Quotes

• George Will on Manhood : "At the 2006 Super Bowl, the Rolling Stones sang 'Satisfaction,' a song older than the Super Bowl. At this year's game, another long-of-tooth act, the Who, continued the commerce of catering to 'aby boomers' limitless appetite for nostalgia. "My generation's obsession with youth and its memories,' Cross writes, 'stands out in the history of human vanity.' "Last November, when Tiger Woods's misadventures became public, his agent said: 'Let's please give the kid a break.' The kid was then 33. He is now 34 but, no doubt, still a kid. The puerile anthem of a current Pepsi commercial is drearily prophetic: 'Forever young.'
  
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• Newsweek: Iraq: "Victory At Last" : "[S]omething that looks mighty like democracy is emerging in Iraq. And while it may not be a beacon of inspiration to the region, it most certainly is a watershed event that could come to represent a whole new era in the history of the massively undemocratic Middle East."
  
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• James Bryce on America : "The Americans are at bottom a conservative people, in virtue both of the deep instincts of their race and of that practical shrewdness which recognizes the value of permanence and solidity in institutions. They are conservative in their fundamental beliefs, in the structure of their governments, in their social and domestic usages. They are like a tree whose pendulous shoots quiver and rustle with the lightest breeze, while its roots enfold the rock with a grasp which storms cannot loosen."
  
  James Bryce (The American Commonwealth, Vol. 2, Chapter LXXX)
  
  
• Dan Coats on Character : "Character cannot be summoned at the moment of crisis if it has been squandered by years of compromise and rationalization. The only testing ground for the heroic is the mundane. The only preparation for that one profound decision which can change a life, or even a nation, is those hundreds of half-conscious, self-defining, seemingly insignificant decisions made in private. Habit is the daily battleground of character."
  
  
• Abstinence Education Works : "A new study released today, shows that abstinence education is highly effective in reducing sexual activity among youth. It also showed “safe sex” and “comprehensive” sex ed programs to be ineffective."
  
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• Abraham Lincoln & Life : "Nothing stamped with the divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on and degraded and imbruted by its fellows."
  
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• Victor Davis Hanson on What Went Wrong for Obama : "After Van Jones, Anita Dunn, the Skip Gates mess, the "tea-bagger" slurs, the attacks on Fox News, the Copenhagen dashes, the bowing, the apologizing, the reordering of creditors, the NEA obsequiousness, the lackluster overseas-contingency-operation front, the deer-in-the-headlights pause on Afghanistan, the pseudo-deadlines on Iran, Guantanamo, and health care, the transparency and bipartisanship fraud, and dozens of other things, Obama simply does not have the popularity to carry unpopular legislation forward. Indeed, he is reaching a point where he may poll more negatively than his agenda does. "Let me be perfectly clear" and "make no mistake about it" are now caricatures."
  
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• Martin Luther King on Loving Your Enemies : "Oh God, help us in our lives and in all of our attitudes, to work out this controlling force of love, this controlling power that can solve every problem that we confront in all areas. Oh, we talk about politics; we talk about the problems facing our atomic civilization. Grant that all men will come together and discover that as we solve the crisis and solve these problems "the international problems, the problems of atomic energy, the problems of nuclear energy, and yes, even the race problem" let us join together in a great fellowship of love and bow down at the feet of Jesus. Give us this strong determination. In the name and spirit of this Christ, we pray. Amen."
  
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• Anne Applebaum: "Not the Wretched of the Earth" : "In recent years, the emergence of this international jihadi elite has often been blamed on European immigration and assimilation policies or, rather, the lack of them: Several of the Sept. 11 bombers were radicalized in Hamburg; the 2005 London Tube bombers were born in Britain. There are other European examples. But the case of Bayrak, who was educated in a secular Muslim society -- and that of Hasan, who is American -- suggests that this elite has a much broader base and radical Islam potentially a much wider appeal."
  
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• George Will on 2009 : "In 2009 the two most important unelected policymakers in Washington were put in their offices by George W. Bush: Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. In December there were more U.S. troops deployed in the two wars than there were in January. Iran, threatened with economic sanctions, announced plans to sharply increase its uranium enrichment. "North Korea," said Barack Obama in December, "must live up to its obligations." Must?"
  
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• Bill McGurn on Obama and Tyrannies' Dissidents : "For a man whose whole appeal has been wrapped in powerful imagery, President Obama appears strikingly obtuse about the symbolism of his own actions: e.g., squeezing in a condemnation of Iran before a round of golf. With every statement not backed up by action, with every refusal to meet a leader such as the Dalai Lama, with every handshake for a Chavez, Mr. Obama is defining himself to foreign leaders who are sizing him up and have only one question in mind: How much can we get away with?"
  
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• What Doctors & Patients Lose in Reform : "Mr. Obama promised that under his plan people wouldn't have to change their doctors. But it's clear that doctors will be forced to change how they make their medical decisions."
  
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• The NEA & Political Contributions : "The Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money in State Politics recently released data showing that the NEA topped the chart as the number one national donor during the 2007-08 election cycle, shelling out $57.6 million in combined federal and state contributions. The American Federation of Teachers was number 25, with more than $13 million in contributions.
  
  "...the NEA’s and AFT’s 2007-08 contributions meant that ‘America’s two teachers’ unions outspent AT&T, Goldman Sachs, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, General Electric, Chevron, Pfizer, Morgan Stanley, Lockheed Martin, FedEx, Boeing, Merrill Lynch, Exxon Mobil, Lehman Brothers, and the Walt Disney Corporation, combined’.”
  
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• Bill Bennett on Cultural Surrender : We've spoken of battlefields at home and abroad and I received a lot of feedback on my commentary about our culture and our national mindset yesterday when it comes to terrorism here--you can read that commentary at BillBennett.com.
  
