If you’ve noticed how harsh I’ve been on Dean, you might think that I would be pleased to see him to go ape on national television. Not so – I’d rather see him run against Bush than any of the other leading candidate. Since they are all equally communist, I’d at least like to see the candidate with the least chance of beating Bush win the primary. Just to cover my bets, I had better stick to bashing the leftists in general:

Larry Elder: The left supported the war in Iraq, then flip-flopped when it was politically advantageous.

Thomas Sowell: The Left’s problem is “that they are running out of the poor, who serve as a justification of the left’s drive to extend their power over all the rest of us.”

Dean is taking grassroots to a whole new level: “Team Dean Racing“. In the words of Tim Blair, it’s “the only race vehicle in the world actually designed to spin.”

I recently received an email (too long to show here) from a reader of my blog criticizing me from calling Dean a socialist. He gave Dean’s “goal of diversifying our media” as an example of his non-socialist, pro-American stance and “one of the main reasons I will support him in this year’s election.”
Well hell, if Dean can claim that Bush is a Fascist, that the world isn’t safer without Saddam, and “diversifying” the media is pro-American, then maybe he deservers my “support:”
Dean? For America?
As I recall, both Stalin and Hitler made “diversifying the media” major goals of their rule shortly after their gained power.

The Ominous Parallels

After each full day of skiing during the last week, I recovered my body by exercising my mind – notably by reading The Ominous Parallels. Here is the review I submitted to Amazon.com afterwards:

As a Jew, I have watched, read, and visited countless accounts of the Holocaust – but not one of them correctly identified the ideas that brought it about or the ideas that will prevent it from happening again. In some cases, I was first shocked by the accounts of survivors and then horrified when they offered as a solution the same ideas that created the Nazis.

“The Ominous Parallels” finally exposes the cause and answer to Fascism. Dr. Peikoff presents a compelling and cogent thesis on the evil of collectivism in terms of the fundamental ideas that shape our history by masterfully analyzing the intellectual and cultural climate that led to the Holocaust and its parallels to today’s America. Along the way, he outlines the development of Western philosophy – from the glorious creation of the United States to the rise of skepticism, pragmatism, collectivism, and the Weimar culture. Broad philosophical, political, and cultural trends are analyzed and dissected according to their basic premises, as you will never hear in a history class.

Both those well read in and new to the philosophy of Objectivism will find this book accessible and the arguments reasoned out and supported by numerous examples. This is not light reading, however– I spent as much time pausing to digest and integrate the ideas in this book as I did reading it. Those unfamiliar with Objectivism may have some difficulty connecting the author’s asides on abortion, physics, and religion to the central theme, but it does not detract from the overall message.

As Dr Peikoff states, it is impossible to predict the future or know whether the Holocaust will repeat itself – but it is certain that only by understanding and adopting a proper philosophy can America survive as a free country. If this book succeeds in teaching the world about the importance of ideas, then six million shall not have died in vain.

After asking voters not to focus on “guns, God and gays,” Howard Dean is using Jesus in his campaign rhetoric – but only in the South. Dean is a “Congregationalist” (wtf is that?) and has a Jewish wife and children. Methinks that (a) Dean is too pragmatic to hold any kind of explicit abstract belief, and (b) Dean already has his bases loaded with deities to worship – like the environment and the “common good.” Cox and Forkum comments:
facesofDean-X.gif

In other news, Dean thinks Bin Laden should be presumed innocent until a jury decides otherwise:

I’ve resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found,” Dean said. “I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials.

Earth to Dean: There is an essential difference between a civilized, law-abiding country and a war zone. It is just as absurd to hold jury trials in a war zone, as it is to use machine guns and bombs against a common thief. Both Saddam and Bin Laden (if he is captured alive) should be tortured to obtain any relevant information and unceremoniously shot and dumped back into the hole they crawled from. If either is presumed innocent, then why did hundreds of U.S. soldier’s lives and uncounted billions of dollars go to kill them?