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THE FEDERALIST(r) BRIEF The Conservative e-Journal of Record * Veritas Vos Liberabit * 25 February 2002 Federalist Edition #02-09 Monday Brief *To support The Federalist, Link to -- http://www.Federalist.com/support.asp *To sponsor The Federalist, Link to -- http://www.Federalist.com/sponsor.asp *To retrieve today's Brief as HTML printer-friendly text or PDF Link to -- http://www.Federalist.com/current2002.asp *To change your e-mail address or format, see instructions in footer. ______----********O********----______ THIS WEEK'S FEATURED SITE Citizens Against Government Waste counts a million members and supporters nationwide. CAGW's mission is to eliminate waste, mismanagement, and inefficiency in the federal government. Founded in 1984 by the late industrialist J. Peter Grace and syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, CAGW is the legacy of President Ronald Reagan's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, also known as the Grace Commission. Visit -- http://www.cagw.org/ CONTENTS: The Foundation Insight Good News ICTUS Imprimis Family Culture Liberty The Gipper Opinion in Brief Editorial Exegesis Government Re: The Left Political Futures For the Record Reader Comments The Last Word ______----********O********----______ THE FOUNDATION "Security against foreign danger is one of the primitive objects of civil society. It is an avowed and essential object for the American Union." --Federalist No. 41 ______----********O********----______ INSIGHT "Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival." --Winston Churchill ______----********O********----______ GOOD NEWS "All the ways of the Lord are loving and faithful for those who keep the demands of his covenant. For the sake of your name, O Lord, forgive my iniquity, though it is great. Who, then, is the man that fears the Lord? He will instruct him in the way chosen for him. He will spend his days in prosperity, and his descendants will inherit the land. The Lord confides in those who fear him; he makes his covenant known to them. My eyes are ever on the Lord, for only he will release my feet from the snare." (Psalms 25:10-15) ++ "After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus. Peter said to Jesus, 'Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters -- one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.' While he was still speaking, a bright cloud enveloped them, and a voice from the cloud said, 'This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!' When the disciples heard this, they fell face down to the ground, terrified. But Jesus came and touched them. 'Get up,' he said. 'Don't be afraid.' When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus." (Matthew 17:1-9) ______----********O********----______ ICTUS IMPRIMIS "For centuries, theologians and philosophers understood that conscience is the anvil of virtue and character. They took it for granted that God places his moral law in the heart, or conscience, of every person. Yet they were not naive. Individuals can know what is right, yet deliberately embrace what is evil. And when wickedness is chosen often enough, the moral senses become dulled, hardened, rendered useless." --Joseph Laconte ______----********O********----______ FAMILY "The Lindh family was extreme. And yet, the pattern is familiar enough. Eager to provide their son with 'choices' and to be 'supportive,' the Lindhs never so much as raised an objection when their 16-year-old dropped out of school, converted to Islam and announced a desire to live in Yemen. Mrs. Lindh wondered about Islamic views of women, but not apparently enough to deny her son's request for the wherewithal to travel to Yemen and thence to Afghanistan. On what grounds could the Lindhs have objected? Could they have argued that Christianity had a superior spiritual message? That would be ethnocentrism. Could they object that Arab nations are notoriously anti-American? They weren't wild about America themselves. Could they maintain that parents have authority over minor children because they are parents? Not the Lindhs. Their highest value was 'choice.' John Walker Lindh clearly went further than his parents were comfortable with. In an e-mail to his mother, he recently scoffed, 'What has America ever done for anybody?' The Lindhs were probably dismayed that John fought with the Taliban and trained with al Qaeda. But they should not be surprised. He simply went too far in the direction they pointed him." --Mona Charen ______----********O********----______ CULTURE "The campaign reform bill may have been 'sweeping,' as the media told us, but one of the things being swept away was the right of independent groups to take to the airwaves with ads lobbying for their causes around election time. ...Reformers did, in fact, dismiss the threat to free speech as a trivial annoyance or a myth. This oblivious attitude owes a lot to the disregard for free expression that now marks our culture. The truth is that free speech no longer has a strong core constituency in America. What passes for a core constituency is now mostly on the right. The left, which once fiercely fought for free speech, essentially abandoned that role when it decided that 'historically underrepresented groups' needed to be shielded from harmful speech, or else they would never feel comfortable enough to rise in society. This emphasis on comfort, sensitivity and the awful danger of words arose on the campuses and spread into the general culture. It hardened into the doctrines of 'hostile environment' and 'hate speech,' both of which now justify violations of free speech that would have sent liberals of the 1950s or 1960s into shock." --John Leo ______----********O********----______ LIBERTY "...