In “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents,” his brilliant anatomy of covert state despotism, Edmund Burke noted that “the forms of a free, and the ends of an arbitrary [i.e., despotic] Government” are not at all incompatible. You may well live in a country in which the law of the land states that “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” But it is the work of a moment for a despotic government to supersede that law in fact if not in name.

Consider, to take just one example, the Transportation Security Administration. When Senator Rand Paul was detained by the TSA for refusing a pat-down, the senator’s father, Congressman Ron Paul, declared that “the police state in this country is growing out of control.” Indeed.  The chaps and chapettes who staff the TSA specialize in useless physical violation — useless, that is, for foiling terrorists or improving security: for intimidating citizens and encouraging the habit of docility, the intrusive searches are powerful tools.

But if the TSA is an obnoxious institution, it has plenty of competition from certain local police forces.  Consider the letter I received yesterday from a friend in an upscale town in the mid-West:

Last Saturday, [my son’s] kids were playing in their front yards in the snow with the neighborhood kids. About 5 pm [their mother] called them in for dinner.  James (age 6) came in, took off his hat and coat (he was still in his snow boots, snow pants, long underwear and long shirt) when [his mother] told him to run two houses down the street to get his sister to come home.  James ran past [his father] who was waiting on the front porch for a client and watched James run down the street.  He then saw a cop car make a u-turn, stop and walk up the neighbor’s walkway and confront James.  [My son] was there within seconds.  The cop said he was writing [him] up for James not having a coat on (temp was about 25).  Now this house he ran to wasn’t more than 100 feet from [my son’s] house.  Cop called DCFS  [Department of Children and Family Services] that moment and said that James was barefoot, had inappropriate clothing, and lack of adult supervision.  [My son] went back to his clients and Julie went to confront the cop.  She was as mad as I have ever heard her and the cop was just abusive.  Said he was writing down everything she said and kept asking her if she was done yet. [My son] called the sergeant on call who said he didn’t know the cop but would look into it.  [He] got no call back.  Sunday morning at 9 a.m. a person from DCFS appeared at the front door wanted to search the house and talk to James who was hysterical by this time.  DCFS said they didn’t think there was going to be a problem.  On Monday [my son] called the police department asking to talk to the police chief.  Secretary wouldn’t put him through but sent him to another sergeant.  [He] explained his story and sent him the photo he took of James after he got back into the house.  Officer said that the picture was taken some time after the incident and [My son] could have dressed James up.  [My son] wanted to file a police harassment complaint but the cop said, “If you do and we find that any of what you say is wrong, we will prosecute you!”  [He] finally got a hold of the police chief who really wasn’t going to do anything about it.  [My son] is giving up for fear of reprisals.  Amazing isn’t it.  Now we should call the police station so they can determine what type of clothing we should put on our kids before we let them out of the house.

Note the phrase “fear of reprisals.”  I omitted the names of my friend’s son and changed the name of their little boy to minimize the chance of reprisals from this publicity.  But think about it: since when should law-abiding citizens in a free country fear reprisals from the police or other government bureaucrats? The answer, of course, is “just as soon as that country starts treating its citizens as wards of the state.” I sent the above missive to a lawyer friend who advised that the best recourse was publicity in some local papers. I hope it is forthcoming. In the meantime, I hope my friend rallies all his acquaintances to do exactly what he suggested: call the police station every morning to get a bulletin on what to wear that day. A few hundred calls a day might just dampen police  enthusiasm for this particular form of harassment. It will also while away the time until the town can get around to cutting the budget of their local police force and publicly humiliate the egregious officer who thinks he was hired to be a nanny-state bully not a public servant.

(Thumbnail on PJM homepage by Carolina K. Smith, M.D. / Shutterstock.com.)

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I am down in Antigua for a few days with friends sorting out the problems of the world. It seems as remote as it is beautiful here high on a bluff overlooking Green Island then three thousand unobstructed miles to the coast of Africa. Modernity is just about everywhere, though. The beach below my window is empty all day long, except when we do our daily perambulation and the heartier among us plunge into the ocean to swim. But there is plenty of ice for the rum punches and, more to the point, the satellite-enabled wifi silently connects us to the chatter back home.

