‘Imaginitive’, Aye

Not much to be said that hasn’t been already on President Obama’s Nobel award, but in case you missed it, I thought I would share Desmond Tutu’s official response, a brilliantly diplomatic version of the “Huh?” reaction of so many of us (one can only hope that the irony was intentional):

[A] surprising but imaginative choice.

Hat Tip: Times UK

Paglia on Democratic Elitism

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism…

But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote “critical thinking,” which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (“racism, sexism, homophobia”) when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it’s positively pickled.

Read the full article here.

Obama takes on the Constitution

Chrysler and the Rule of Law, by Todd J. Zywiki on one of the dangers of government bailouts.

If I can accept a divine Commandment, it’s this one: ‘Thou shalt preserve the species.’ The life of an individual must not be set at too high a price. If the individual were important in the eyes of nature, nature would take care to preserve him.”

- Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941-1945 (New York: Tarred, Straus, and Young, 1953) 116.

Preservation is tied to the iron law of necessity and the right of victory of the best and the strongest…Whoever wants to live, must struggle, and whoever will not fight in this world of eternal struggle does not deserve to live…Even if this is harsh – it is simply the way it is.”

- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: NSDAP, 1943) 316-317.

[An evolutionist] can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or seem to him the best one.”

- Charles Darwin, Autobiography (New York: Norton, 1969) 94.

The Calumny for all Occasions

In short, “fascist” is a modern word for “heretic,” branding an individual worthy of excommunication from the body politic. The left uses other words – “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobe,” “christianist” – for similar purposes, but these words have less elastic meanings. Fascism, however, is the gift that keeps on giving. George Orwell noted this tendency as early as 1946 in his famous essay “Politics and the English Language”: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ’something not desirable.’ “

- Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism (New York: Doubleday, 2007) 4.

With dictators, nothing succeeds like success.

- Adolf Hitler

The Political Dr. Seuss

Because of the fame of his children’s books (and because we often misunderstand these books) and because his political cartoons have remained largely unknown, we do not think of Dr. Seuss as a political cartoonist. But for two years, 1941-1943, he was the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM (1940-1948), and for that journal he drew over 400 editorial cartoons.

- Richard H. Minear

Bragging Rights

American WWI Recruitment Poster

This Administration Brought to You by Pepsi

Two days before the election, I spent the day in Washington D.C. with some friends, and I noticed something odd: At first, I assumed that the metro stations were just decorated for the upcoming inauguration. A number of the lighted pillar-things had a simple tri-coloured design on them that looked a little something like this:

And I thought “Hey, isn’t that they Obama campaign logo? Odd.” This opinion was bolstered by several posters that had the symbol and a single word or phrase “Hope”, “Change”, “Pop”. Wait: “pop”? Something wasn’ right (there was also one that said “soul”, which, honestly, why didn’t they just say “fried chicken”? I mean, good grief.):

Turns out, it was a pepsi add campaign, but the confusion was (and is) understandable and dare I say intentional:

To be fair, maybe the Obama camp stole Pepsi’s idea:

All of which sparked a memory of a propaganda poster I came across a few years ago:

Lasagna v. Won Ton Soup: The Bushy Inauguration Speech

The Daily Show has presented a detailed, in-depth analysis of President Obama’s inauguration speech. Click here for change.

The Culture War

Nazi propaganda poster, Belgium, 1944