps one of the most intelligent statements of a politician of our times when President Bush called Christ his most admired political philosopher). In our democracy, the government, promoting an entitlement mentality amongst the people, has come dangerously close to placing material well-being and an ideology of egalitarianism into that place which ought to be reserved for higher things. In extremist Islamist societies, the dogma of a particular interpretation of the Koran as the ungrounded and never bending will of a not necessarily logical god takes the place of true philosophy. Both are dangerous. While religion is clearly a path to that higher good, dogma cannot be, and the state must leave that arena open for the individual. Freedom of religion and to philosophize is crucial even as our modern first amendment jurisprudence which borders on enforcing a total freedom from religion is precisely the kind of evil I am describing. Thus in the philosophy of Plato we see the roots of those values which modern American conservatism cherishes: freedom to be religious, freedom to philosophize, and the need to combat evil, to combat those at home and, more pertinently now, those abroad who would through their dogma would kill a modern day Socrates and reverse the proper ordering of beings and of the Good.
As a final note, I was struck watching Saddam Hussein being brought before the investigative Iraqi judge yesterday by one of his comments. After asserting that he was still the President of Iraq and chosen by the people, he challenged the law under which he was being brought to trial. After the judge attempted to put Hussein in his proper place, Hussein did something very interesting -- he, as a last resort in an argument he was losing by any measure of logic, appealed to something illogical, to the Koran, specifically making an appeal to it as the only true source of law, a source of law which, Saddam implied, makes the laws of the infidel Coalition and those who cooperate with them not law but rather anathema. This is a fascinating example both of the increasing tendency Saddam had been showing of his willingness to use Islamism as a driving doctrine and tool for his regime of terror, but also now after his defeat, to use it as a battle call to rally insurgents and fundamentalists to his cause. Remember that these are the terrorists and radicals that, according to the press, are not in any way connected to Hussein and never were nor could have been. Thus, as usual, by refusing to be philosophical and failing to look past their own ideology, the American left and the press miss the greater intellectual currents that tie the dictator to the terrorists, and entirely miss the philosophical foundations of the current war. Wolf Blitzer and company should reread their Plato.
This is a person who wants to be Attorney General for all of us. His way. Ellison, whether or not he pulled a woman off a bed, is one without interfering dogma, but with a track record of favoring the bulk of the people against an entrenched self-serving wealth-driven will. Perhaps Wardlow could handle that cause, policing bankers and credit card usury, but Bush's war being right as a matter of God's will is too big a crock to accept, for thoughtful people Wardlow would minimize because he knows best and is closer to the Almighty, or how else do you read that stuff?
Talking about Bush-Cheney without mention of oil as a factor in the Iraq invasion is the very sophistry the man says he deplores.
Back to the Timmer Cuckingstool post; that stuff quoted at length above is as cringeworthy in toto as the clip of Wardlow's questioning of the better man; and the tune Timmer linked to is simply worded, yet a universal theme that should never be ignored.
___________FINAL UPDATE_____________
In the ramp-up to the election which Doug Wardlow won to take the seat Mike Obermueller held, Strib endorsed Obermueller, writing:
Like his father, the 32-year-old Wardlow is bright and personable. He also is among the most doctrinaire conservative candidates we met this year. The more moderate 37-year-old Obermueller gets our nod.
Lynn Wardlow has a Wikipedia page and a part of his campaign website is preserved by Internet Archive. His service record and decorations are a credit to his courage, and deserve respect.
Mindeman in concluding his post wrote:
OK – there is the background on the Rostra blog. It depicts the Wardlow philosphy well. And I hope you find it ironic that Doug Wardlow has made a public pledge to “take politics out of the AG office.” I can guarantee you that he will not take politics out of the office, he will only make it more accessible to right wing homophobic philosophy and turn the AG office into a political arm of MCCL, Christian conservatives, and Alliance Defending Freedom.
Whatever you may think about Keith Ellison’s personal issues (and they are serious) – one thing is certain, he will be vastly better on public policy than Doug Wardlow. Do not allow the MN GOP to succeed in their cynical ploys regarding Keith Ellison. Their agenda must not be allowed to succeed.