And what chatter it’s been. Yesterday, I popped out of my room to announce that Rick Perry had dropped out of the race and was endorsing Newt Gingrich to the chagrin of some and the delight of others in my party. I popped out again to provide a précis of Marianne Gingrich’s nasty and indecorous rant about her ex-husband in an interview with ABC’s Brian Ross. “Monkeys with clubs,” said one of our band of studious researchers. “That’s what politics is: monkeys with clubs.” He was not, by the way, a Gingrich partisan, but he could recognize a monkey — and a club — when one paraded by.

It was all old news, you know: notwithstanding the attention-grabbing headline about Newt wanting an “open marriage,” Marianne had no new scandals for us. The lack of novelty did not, of course, temper the viciousness of her attack, which was underscored by the opening act earlier in the day of how some ABC execs were debating the “ethics” of broadcasting the  interview before the primary vote in South Carolina.

Ha, ha, ha: Oh, those cards at ABC!  You can just imagine how tormented they were by the ethics of the situation. “Hank, what do you think, should we broadcast this bucketful of sewage from the guy’s angry ex now when it can do some serious harm to his candidacy, or do you think it would cause more damage if we held it until later in the campaign?”

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The stars must be aligned to foist the constellation anaticula into the Zeitgeist: for the Duck, otherwise known as “the canard” casts its ghoulish light over our sublunary world. Four times in the past week someone has written to inform me that (I pick one formulation of the falsum anaticula) “when Bill Clinton left office there was a government surplus, it was the Bush administration  that turned that into a deficit . . .”

This is a canard one hears almost as frequently as this election- year staple: that Newt Gingrich, heinous fellow, asked a former wife for a divorce while she languished in hospital, dying of cancer.  What a terrible man, eh? Except that the story isn’t true, as even the most cursory research (e.g.,  The Gingrich Divorce Myth) would show.

But research, even the cursory sort, isn’t as much fun as simple repetition, especially when there’s a reputation to ruin, smugness to be enjoyed, or a political point to score.

So it is with “Clinton delivered a surplus to George Bush in 2000” canard. You can discover this by going to the monthly statements published by the U.S. Treasury. “But wait,” you say, “that chart linked shows a surplus of  more than $200 billion! It’s right there in black-and-white: $236 billion and the word ‘surplus.’ So there.”

Not quite “there,” actually. That $236 billion is only one part of a larger puzzle, the bottom line of which is the total national debt, which grew every year under Clinton.  Talk of a “surplus” is possible only because of accounting legerdemain.  The economist Craig Steiner has put the case more clearly than anyone I know in a series of articles: “The Myth of the Clinton Surplus,” “The Myth of the Clinton Surplus, Part II,”  and “The True Federal Deficit.” In the second article, Mr. Steiner casts his beady eye upon that $236 billion and  explains how the national debt is calculated:

If there’s a $236 billion surplus then most people would think the national debt would go down by $236 billion. Instead it went up by $18 billion [in the year 2000]. This is the difference that must be explained.

Public Debt is calculated by taking the previous year’s public debt and adding the total unified budget deficit (or subtracting the surplus), and then adding any “other means of financing.”

Intragovernmental Debt is calculated by taking any trust fund surpluses and adding it to the previous year’s intragovernmental debt.

 

Total National Debt is calculated by adding the public debt to the intragovernmental debt. As a result, the national debt can increase even when the public debt decreases if the intragovernmental debt increases by a larger amount.

Why? When a trust fund (such as social security) takes in more money than it pays out in benefits, it takes the extra money and “invests” it in government bonds. Essentially social security says “We received $100 billion in social security contributions but only paid out $80 billion in benefits, so we take the extra $20 billion and buy U.S. government bonds.” Social security doesn’t keep the extra cash but rather loans  it to the U.S. government and, in return, it gets a U.S. government bond. That means the U.S. government can immediately spend that $20 billion on normal government operations but owes that $20 billion to Social Security. [My emphasis.]Hence one part of the government (the U.S. Federal Government general fund) owes $20 billion to another part of the government (Social Security). That is intragovernmental debt.

 

Mr. Steiner has a homely but clarifying analogy that explains this:

 If in a given year you earn $30,000 and a friend loans you $5,000, and you spend $32,000, is that a surplus? While you can claim “I received $35,000 and only spent $32,000, thus I have a surplus,” that’s a pretty weak argument when you know that $2,000 of the money you spent was actually borrowed and has to be paid back later. That’s pretty much what happened in 2000.

