Saturday, December 22, 2012

So I got up this morning...

and turned on the tube, excuse me the telescreen. Another sports guy, coach Paterno, was telling me about guns and how this is not the Wild West. That the Second Amendment is out of date since the invention of self loading firearms (more than a century ago) and we should, in the words of Jeremiah the Bull-frog; "Throw away the guns and the bombs and the wars/ and make sweet love to...whomever."

So M and I went out to get breakfast, and there on the cover of the NY Post was a headline calling Wayne LaPierre a "Gun Nut" for calling for the deployment of armed guards at schools and other free fire, I mean gun free zones. After all we know that when seconds count the police are only minutes away.

But further back in the paper I found a classic case. An immigrant from Egypt, a guy who put in a sixty hour week at a bodega so he could go home with his US citizenship and marry his bride was on duty last night. Two huckleberries in hoodies came into the store, shot him in the face and emptied the register. Just a normal day in the neighborhood, especially if you live in Chicago, Philadelphia or Detroit

So I ask again, why do people who can afford, and probably have, armed guards want the rest of us to give up our God given right to self-defense? Because in the reality of this world it's always the Wild West, no matter what fantasy world Paterno, Costas and Blumberg live in.


Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Can Soledad O'Brian reason?


THE PUBLIC POLICY from The American Spectator

By Peter Ferrara on 12.19.12 @ 6:08AM

It is time to put liberal posturing aside.

To President Obama, the word “politics” means anyone who disagrees with him, as in the phrase “It is time to put politics aside.” Whenever he says that, he is really saying “It is time to put aside anyone who disagrees with me on this issue.”

Our hearts are all still hurting over the mass shooting and murder of 20 innocent small children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. But it was in the same breath as the announcement of the tragedy that President Obama’s all politics all the time ideological warriors inserted their politics, seeking to exploit the deaths of these small children for their ideological and political gain. For them, such gain means liquidating even more of the liberties and even constitutional rights of all Americans who had nothing to do with the mass shooting.

Twenty children are murdered in cold blood by a deranged gunman, and the answer is to seize the guns and flush the effective right to self-defense of 300 million Americans? The answer is actually just the opposite, as I explain below. Just ask yourself what political philosophy has had disarming the citizenry near the top of its agenda for more than a century.

But the question we all have to ask now is are we going to tolerate left-wing infiltrators exploiting the gruesome murder of small children to advance the further diminution of our liberties and constitutional rights?

More Guns, Less Crime

The sharpest person in America on the issue of guns and crime is John Lott, the author of the classic book, More Guns, Less Crime. Early in his career, Lott was an economist for the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which established federal sentencing guidelines, leading to his subsequent career as a path breaking thinker on guns and crime. His book More Guns, Less Crime is the bible for understanding how to respond effectively to the Sandy Hook school tragedy.

Lott’s book is not an opinion piece or a lawyer’s argument. What it does is carefully present, review, and analyze copious data county by county, city by city, state by state, all across America, for several recent decades. Moreover, he doesn’t just cite stats that he thinks will make his case. He presents the data through highly sophisticated regression analysis that befits a first rate economist formerly of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, and thoroughly explains and demonstrates what the numbers show. These regressions account for not only all the law enforcement variables (arrest, execution, and imprisonment rates), income and poverty measures (poverty and unemployment rates, per capita real income, as well as income maintenance, retirement and unemployment payments), the thirty-six measures of demographic changes, and the national average changes in crime rates from year to year and average differences across states….In addition, the [regressions] account for the differences in various concealed-handgun laws and other types of gun control laws.

In other words, this is the most sophisticated presentation of the data in the world.

What the results show is that in localities where there are more guns, there is less crime. That is because criminals avoid victims who are or might be armed, and prefer to prey on the defenseless and unarmed. It is this unparalleled scholarship that has swept the states with newly enacted “concealed carry” laws. Those laws require local authorities to issue permits to carry concealed handguns to those who meet the specified qualifications (known as “shall issue” laws). Lott describes the sweeping change in his latest Third Edition of More Guns, Less Crime:

In 2007, there were about 5 million Americans permitted to carry concealed handguns. Thirty-nine states have right to carry laws and nine have may-issue laws. Only two states, Illinois and Wisconsin, still completely ban people from carrying concealed handguns. That is a big change from just the eight states that had right-to-carry laws in the early 1980s.

Also in the Third Edition, published in 2010, are the results of sophisticated regressions run on the effects of those conceal and carry laws:

There are large drops in overall violent crime, murder, rape, and aggravated assault that begin right after the right to carry laws had gone into effect. In all those crime categories, the crime rates consistently stay much lower than they were before the law. The murder rate in these right- to-carry states fell consistently every year relative to non-right-to-carry states.

