SOME HISTORY

American Leftists claim to be deathly afraid that a second term for GWB will allow him to appoint Supreme Court judges who uphold the constitution instead of making the law up as they go along. I would like to think it is true but from the way the Senate Democrats recently filibustered Estrada, I fear it is unlikely. And you don't always get what you expect with judicial appointments. Power can easily go to the head of the enthroned one. We might recollect the time when a Republican President appointed a Republican governor to the court and the nation got out of it one of its most determined judicial dictators -- Earl Warren.

Condemnation of the President: "What has [the president done] to entitle him to re-election? We contend he has done nothing to earn this high distinction but that, on the contrary, in the conduct of the war, his deplorable mismanagement of our most important armies, with the disastrous and alarming consequences, have furnished evidence sufficient to convince the country he is not the pilot to carry us through the perils of this war..." But the President concerned was Lincoln, not Bush.

"Neocons" in 1944: "Jewish government officials secretly manipulating the president? That accusation, heard recently in connection with the decision to go to war against Saddam Hussein, was also raised sixty years ago, in the heat of the 1944 presidential race. The lightning rod for criticism in 1944 was Sidney Hillman, a prominent labor leader and aide to President Franklin D. Roosevelt."

There is some discussion here of how the welfare state "colonised" Britain's formerly self reliant and mutually supporting working class: "the extensive culture of privately run working-class schools was destroyed by the board-schools founded by the 1870 Education Act, which were not free, but were effectively subsidised to a point where they put their private competitors out of business. All of this was part of a process in which 'the working classes are firmly tagged as the patients, never the agents.'... The state,... by taking away the working classes' means of providing for themselves, and especially by creating catastrophic "Downer" ghettos in housing estates, has created a culture of dependency.

Some interesting statistics about the lead-up to World War II from Jim Lindgren: A Gallup poll taken in 1938 showed that the support for an anti-Jewish campaign was quite low in America but that Democrat voters were 50% more likely to support such a campaign than were Republicans (14.7% versus 9.8%). Those "racist" conservatives again!

"Genghis Khan may not sound like a compassionate conservative, but Weatherford argues that his subject was a great deal more tolerant and far-sighted than his barbaric reputation suggests. Suborned peoples, of all creeds and cultures, were permitted to conduct their affairs autonomously - so long as they recognized his paramountcy. He was the first of the great free traders, a meritocrat, and, by the lights of his time, a nicely enlightened despot. You could do worse than being ruled by Genghis Khan, and many did".

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