[T]here can be no truly moral choice unless that choice is made in freedom; similarly, there can be no really firmly grounded and consistent defense of freedom unless that defense is rooted in moral principle. In concentrating on the ends of choice, the conservative, by neglecting the conditions of choice, loses that very morality of conduct with which he is so concerned. And the libertarian, by concentrating only on the means, or conditions, of choice and ignoring the ends, throws away an essential moral defense of his own position." --Murray N. Rothbard ______----********O********----______ THE GIPPER "We are not a warlike people. Quite the opposite. We always seek to live in peace. We resort to force infrequently and with great reluctance, and only after we have determined that it is absolutely necessary. We are awed by the forces of destruction loose in the world in the nuclear era, but neither can we be naïve or foolish. Four times in my lifetime America has gone to war, bleeding the lives of its young men into the sands of beachheads, the fields of Europe, and the jungles and rice paddies of Asia. We know only too well that war comes not when the forces of freedom are strong, but when they are weak. It is then that tyrants are tempted." --Ronald Reagan ______----********O********----______ OPINION IN BRIEF "[G]ive only two cheers for capitalism. It does deal in efficiency, but not in justice. In a micro world -- the world of real people -- there is no justice. Most Enron insiders have not been punished by the market. They sold early, possibly corruptly with guilty knowledge, and walked away with millions, while those to whom they gave phony information and fraudulent accounting are left shirtless. Two cheers, then, for politics and the law: for the publicity-hungry congressmen who perform the salutary, if ghoulish, function of hanging out to dry for public humiliation capitalism's newest devotees of the Fifth Amendment; and for the prosecutors who will likely try to put some of the malefactors behind bars. These are useful functions, and they go beyond justice to deterrence. They will make future (and current) executives think twice about pulling an Enron. Nonetheless, when it comes to macro regulation, the politicians, for all their huffing and puffing, will be just following the market -- at considerable delay. Legislation will merely codify the message that the market has already pronounced and brutally enforced: Act like Enron, and you're in big trouble." --Charles Krauthammer ______----********O********----______ EDITORIAL EXEGESIS "President Bush is reportedly about to commit a cynical and opportunistic act unworthy of his young presidency: signing a disaster of a campaign-finance-reform bill. The bill, as it seems likely to emerge from Congress, is perfect veto bait for Bush: 1) He thinks it is unconstitutional; 2) it violates the principles for reform that he defended during his campaign and enunciated during last year's legislative debate; and 3) it will discourage exactly the sort of engaged citizenry that Bush devotes so much rhetoric to promoting. But Bush seems ready to ignore all of this and instead heed his own narrow political and financial interests, in a capitulation that will require double-backing on his commitments. ...Conservatives were forewarned that, for instance, Bush's education policy might not be much to their liking. He had promised as much for two years. His support for an over-regulatory campaign-finance reform would be something different, not just a disappointment, but a betrayal." --National Review ______----********O********----______ GOVERNMENT "Free speech does not guarantee anyone the right to be heard but it does guarantee the right of the speaker to speak and not be silenced. For some, free speech means standing on a street corner and shouting that the president (or a member of Congress) is a fool or a crook. For others, it means buying TV and radio time in support of, or in opposition to, an incumbent or challenger. The answer to the problems that have arisen in political campaigns is not less speech, but more. All contributions to candidates and parties should be immediately disclosed and published on Web pages. That would enhance accountability and the public good. The airlines do this with frequent flier miles, which are posted on the same day passengers fly. There may be other ways to right the wrongs of campaign financing, such as term limits, but violating the Constitution is not one of them. This bill protects incumbents and deprives voters of their constitutional rights." --Cal Thomas ______----********O********----______ RE: THE LEFT Excerpts from Al Gore's recent speech to the Council on Foreign Relations: "[T]here is another Axis of Evil in the world: poverty and ignorance; disease and environmental disorder; corruption and political oppression. We may well put down terror in its present manifestations. But if we do not attend to the larger fundamentals as well, then the ground is fertile and has been seeded for the next generation of those born to hate us, who will hold these things up before the world's poor and dispossessed, and say that all these things are in our image, and rekindle the war we are now hoping to snuff out." "'Draining the swamp' of terrorism ... drying it up at its source must also