Lott adds:

All the results indicate that violent crime falls after right-to-carry laws are passed…. There is a large, statistically significant drop in murder rates across all specifications. The before-and-after average comparison implies that right-to-carry laws reduce murder by roughly 20 percent. In all cases, right-to-carry laws cause the trends in murder, rape, and robbery rates to fall.

Lott quotes the Detroit Free Press on the results of conceal and carry in one state:

“Six years after new rules made it much easier to get a license to carry concealed weapons, the number of Michiganders legally packing heat has increased six fold….The incidence of violent crime in Michigan in the six years since the law went into effect has been, on average, below the rate of the previous six years. The overall incidence of death from firearms, including suicide and accidents, also has declined. More than 155,000 Michiganders — about one in every 65 — are now authorized to carry loaded guns as they go about their everyday affairs…. About 25,000 people had CCW permits in Michigan before the law changed in 2001.”

Conceal and carry permit holders have been incredibly law abiding, with revocations running at about 0.2 percent or less in most states, sometimes much less. Many if not most of these are for infractions unrelated to guns, such as failure to maintain vehicle insurance. People are safer around permit holders than among the general public.

In fact, armed permit holders often serve as the first line of defense, as explained by David Kopel in Monday’s Wall Street Journal:

The media rarely mention the mass murders that were thwarted by armed citizens at the Shoney’s Restaurant in Anniston, Ala. (1991), the high school in Pearl, Miss. (1997), the middle-school dance in Edinboro, Penn. (1998), and the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo. (2007), among others. At the Clackamas Mall in Oregon last week, an active shooter murdered two people and then saw that a shopper, who had a handgun carry permit, had drawn a gun and was aiming at him. The murderer’s next shot was to kill himself.

Of course Lott and his work have been attacked by liberal and leftist ideologues. But in his book he thoroughly and brilliantly decimates them, too. It is easy for hardened gun control campaigners to assert that “Lott has been discredited.” But there is no basis for such assertions.

Can Liberals Reason?

Lott applies the lessons learned from this work to mass murders such as the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary. In a recent talk radio interview, he noted that the mass murderers usually choose so-called gun free zones such as schools, or movie theaters or shopping malls where guns are prohibited. That is because they know they can carry out their plan for mass murder there without being stopped.

Lott insightfully explains that these mass murderers are consciously choosing to commit suicide in carrying out their crimes. But they don’t want to go out quietly. They want to make a big splash to draw national and even world attention to their pain and their plight. This is all a reflection of the mental illness that generally plagues them.

The lessons of More Guns, Less Crime actually apply quite directly to this problem. When Israel suffered terrorists targeting its schools, it ultimately decided to arm its teachers. In fact, Israel generally follows the conceal and carry policy Lott favors throughout society. This way, the Israeli people themselves are the first line of defense against terrorism.

Such a policy would have prevented the extent of the killing at Sandy Hook. School policy should seek to train as many willing teachers as possible in each school, empowered with conceal and carry permits to defend themselves and their children. Such permits more generally would help to prevent such mass murders elsewhere.

Is this just a wild west scenario? We are already living in the wild west, but often with only the bad guys having guns. And that is where the policies of the liberals and President Obama would take us further. As Lott says, “The evidence should make gun control advocates pause, as all the gun bans that I have studied show that murder rates increase after the ban is enacted.” But our experience with President Obama shows that he doesn’t learn from experience. That is why he wants to expand the experience of murder capital Chicago to the entire nation.

The bottom line is that the government does not have the power to take away guns from dangerous criminals and mass murderers. The government cannot stop drugs from crossing our borders, and even showing up in prisons. The government can only stop law-abiding, innocent victims from being armed. But there is no sense or logic to that.

The gun control policy is even worse than that, because it sacrifices the liberties, self-defense, and constitutional rights of every innocent American, to an ineffective policy that will not work, unless your policy is precisely to disarm the public because you have nefarious plans for the American people. Just bring back the ban on assault rifles? We already tried that, and it didn’t work, with no significant change in the data when the ban went into effect, and no significant change when the ban lapsed. More effective would be to ban brain dead liberals from public service. Would that violate the Constitution? Aren’t we already discussing policies that would violate the Constitution?

There really is no such thing as an assault rifle. They are defined by references to their cosmetic appearance rather than to their functionality. Banning assault rifles is really just a PR stunt deluding the gullible that something important has been accomplished.

Other liberal policies have only contributed to the problem as well. Liberal deinstitutionalization policies have liberated the mentally ill to roam the streets, giving rise to the homeless problem as well as to more mass murderers. As Kopel also notes in Monday’s Journal:

A 2011 paper by Steven P. Segal at the University of California, Berkeley, “Civil Commitment Law, Mental Health Services, and U.S. Homicide Rates,” found that a third of the state-to-state variation in homicide rates was attributable to the strength or weakness of involuntary civil-commitment laws.

