No he is NOT a "true conservative"

City Journal describes itself this way:

City Journal is the nation’s premier urban-policy magazine, “the Bible of the new urbanism,” as London’s Daily Telegraph puts it. During the Giuliani Administration, the magazine served as an idea factory as the then-mayor revivified New York City, quickly becoming, in the words of the New York Post, “the place where Rudy gets his ideas.” The Public Interest goes further, calling City Journal “the magazine that saved the city.”

I have no beef with that description, but it is obvious that they feel as though they were really "put on the map" by their association with the Giuliani administration. That sense of kinship with Rudy has led them to start a campaign to present Giuliani as a "true conservative" who is the most electable Republican in the race. In the Winter issue of CJ Steven Malanga pens an article called Yes, Rudy Giuliani Is a Conservative in which he attempts to make that case. Here is a sample:

Not since Teddy Roosevelt took on Tammany Hall a century ago has a New York politician closely linked to urban reform looked like presidential timber. But today ex–New York mayor Rudy Giuliani sits at or near the top of virtually every poll of potential 2008 presidential candidates. Already, Giuliani’s popularity has set off a “stop Rudy” movement among cultural conservatives, who object to his three marriages and his support for abortion rights, gay unions, and curbs on gun ownership. Some social conservatives even dismiss his achievement in reviving New York before 9/11. An August story on the website Right Wing News, for instance, claims that Giuliani governed Gotham from “left of center.” Similarly, conservatives have been feeding the press a misleading collection of quotations by and about Giuliani, on tax policy and school choice issues, assembled to make him look like a liberal.

He spends the rest of the article laying out Giuliani's conservative credentials, although he never even attempts to rebut the charges that Rudy supports abortion, gay unions and gun control. Instead we are led on a journey through Giuliani's crime fighting, tax cutting and union busting (or at least union resisting).

All of this is true, but it does nothing to cancel out the fact that Rudy only satisfies half the definition of a genuine conservative. He still supports abortion on demand, the destruction of marriage through legalized gay unions and the disarming of the population (which will lead inevitable to the enslavement of the population).

Also Malanga does not even touch on Giuliani's support for amnesty for the alien criminals who have invaded that nation and his desire to bring in tens of millions more through a "guest worker" program. I suppose he realizes that his "Rudy really is a conservative" case will utterly collapse if he draws our attention to that.

I would like to ask the City Jorunal crowd, and all the other Julie Annie supporters, to answer this question. If Rudy had raised taxes in New York City over 20 times and caved in to every single demand of the City's public employee unions and if there were six times as many people on various kinds of public assistance after his tenure as mayor than there were before he came to office and he had turned the City's law enforcement over to the ACLU with the result that crime had tripled during his time as mayor, BUT he was dead set against abortion, believed that the Second Amendment recognized an absolute right to own crew served machine guns and had flown down to Boston to chain himself to the doors of the courthouse in an attempt to stop gay wedding ceremonies would you still be saying that he was a "true conservative"?

You say that we should accept him even though he is wrong about half of the conservative equation because he is right about the other half, but would you still accept him if his rights and wrongs were reversed? Or is it just that you consider the social conservative issues to be dispensable, or even an embarrassment?

After all being seen as anti-gay, pro-gun and anti-abortion doesn't help you get invited to Manhattan cocktail parties.

If you think that Giuliani is the best we can do this time around then say so. But please stop insulting our intelligence. If you attempt to buy something in a store with a twenty dollar bill that is perfect on one side, but blank on the other you will be arrested for counterfeiting. Trying to pass off a 50 percenter as a "true conservative" is just as bad.

The death of Harvard

Heather Mac Donald introduces us to Drew Gilpin Faust the new president of Harvard University (an institute of higher learning created to prepare young men for the ministry).

Faust runs one of the most powerful incubators of feminist complaint and nonsensical academic theory in the country. You can count on the Radcliffe Institute’s fellows and invited lecturers to proclaim the “constructed” nature of knowledge, gender, and race, and to decry endemic American sexism and racism. Typical guest speakers include left-wing journalists Susan Faludi and Barbara Ehrenreich. At Radcliffe, Faludi argued that 9/11 had triggered yet another “backlash against feminism,” while Ehrenreich lectured on “Weird Science: Challenging Sexist Ideology Since the 1970s.” It is received truth among Radcliffe Institute lecturers that obstacles throughout American society block women’s progress. Radcliffe speaker Rebecca Walker, for example, has created the “I Spy Sexism” initiative, which asks young women between the ages of 15 and 30 to keep logs of the “sexism, racism, and homophobia” that they see as they walk down the street or go to a movie.