  Today we have an update on the most important battlefield we face, the homeland. The Washington Post reports: "Federal authorities unsealed terrorism-related charges against eight men Monday, accusing them of recruiting at least 20 young Somali Americans from Minnesota to join an extremist Islamist insurgency in Somalia."
  
  On another aspect of our cultural problem when it comes to home grown recruits for terrorism, I've long-quoted Melanie Phillips who has written of "pre-emptive cultural surrender." She says western societies suffer from a growing "funk," defined as "a profound loss of cultural nerve which means that we become paralized by the terror of being thought racist, Islamophobic, or xenophobic if we criticize a minority religion, and are further paralized by the terror that any actions against Islamist extremism may provoke civil disorder or more terrorism."
  
  This was clearly the case with Nidal Hasan and Ft. Hood. And it looks like much of the case with the American immigrants from Somalia who were, painful as this is to say, "settled in a gang-ridden enclave of Minneapolis." Minneapolis!
  
  Why is it African immigrants can come here, escaping a forsaken place, for the hope and dream of America and become some of our most patriotic citizens only to see their children sign up for al-Qaeda and its affiliates? We see it, too, with second and more generation Americans like Adam Ghadan and John Walker Lindh. As I've said, youth thirst for a strong medicine, they will seek things like the Boy Scouts or the Gangs. Here they sought the gangs, with inspiration from local mosques. There are today more gang members in America than there are Boy Scouts. I said yesterday we are in danger of losing the idea of what we are fighting both for and against in this war on terror. That's actually only true of the good guys. The bad guys, the terrorists, know what they are fighting against. But what have we done with our teaching about America and what it stands for?
  
  When we constantly run down our country, when our leaders run it down both on the domestic and international stages, when we think we have to apologize to Europe, when our schools instill an ethic of feeling good and promote self esteem over and above a sense of national pride, purpose, and greatness, the vacuum in the soul will be filled with whatever manna is fed our youth. We don't feed them ourselves, so whoever does satisfies the hunger. You want to know the danger of American history being our worst subject, this is it?
  
  Yes, MOST Americans are okay--but how many people does it take to upend this country? One Army major? 19 foreign born Arabs? Well, today's story is about 20 American youth who were recruited for terrorism. We can stop teaching about America in our schools, we can allow leaders to run down the country, we can--in the name of political correctness--refuse to report on suspicious colleagues in uniform who speak of pouring hot oil down the throats of disbelievers, we can bow to foreign leaders, we can make apologies to Europe, we can denigrate democracy movements abroad, and we can stop using the word "terrorism," but there really is only one phrase to describe all that and it is "pre-emptive cultural surrender." And when you surrender the culture, just as when you surrender in war, you lose. When you do it preemptively, it means there was no need for it.
  
  
• Leon Wieseltier on Obama and Berlin & Iran : "Obama declared that 'the work of freedom is never finished,' which is true enough, but the urgent question is what he means by “work.” Consider an example. A few days before the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the wall in Berlin, there occurred the thirtieth anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The dictators’ commemoration of that happy day in the history of their dictatorship was ruined by rallies of democrats and dissidents.
  
  Obama’s response was to intone wanly that 'the world continues to bear witness to their powerful calls for justice.'
  
  So does “witness” count as “work”? Was the Soviet Union brought down by “witness”? We did not, on our own, bring the Soviet Union down--it collapsed, pathetically, on itself; but we assisted keenly in its collapse. Are we assisting in the mullahs’ collapse? I think not. Our Iran policy seems not to have discovered the connection between Iranian nuclearization and Iranian liberalization. The only sure solution to the former is the latter. It is no longer a fantasy to contemplate a new Iran.
  
  For this reason, American support for the democracy movement in Iran (he sounds like Bush! and he calls himself a liberal!) is not only a moral duty, it is also a strategic duty. Such support might indeed be “destabilizing,” but there is no stability in Iran anymore, there is only a vicious tyranny fighting for its life against a popular uprising that explains itself with principles that we, too, espouse. It makes sense that the man who takes no side in that fight did not make it to Berlin."
  
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• Andy McCarthy on the Meaning of the KSM Trial : "So here's the message to terrorists: If you kill thousands of civilians, we will give you better rights than if you attack military assets. That is dangerously irresponsible."
  
  
• A. Lincoln, To Former Slaves In Richmond Who Kneeled To Him : "Don't kneel to me. That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy....Liberty is your birthright. God gave it to you as he gave it to others, and it is a sin that you have been deprived of it for so many years."
  
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• The Brotherhood of the Ropes : "Men banded together in a common effort of will and strength--not against this or that imagined foeman of the instant, but against their only true enemies: inertia, cowardice, greed, ignorance, and all weaknesses of the spirit." --Charles Houston
  
  
• Harry Jaffa on Reclaiming the West : "It would certainly seem that the salvation of the West must come, if it is to come, from the United States. The salvation of the United States, if it is to come, must come from the Republican Party. And the salvation of the Republican Party, if it is to come, must come from the conservative movement within it. And the salvation of the conservative movement, if it is to come, must come from the renewal and reaffirmation of the principles of the American Founding, embodied above all in the Declaration of Independence, such a reaffirmation as happened in the events that led to the election of Abraham Lincoln."
  
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• A Modest Proposal-Victor Davis Hanson : "I think the president could improve his poll ratings markedly if he simply took all the things he has said about Limbaugh, Hannity, Fox News, the town-hallers, and his domestic critics and instead applied that invective to Iran, radical Islam, Russia, and Venezuela, and, in turn, took all the outreach things he's said the latter and applied them to the former."