The bottom line: a real surplus would cause the total national debt to decrease. The total national debt did not decrease under Clinton: on the contrary it rose ever year.  Ergo, etc.

This is not a partisan issue, by the way. The Clinton administration is not the only one to have engaged in such deceptive accounting reporting. As Mr. Steiner notes, “all modern presidents have.” He lays it all out in “The True Federal Deficit,” where he trace the national debt from 1978 to 2008. “Every year,” he notes “the ‘official’ claimed deficit is smaller than the amount by which the national debt went up. This is true under both Republican and Democrat presidents. Sometimes the differences between the two are smaller and sometimes they are larger, but the real deficit (calculated by the amount the national debt increased) is always larger than the deficit the government claimed.”  Here it is, President by President:

 * The sum of all Carter’s claimed deficits was $252.709 billion but the national debt went up by $299.015 billion.

* The sum of all Reagan’s claimed deficits was $1.412228 trillion but the national debt went up by $1.859576 trillion.

* The sum of Bush Sr.’s claimed deficits was $1.035646 trillion but the national debt went up by $1.554057 trillion.

* The sum of Clinton’s claimed deficits and surpluses actually resulted in a net surplus of $62.904 billion but the national debt went up by $1.395974 trillion–only 30% less than the increase during the Reagan administration.

* The sum of George W. Bush’s claimed deficits (through fiscal year 2008) was $2.131405 trillion but the national debt went up $4.217262 trillion.

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I am just back from a brief family trip to our nation’s capital. The efficient cause of our sojourn was a twelfth-night party at some friends’ in nearby McLean, Virginia, but we took the occasion to visit the Air and Space Museum, a reliable hit with our 13-year-old son and a source of wonder for his 4-year old sister. We also — that is, my son and I also — visited the International Spy Museum, an establishment I hadn’t known about before, meeting up later with the distaff side at the Natural History Museums (gems, butterflies, dinosaurs). Tootling around Washington, I was struck by — well, not by its prosperity, exactly, but by what is clearly a lavish outlay of funds — your funds, in fact. Everywhere I turned there were huge building cranes. In one spot, I counted seven over the space of a few blocks. It looked a little like a third world country suddenly flush from newly discovered mineral reserves of some sort. Which I suppose describes the situation in Washington accurately enough, except that for “mineral reserves” you need to substitute “deficit spending.” I remember meeting my friend Edward Shils several years ago in Washington: “My, they live well on our money,” he said. What would he say today, I wonder, when Washington has come more and more to resemble Versailles circa 1780.

I confess to feeling despondent about our political class — what Peter Schweizer, in his depressing and revelatory book Throw Them All Out, calls the PPC, the “Permanent Political Class.” Schweizer’s book provides lavish documentation for something Sarah Palin complained about a few months ago: that the people who go to Washington to be Public Servants tend to leave several years later (those who do leave) vastly richer than they arrived. How is it, for example, that Nancy Pelosi, who was helping to shape credit card legislation, made a 50 percent profit in two days from her $1-$5 million investment in Visa? Or that John Boehner profited so handsomely from real estate speculation along a highway route that he knew about before the general public? Why is it that congressmen are allowed to invest on the basis of insider knowledge when the same behavior would bring down the scrutiny of the SEC on us plebs?

Kevin Williamson has some characteristically intelligent things to say about this and other depressing facts of government financial life and its Wall Street friends in his National Review essay “Repo Men“:

Wall Street can do math, and the math looks like this: Wall Street + Washington = Wild Profitability. Free enterprise? Entrepreneurship? Starting a business making and selling stuff behind some grimy little storefront? You’d have to be a fool. Better to invest in political favors.

But it’s not only this spectacle of banana republic favoritism that is depressing. There is also the reality of what George Will calls “The Redistributionist Behemoth.” “Liberals,” Will notes,

have a rendezvous with regret. Their largest achievement is today’s redistributionist government. But such government is inherently regressive: It tends to distribute power and money to the strong, including itself.

Prominently including itself. That’s one of the disturbing ironies of Obama’s desire to “spread the wealth around.” Most of what’s spread around doesn’t find itself in the pockets of folks like Joe the Plumber but the bureaucrats who manage the distribution. Will has it exactly right:

Government becomes big by having big ambitions for supplanting markets as society’s primary allocator of wealth and opportunity. Therefore it becomes a magnet for factions muscular enough, in money or numbers or both, to bend government to their advantage.

