Rants of a Fuzzy Curmudgeon

Mark Steyn has some extremely trenchant observations today, but his last paragraph is his most important one:

You’ll notice, incidentally, that I haven’t used the word “liberal” to describe the left. “Conservative” has been carelessly appropriated by the media to mean no more than the side you’re not meant to like. John Ashcroft is a hardline conservative, but so, according to the press, is the Taliban and half the Chinese politburo and the crankier Ayatollahs. So I think we conservatives ought to make an attempt to reclaim the word “liberal.” We believe in liberty, and in liberating human potential. I don’t know what you’d call a political culture that reduces voters to dependents, that tells religious institutions whom they can hire, that instructs printers on what printing jobs they’re obliged to accept, that bans squeegee kids unless they’re undercover policemen checking on whether you’re wearing your seatbelt, etc., etc. But “liberal” no longer seems to cover it.

I agree. I think the Conservative movement does need to reclaim the good old term “liberal”. Hayek used the term 60 years ago to mean what we mean today when we say “Conservative”, not what we mean today when we say “Liberal”. It does not mean “liberal with handouts to the point of nanny state”, it means “a believer in freedom of choice, thought, and anything else you can think of.” And today the correct definition of “liberal” has much more applicability to the right than it does to the left.

Via Instapundit, this article seems to indicate that knife assaults (or at least assaults by people using knives) are way up in the Australian state of Victoria.
Australia banned from private ownership just about every type of gun several years ago.
I wonder if they’d have less crime if people were allowed to protect themselves with handguns?
I don’t think there would be much argument there.

…is amazing today. I do not think I could be so kind.

Keep up the good work, IDF.

Wow. Not long ago the Joint Chiefs sounded like war was an option they weren’t interested in, regardless of what their job descriptions must read like. Now it appears they’ve changed their minds.

Hugh Hewitt has a few pointed things to say about our favorite Democratic Senator. I don’t think I’d be as harsh about his military record, but there’s no question that Zell Miller could have saved us all a lot of trouble had he simply done the right thing and switched over.
The only thing I can think of is that he believes in his heart that since a Democratic governor appointed him to fill the vacant seat, he has to stay with the party that brung him. And as much as I appreciate his sense of honor, he DID replace an ELECTED Republican. So at this point it almost seems that crossing the aisle would be an act of even greater honor than the one he seems currently to stand upon.

Ken Adelman with some trenchant comments on the Time story claiming that the Clintonistas had a plan ready to go to take out al-Qaeda.

Clinton’s constant maneuvering and shaving of truth had long tarnished, if not ruined, his credibility. If the Clinton team scored with a nice spin over the weekend, it loses in anything longer than a single news cycle.
Obviously, the Clinton machine is ramping up his toughness against terrorism precisely because he’s especially vulnerable there.

No kidding. This is the guy who was offered bin Laden on a platter and turned the offer down.
UPDATE: Another link to more on this story. Via PejmanPundit.

It only goes to show that some people will take advantage no matter how horrifying the circumstances.
Every one of these people ought to be prosectuted to the fullest extent of the law. But the bank is letting some of them off easy. Cowards.

Apparently

White House officials took umbrage at this week’s Time magazine article, which said that a Bush administration review of the [al-Qaeda] threat became bogged down in bureaucracy.

Indeed,

Officials said that action items given to the Bush administration [by the outgoing Clintonistas] were proposed to the Clinton administration in 1998. The Clinton White House had two years to come up with a plan encompassing the proposals but did not.

Shocking, simply shocking, that the Clinton camp would try to put a spin on this, what?

The Washington Times has a front-page article today about new research into the Jeffersonian “wall of separation” between church and state. It turns out that it was not supposed to be as impermeable as our courts have made it out to be.

“What we have today is not really Jefferson’s wall, but Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black’s wall,” said American University professor Daniel Dreisbach, whose forthcoming book explores how Jefferson coined the “wall” metaphor.
Mr. Dreisbach’s arguments parallel those of University of Chicago law professor Philip Hamburger, whose new book also says Justice Black’s anti-Catholicism — learned in the Ku Klux Klan — influenced his 1947 ruling that the First Amendment created a “high and impregnable” wall between religion and government.
The two authors say the Founders did no such thing and that the “wall of separation” has become a “lazy slogan” for judges and politicians.

I do not understand the fear of people in this country who believe that posting the Ten Commandments on the courthouse square constitutes a state sponsorship of religion. My co-religionists protest too much when they make a Christian mountain out of an Old Testament molehill. If the Ten Words aren’t the basis of Western Law, then we are in serious trouble. And we all know that the eminent jurists of the past paid homage to ancient lawgivers, including Moshe Rabbeinu. What was it P.J. O’Rourke said in Parliament of Whores?

Above the doors [of the House chamber] are medallions bearing bas-relief profiles of mankind’s great and reasonably great lawgivers: Moses, Solomon, Alfonso X, Solon, Hammurabi, Pope Innocent III. No U.S. congressmen are included.
Parliament of Whores, p. 50

Kind of speaks for itself.