mean draining the aquifer of anger that underlies terrorism.... Anger at perceived historical injustices involving a mass-memory throughout the Islamic world of past glory and more recent centuries of decline and oppression at the hands of the West." "What is 'evil' anyway? I do not pretend to have the answer to such a question...." "It is time to accept that massive environmental disorder including global warming is literally a threat to international peace and stability." "The administration in which I served looked at the challenges we faced in the world and said we wished to tackle these 'With others, if possible; alone, if we must.' This administration sometimes seems inclined to stand that on its head, so that the message is: 'With others, if we must; by ourselves, if possible'." "One of the truly bad things about our politics is that it incites each administration to attack every last thing its predecessor has done, and to either tear down what was left or rename it so that its parentage can be forgotten. We did some of that -- but we also kept a lot of what we inherited from the first Bush administration and we protected it and built upon it." "I hope that the present administration chooses to invest in reconstructing a sense of what bipartisanship in the defense of the country is all about: even after the planes land and the guns stop firing." "I don't pretend to any received wisdom but I learned a lot from my experience in the Clinton-Gore administration: lessons I think are worth remembering and incorporating into the normal practice of our diplomacy." "Above all, I learned that our engagement with others on behalf of common values is something that must be of profound intent, and of long duration. It isn't enough to destroy what is evil, and then seek to leave by the nearest door." ______----********O********----______ POLITICAL FUTURES "If we practice diplomacy and military action creatively and forcefully, in the future we can be far less visible and active in the Middle East than we are now. The key is to make our current enemies into friends and in some sense our present 'friends' into enemies. Should Hussein leave Iraq -- a secular and wealthy state -- and the people craft some sort of moderate government, there would be three immediate and beneficial effects. We would end U.S. belligerent action in the skies over the Gulf; Iraq would serve as a model and catalyst for Iranian reform next door; and we could exit Saudi Arabia and put the Gulf sheikdoms on notice that what transpired in Baghdad can and should happen to them. Our goal eventually is to help establish regional moderate governments that reject both autocracy and fundamentalism, and thereby do not serve as sanctuaries for those who kill Americans." --Victor Davis Hanson ______----********O********----______ FOR THE RECORD "Is campaign spending too high? No. In 2000, all campaigns -- including state and local elections and ballot referendums -- cost about $3.9 billion.... This is less than four one-hundredths of 1 percent of our national income. It's less than Americans spend annually on flowers ($6.6 billion in 1997)." -- Robert J. Samuelson ______----********O********----______ SELECT READER COMMENTS (To submit an editorial comment or read other comments link to: http://www.Federalist.com/postededs.asp) "McCain McCrap: John McCain is blabbering again about the abuses of money in politics and the need for campaign finance reform. The only one of the Keating Five still in Congress and the leading recipient of donations from Global Crossing, he should know whereof he speaks!" "From #02-08: 'Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.' --Theodore Roosevelt. Unfortunately, today's lunatic fringe goes by the name 'Congress'." "The Federalist is on the mark. The problem that needs fixing is not campaign money; it's not people who give it; it's the politicians who take it!" "The NEA, owing to its present and persistent disconnect with reality -- (#02-07 Digest ref. NEA's gender disorientation) and a multitude of other follies that have exactly nothing to do with education -- continues to be, without a doubt, the greatest single impediment to education in this country." ______----********O********----______ THE LAST WORD "Consider the luge, which one reporter characterized as the act of rocketing down a sheet of ice at 90 miles an hour on a cafeteria tray. That looks dangerous even to those of us who live in NASCAR territory, where seat belts and roll bars are standard issue. Whatever else people might say about them, these lugists have stones -- perhaps between their ears, but that's better than nothing. This goes double when they go down the hill head-first, an act fondly known as 'the skeleton.' ...At the Olympic Village a patriot affixed Osama's baleful image at a strategic location in the Dead Goat Saloon's men's bathroom. From all accounts, his presence has inspired peerless marksmanship. Perhaps the summer gamesters could add this activity to their repertoire." --Dave Shiflett This Week's Leftoons: http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/garner.htm http://www.cnsnews.com/cartoon/welcome.asp -- PUBLIUS -- *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for nonprofit research and educational purposes only.[Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ] Want to be on our lists? Write at [EMAIL PROTECTED] for a menu of our lists! Write to same address to be off lists! <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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