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For many, New Year’s Day is a time for gentle reflection.  We think back on the year that’s past (good riddance to 2011, I say: what a year!) and look forward to the year ahead: resolutions, ambitions, anticipations, trepidations. . .

One good thing that is nigh is another splendid recording by the pianist Simone Dinnerstein.  I’ve written about Ms. Dinnerstein in this space before (see A musical interlude  and Another musical interlude). I think she is a remarkable musician. Her recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations dethroned Glenn Gould as my favorite rendition of that sublime work. Ms. Dinnerstein’s new recording, “Something Almost Being Said,” is a sort of conversation ohne Worte (as Mendelssohn might have put it) between Bach and Schubert.  I am grateful to have received an early promotional copy. The Ding an sich will be available shortly and is available pre-order now. Start 2012 off right and get a copy now.

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The thing you have to admire about the Obama administration is its ability to fight furiously on several fronts at once. The economy. Individual liberty. The rule of law.  National security. In his pursuit of  “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” (as he promised his followers in October 2008), Barack Obama has managed to undermine them all. It’s been an impressive, if also a depressing, performance.

Just a few reminders: On the hustings, Obama lambasted George Bush for adding $4 trillion to the national debt over the course of eight years.  That was, I readily acknowledge, profligate behavior. But Obama has vastly outstripped George Bush, adding more than $6 trillion to the national debt in just under 3 years. $4 trillion, $6 trillion: if only there were some means of making it as gargantuan a task to write or read those words as it is to comprehend what such numbers portend. There is no way, so I hesitate to remind you that Obama is set to ask for another $1.2 trillion in spending money. When that happens, the federal debt will clock in at more than $16 trillion. Thanks for the hope, Barack!

What else has Obama accomplished on the economic front? There are big things like soaring unemployment — the administration admits to something approaching 9 percent; really it is 11 percent — and S&P’s downgrade of U.S. credit, the first in history.  And don’t forget “the staggering decline” of household wealth in the U.S. In the third quarter of 2011 alone, total U.S. household wealth declined by 4.1 percent: that’s $2.2 trillion in three months.  Look at the value of your house and your retirement funds: you’ll see what I mean. Thanks for the change, Barack! Then there are the myriad ham-handed initiatives like the government takeover of GM and its subsidizing  a movable electrical machine to toast marshmallows. There is his energy policy, which, as the Washington Post put it, is “infused with politics at every level” (h/t Powerline). Under Obama, the effect of the Environmental Protection Agency is not to safeguard the environment  but to make it more difficult and more expensive to create or conduct business in the United States.

Then there is the rule of law.  Start at the top, with Attorney General Eric Holder, whom  Charles Krauthammer called “one of the worst attorneys general in U.S. history.”  Voter intimidation by the Black Panthers?  You must be racist. “Fast and Furious,” a clandestine program that funneled scores of  weapons to Mexican drug thugs, one of which was used to kill Brian Terry, a U.S. Border Patrol agent (to say nothing of the hundreds of Mexicans killed with the guns)? AG Holder said he didn’t know about it, but ABC reported that he was briefed on the program  in July 2010.

The list goes on. But let’s leave the domestic side of things to one side and consider the issue of national security. 

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And it ain’t over yet. A week, said the British politician Harold Wilson, is a long time in politics. It was just last week, on December 22, that Conrad Black, though describing Newt Gingrich as “a completely unfeasible president,” could also note that he is “now the leading contender for the Republican nomination.” Newt thought so, too.  Less than a month ago, he blithely assured ABC’s Jake Tapper that “I’m going to be the nominee.” And just why did he think so? “It’s very hard not to look at the recent polls and think that the odds are very high I’m going to be the nominee.”

Ignore the tangled negatives: it’s clear what he meant: “I’m riding high and still rising in the polls; therefore it is very likely that I will be the nominee.”

Bad argument, Newt. You spoke 11 months before the election. Remember what Harold Wilson said: a week is a long time in politics. According to the Public Policy Polling folks, his balloon has deflated from 27% to 22% to 14% to 13% over the course of four successive Iowa polls.