With typical feminist hypocrisy, Faust has managed to wield massive power even as she rues female powerlessness. She headed the Task Force on Women Faculty, created after the firestorm over Summers’s recklessly honest speculations about women in science, that strengthened the feminist hold on faculty hiring and promotions. The Task Force won a $50 million commitment to increase faculty “diversity efforts” at Harvard, notwithstanding that for decades the university has tied itself in knots trying to increase female and black faculty representation. Faust’s Task Force also muscled into existence a remarkable new bureaucratic sinecure: the Senior Vice Provost for Diversity and Faculty Development. This new official sits with the president, the provost, and the deans of faculties, in order to push “diversity” quotas in every corner of the university’s academic operations. Naturally, Harvard gave the new position to one of Faust’s two co-chairs on the Task Force: Evelyn Hammonds, a professor of the history of science, and of African and African-American studies, who specializes in discerning bias against minority women in science and medicine. (Please do not question how Hammonds’s unobstructed rise through the most elite American universities comports with her thesis of pervasive discrimination against black women.)

Should the Board of Overseers confirm Faust, the Senior Vice Provost for Diversity that she created will be even more redundant than before. Expect a constant push for ever greater female and minority representation throughout the university, backed up by academic “research” showing widespread discrimination against those favored beneficiaries—research unclouded by the fact that women now run many of the nation’s most prestigious universities. Asked whether her appointment showed that gender inequities were ending at Harvard, Faust responded: “Of course not. There is a lot of work still to be done, especially in the sciences,” reports the New York Times. Unbiased inquiry into why certain groups may not enjoy proportional representation in scientific and technical fields, of the sort that Summers engaged in to his demise, will be even more proscribed. This triumph of feminist ideology is a tragedy not just for Harvard, but for the American academic world, which will undoubtedly follow Harvard’s lead in elevating feminist politics to premier intellectual standing.

The West is showing all the signs of entering a new Dark Age. Dogma is replacing science. Consensus is replacing experimentation and observation and any attempt to question the new received wisdom is treated as heresy to be suppressed.

How much longer will parents pay $40,000 per year to send their children to an ideological reeducation camp masquerading as an institute of higher learning? I suspect that it will be a long time because the CLAM Establishment* will do all in its power to prop up the reputations of America's increasingly worthless Ivy League schools.

But sooner or later the truth will out and they will wither away like America's once great "newspaper of record" the New York Times which is slowly dying.


*CLAM = Congressional Left + Academia + Media, a hat tip to the late Col. Cooper.

No, I'm afraid he isn't

Today's Front Page Magazine reprints an article from City Journal by Steven Malanga on Rudolph Giuliani's conservative credentials. The article's title, "Yes, Rudy Giuliani Is a Conservative", sums up the uphill battle which Giuliani must fight to be taken seriously by the nation's conservatives.

Here is how it begins:

Not since Teddy Roosevelt took on Tammany Hall a century ago has a New York politician closely linked to urban reform looked like residential timber. But today ex–New York mayor Rudy Giuliani sits at or near the top of virtually every poll of potential 2008 presidential candidates. Already, Giuliani’s popularity has set off a “stop Rudy” movement among cultural conservatives, who object to his three marriages and his support for abortion rights, gay unions, and curbs on gun ownership.

Mr. Malanga then goes on to list Mr. Giuliani's many achievements as Mayor of New York City. Among them his dramatic lowering of the crime rate and he revitalizing of the city's economy. This, he says, proves Rudy's conservative credentials and makes him a good candidate for president.

Everything that Mr. Malanga says about Giuliani's governance of NYC is correct. The trouble is, and this is not bragging, I could have done the same thing. The fact is that most of the readers of this blog could have done the same thing. As the article states the situation in New York had gone so far down the left-liberal toilet that the city had become almost impossible to live in. What Giuliani did was apply common sense center-right principles to bring some sanity back to the city's government and police force.

In the decades before Giuliani New York City had become the playground for political "progressives". It had implemented every lame-brained idea of governance, policing, economics and race relations. By the time Rudy was elected mayor those ideas had borne their inevitable fruit and the city was awash in crime, poverty and every other kind of social dysfunction.

By the early 1990s things had grown so miserable that even the liberal Democrats of Manhattan briefly awoke from their normal delusional state and elected an grownup with adult ideas to be the leader of their city.

Giuliani rode to the rescue with ideas which seemed so radical to New Yorkers that they almost seemed to descend from outer space, but the sad reality is that they would have been familiar to any one of multiplied thousands of small town Republican mayors, sheriffs, county commission members and millions and millions of "just plain folks".

That is why I said that I and most readers of this blog could have done what Giuliani did. Not because we are so damn smart, but because New York had for so very long been the plaything of people who were so damn stupid.

In the kingdom of people with IQs of 75 the man with an IQ of 95 will be king.

Now here is what will hamper Rudy's presidential ambitions. The entire USA is not NYC. Rudy's departure from the Manhattan elite's lunacy on the issues of law enforcement, tax policy and other fiscal issues does mean that he isn't completely nuts. However his unity with Manhattan's loony left on abortion, gay marriage and gun control along with other social issues does mean that he is partially nuts.