As I write, Mitt Romney, the Establishment candidate, seems to be consolidating the presumption that has followed him for months: that when the dust settles, he, the well-coiffed successful businessman, is the most serious, i.e., the most plausible, i.e., the candidate that best fulfills the Buckley (as in William F.) Rule: that political prudence dictates that we (i.e., “we” conservatives) support the most conservative candidate who can win.  Never mind that Bill Buckley himself did not consistently follow the Buckley Rule — he was, for example, an ardent supporter of Barry Goldwater.  No matter: it is a sound rule. When, that is, it can be plausibly applied, which is much less frequently than the conventional wisdom would have you think.

As I’ve said before in this space, if it turns out that Mitt Romney is the nominee, then I will support him. But at this juncture, I believe, it is by no means clear that he will be the nominee.  I say this with some hesitation, since most of the smart money on my side of the aisle is solidifying around Mitt. The shooting star (at least, I think it was a shooting star) that was Newt Gingrich seems to have startled many conservative bystanders into eloquence: Newt, No! Romney, Yes!

I do not, however, discern a great deal of enthusiasm in their endorsement.  Some of the holdouts explain why. Over at Townhall.com, frequent PJM contributor John Hawkins, for example, summarizes some of Romney’s signal vulnerabilities in a post titled “7 Reasons Why Mitt Romney’s Electability Is A Myth.” When I tell you that Bain Capital, the company that made Romney rich, received a $10 million federal bailout, of which he and some of his partners pocketed $4 million, while laying off hundreds, you’ll understand that the idea that he is the candidate, conservative or not, who can win is open to doubt.

As I say, most of the smart conservatives, especially those who are politically engaged, favor Romney (just as the they are alternately terrified and contemptuous of Gingrich). But the gratification gap is palpable. “People,” Hawkins observes, “just don’t like Mitt. The entire GOP primary process so far has consisted of Republican voters desperately trying to find an alternative to Mitt Romney.”

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“Energy,” said the poet William Blake, “is eternal delight.” Barack Obama  disagrees.

Quick test: When it comes to energy, what is America’s number one priority?

If you said “a cheap and abundant supply of the stuff,” go to the head of the class.

If you uttered the phrase “environmentally sustainable” or some such other piece of politically correct nonsense, you should turn off all the lights in your house, sell your car, and apply to the Obama administration or one of its enablers for a job.

As Glenn Reynolds has frequently pointed out, the one campaign promise Barack Obama has indisputably kept is to make energy more expensive. He has done this chiefly through regulatory intimidation.  And he has had powerful allies in the media. The New York Times, for example, never saw an oil or natural gas well it really liked. In fact, the former paper of record has devoted an entire series to fan the environmental hysteria over producing natural gas.

 * “Learning Too Late of Perils in Gas Well Leases”

* “Behind Veneer, Doubt on Future of Natural Gas”

* “Insiders Sound an Alarm Amid a Natural Gas Rush”

* “Chemicals and Toxic Materials That Come With Hydrofracking”

*  “Natural Gas and Polluted Air”

And on and on. The Times has thoughtfully assembled the whole series for you under the rubric “Drilling Down.”

It’s a pretty nauseating series, just as the Obama administration’s efforts to impoverish America are alarming.  It is heartening, then, to discover signs of rebellion, for example this bracing sign  which a friend sent me:

“Clearly,” he noted, “the people of North East Fairfield Ohio either don’t read The New York Times or don’t care much for what it says about drilling for oil and gas.”

God bless ’em!

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Last month, late on the Saturday night of homecoming weekend at elite Williams College, some unknown person scrawled a highly unpleasant and ugly graffito on the wall of an upper floor of a student dormitory. The dreaded “N-word” figured prominently in the message, so written to generate the maximum incendiary impact.

Adam Falk, president of the College, was instantly on the case: “A great deal of harm has been done by this vile act,” he said in a public letter to the grieving Williams Community, which was wracked by this horrible, horrible incident. “Since there is no excuse for behavior so offensive, hateful, and harmful — anywhere, but especially at Williams — we will continue to do all that we can to hold the perpetrator(s) accountable.”

He cancelled classes and athletic practice for the following Monday, using the day as an opportunity for “healing” and to teach about the evils of racism and how such attitudes would not be tolerated on his campus. The Counseling Center, Chaplain’s Office, and Multicultural Center advertised psychological help for students who might feel traumatized by this “shock.” A group of students marched to the local police station to demand that the police aid campus security in investigating this “hate crime.” Eventually, even the FBI — the FBI! — was enlisted to investigate this “horrifying,” “vile,” “hateful,” “offensive,” “harmful” act.

A bit of an overreaction? I think so, which is why I wrote a note about the incident for the December The New Criterion. The hysteria continues unabated in bucolic Williamstown. One student who posted several comments  on a student website dilating on the “hypocrisy” of race relations at Williams earned the attention of the Dean’s Office: “The posts that I put up on this thread,” he wrote,

 got me noticed by the Dean’s office as a suspicious person and I was brought in for an interrogation by the FBI and Sergeant McGowan explicitly because of them the Sunday before reading period. “You seem to be a fairly vocal poster on the online message boards.” They asked for a polygraph test, DNA test, the works.

Think about it: A student expresses his opinion about something. The administration doesn’t like his opinion. Ergo, the administration turns him over to the FBI for interrogation.

That was the way they did things in Stalin’s Russia, but many of us thought a different tradition regarding freedom of expression prevailed in American colleges.

When the “vile,” “offensive,” “hateful” graffito was discovered, two hypotheses crystalized to account for it. The first hypothesis, quickly embraced by President Falk (a physicist) and the more vocal parts of the administration, was that there exists a racist sub-culture at Williams. The idea was that the message was written by a bigot to intimidate minority students on campus. Indeed, many students claimed that the message amounted to a “death threat” against minority students.

What do you think? Is elite Williams College (all in, it will cost you — or whoever’s paying — more than $55,000 per annum to attend) a seething cauldron of racist, sexist attitudes? Or do you reckon it is, like most elite educational institutions, a farm specializing in coddling a herd of well-fed, complacent, eminently politically correct sheep — that “herd of independent minds” the art critic Harold Rosenberg spoke of, lo, these many years ago?

I incline to the latter option. I think you’d have to look far and wide at Williams to discover anyone harboring or espousing anything so outré as a racist opinion. Which is why, when the story of this vile, harmful, terrible, offensive, violent example of hate speech was first announced and President Adam Falk publicly promised to discover and hold accountable the “perpetrator(s),” I had to wonder whether he was being entirely prudent.

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David Cameron just batted another century. I think I’ve got that right: On this side of the pond we say “hit a home run.” In Blighty, I believe one says “bat a century.” (English and other members and former members of the Empire will feel free to correct me.) [UPDATE: As many have. The correct equivalent is "hit a six." And, I am reliably informed, one "scores a century."] Just a week or so back, Mr. Cameron demonstrated that he was not, as many of us believed, a sort of blancmange with legs. In vetoing the proposed revisions to the EU’s Lisbon Treaty, he showed that he actually possessed a back bone and that he was willing and able to stand up for Britain. “It has to be in Britain’s interests” was his constant, and correct, refrain. When he went to Brussels for the Merkozy all-nighter, he had reportedly intended to go along to get along. But when he absorbed what the Treaty revisions would mean for the city of London (billions of pounds in new fees), he told Angela and Nicolas that they would be sailing to Eutopia without Britannia.

Mr. Cameron must enjoy standing tall. For just yesterday in a speech about religion in the public square, he told Rowan Williams, the self-described “hairy lefty” and “Druid,” who also happens to be Archbishop of Canterbury, where he could get off. He has made a pastime of criticizing the Cameron government’s spending cuts, the legitimacy of its coalition, and has recently demanded increased taxes on banks.

“I certainly don’t object to the Archbishop of Canterbury expressing his views on politics,” Mr. Cameron responded, but “he shouldn’t be surprised when I respond.”  The Telegraph reported that “Downing street aides” were “concerned” about Mr. Cameron’s speech. But that’s what God made aides for: to  oppose plain speaking. Reagan’s aides repeatedly struck the line “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” from his famous Berlin speech in 1987. They kept removing it, he kept putting it back in. It stayed in.

Mr. Cameron said all sorts of things calculated to give the Sir Humphreys of the world dyspepsia:

Put simply, for too long we have been unwilling to distinguish right from wrong. “Live and let live” has too often become “do what you please.”

Bad choices have too often been defended as just different lifestyles. To be confident in saying something is wrong, is not a sign of weakness, it’s a strength.

One of the biggest lessons of the riots last summer is that we’ve got to stand up for our values if we are to confront the slow–motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations.

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