Given that other more sane candidates will step forward as the primary season draws closer being less loony than the other inmates in the asylum will cease to be much of an asset in the race.

I admire what Giuliani was able to accomplish in New York City before 9/11 and I appreciate the leadership he showed after. However being the most conservative person who could be elected in New York does not qualify one to be the president of the entire nation.

If the Republican Party wishes to reward Mayor Giuliani service (and they should) let it be with the New York governor's mansion or one of New York's Senate seats. This will be far better than letting him be the Party's standard bearer in 2008 in a race which he will probably lose because too many of the nation's real conservatives will not support him.

The White Man's Burden

Theodore Dalrymple takes a leftist newspaper writer to the woodshed for a conspicuous example of liberal condescension:

A headline in the British liberal newspaper, the Guardian, caught my eye recently: IRAQIS CAN’T BE BLAMED FOR THE CHAOS UNLEASHED BY INVASION. The writer was that newspaper’s veteran foreign correspondent, Jonathan Steele (another immortal headline to one of his articles, in May 2002, read: NEW YORK IS STARTING TO FEEL LIKE BREZHNEV’S MOSCOW).

Let us grant, for argument’s sake, the article’s premise: that American policy in Iraq has been naive, rash, foolish, precipitate, and culpable. Yet still it would not follow that “Iraqis can’t be blamed” and so forth, unless one also believed what not even the severest critics of the Bush administration have alleged—that the American army, or other agents of the American government, have desired, planned, and even executed the ongoing terrorist attacks in Baghdad.

The only other explanation of the non-culpability of Iraqis would be that they were not really full members of the human race—in other words, that they did not reflect upon their circumstances and act upon their reflections in the way that the fully responsible and therefore potentially culpable Americans do.

[. . .]

Not even the most ardent, anthropomorphic dog-lover credits his pet with a fully developed moral sense, and he therefore regards its misdemeanors with an indulgence that he would not extend to a ten-year-old child. The author regards Iraqis as if they were in the same moral category as pets: for can one really say that people who travel to a different part of the city to explode bombs, resulting in scores of deaths of people chosen merely because they are (most of them) of a different religious confession, do not appreciate what they are doing, any more than a dog appreciates what it does when it knocks over a precious porcelain vase?

[. . .]

Dare I say it: the inability to take seriously the culpability of men and women who, as a matter of policy or tactics, kill large numbers of passers-by and bystanders is a hangover of the late Victorian imperial sensibility, which viewed much of the world’s population as intellectual and moral minors. Special pleading of the kind encapsulated in the headline is not a manifestation of broadmindedness or generosity but of deep-seated arrogance.

Dr. Dalrymple is entirely correct. Furthermore the arrogance is not restricted to the heirs of the Victorian era in England. American left liberals show exactly the same kind of casual assumption of superiority when they excuse the actions of domestic criminals who happen to be Black or Hispanic or some other racial or ethnic minority.

The idea that non-White, non-Christian or non-Western persons are simply unable to perform to the same high standard as "real people" is seen nowhere more clearly than in the paroxysms of outrage over the sophomoric antics of a handful of prison guards at Abu Ghraib from people who seem to have had no problem whatsoever with Saddam Hussein filling mass graves or his sons maintaining rape rooms where they entertained themselves with 12 year-old victims.

This may well be what most conservatives find most annoying about the left.

Speaking truth to hustlers

Heather Mac Donald has an excellent essay up on the City Journal website about the police shooting of Sean Bell outside a strip club last month. In it she offers this advice to the Black "community leaders" who have summarily found the police officers guilty of first degree murder:

If the city’s black advocates paid even a tiny fraction of the attention they pay to shootings by criminals as they pay to shootings by police, they could change the face of the city. If demonstrators gathered outside the jail cell of every rapist and teen stick-up thug, cameras in tow, to shame them for their attacks on law-abiding minority residents, they could deglamorize the gangsta life. Think you’ll find Sharpton or Barron patrolling with the police in dark housing project stairways, trying to protect residents from predators? Not a chance. Among the crimes committed in minority communities since last week’s police shooting of Sean Bell there has been a 26-year-old man fatally shot in the Bronx; another man hit by stray bullets; a sandwich shop in Brownsville robbed by thugs who fired a gun; and three elderly men robbed at knifepoint by a parolee in Queens. Those minority victims who survived will have to rely on the police and the courts, not the race “advocates,” for vindication.

There is, of course, no chance whatsoever that detestable oxygen thieves like Sharpton, Jackson or Barron will do anything that could be remotely helpful. To actually fix the problems in the Black community would deprive them of their power base.

To see how the other Black "leaders" would react to any sane suggestion of how the Black community could reform itself and end its misery just look at what happened to Bill Cosby back in 2004 when he dared to stand up in a public forum and tell the truth.