Violence-drenched movies and video games contribute to disrespect for life in our culture. The breakdown of the family and widespread out of wedlock births give rise to more violence and crime as well. The airhead liberal policy of piously declaring certain public areas “gun free zones” very directly contributes to mass murder.

Maybe we need to look at that idea of banning brain-dead liberals.

About the Author

Peter Ferrara is Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy at the Heartland Institute, General Counsel of the American Civil Rights Union, Senior Fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, and Senior Policy Advisor on Entitlements and Budget Policy at the National Tax Limitation Foundation. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under President George H.W. Bush.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Life on the Corn Dog, as opposed to the Corn Bread side.


NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE          



Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III (RG III, as he is known) has a problem. It turns out that some black commentators, and probably some black elites, don’t think he is black enough — because he dared to publicly state that he didn’t want to be judged solely by his skin color as an NFL quarterback.

Last Thursday morning on First Take, ESPN’s Rob Parker uttered a comment for which he was later fired, although he probably only said what some African Americans think but don’t publicly express: “My question is, and it’s just a straight, honest question: Is he a brother, or is he a cornball brother?”
I’d never heard the term before, so I did a quick search and landed at Urban Dictionary.com. Here is the definition I found there:

Cornball brother: An African-American man who chooses not to follow the stereotype . . . life choices include marrying white women, being a Republican, and not being ‘down with the cause.’

Urban Dictionary also lists “corn dog brother” as a related term and gives this example in its definition:

Leroy is a Republican who listens to country music, enjoys golfing on weekends, and drives [an] eco-friendly car. He is a corn dog brother. 

I love it when I get an example with my definitions!

Little did Parker know, he was performing a public service by reminding the country of the interesting concept of the not-black-enough brother.

And you wonder why there are not more black Republicans?

Things got more interesting as Parker continued his riff.

“He’s black, he does his thing, but he’s not really down with the cause,” Parker continued. “He’s not one of us. He’s kind of black, but he’s not really like the kind of guy you really want to hang out with.” [Oh man, a stone racist, why would anyone want to hang out with this fool. Oh yeah, he brought the keg.] Parker admitted that he needed to learn more about Griffin’s personal life before he could accept him as authentically black. “I just want to find out about him,” he said. [As if it’s any of your F'n business, Bro.]
It could be a comedy routine on Saturday Night Live [Actually “In Living Color” from back in the day, they actually did routines on this subject, from both sides. I remember a bit in which the brother who had risen through the ranks had to train his white replacement. Followed by a meeting of the White Establishment to confirm the change, hilarious! And all we remember is the beginning of J-Low’s carrier.]  — the notion of a black man standing before some kind of Blackness Panel to determine if he’s black enough. What would be the qualifications? Who would the questioners be, and what would they ask? How would the scoring work, and would there be a talent requirement? Singing and dancing, possibly? And an oath of black allegiance at the end? [Ask J. Jackson, he’s the one that wanted to disembowel The President when he was running against Hillary.]

A comedy routine is exactly what this should be. But it is a reality that black people face, although I hope it affects only a thin minority of African-American commentators and elites. [Read “The Root”, if you dare.]
But there are those words on Urban Dictionary.com, those made-up, ugly words.
 “I don’t know because I keep hearing these things,” Parker explained. “We all know he has a white fiancĂ©e.”

There you have it! Exhibit A for expulsion from the Blackness Club. What kind of authentic black man falls in love with a white woman? [The operative term here is “falling in love”, rather than “bootie call”.]
“Then there was all this talk about he’s a Republican,” Parker continued. “There’s no information at all [about that].”

He is marrying a white woman, and he might be a Republican? That’s automatic disbarment from the Blackness Club. And a lifetime pass to the Cornball Brother Hall of Fame. [Black people are so weak. After a four hundred year fight to regain our honor “we” roll over for a huckleberry like Parker? Damn shame.]
Parker finished his rant with this observation about another not-so-black black man: “Because we did find out with Tiger Woods, Tiger Woods was like, ‘I’ve got black skin, but don’t call me black.’ So people got to wondering about Tiger Woods.”

Didn’t white people used to get in big trouble for this kind of backwards, exclusionary [Redneck] thinking?
It isn’t just athletes who face this scrutiny. And it’s not just from black sportscasters. President Obama faced it, too.

In a column called “Colorblind,” in September of 2007, Debra Dickerson, the popular African-American columnist for Salon, explained to her large following why she had waited so long to write about then-candidate Obama. At the time, if you remember, the battle was between two firsts: the first major-party female presidential nominee and the first African-American presidential nominee. [Since both candidates believed the same things the difference was mainly between their legs.]

“Which brings me to the main reason I delayed writing about Obama,” Dickerson wrote. “For me, it was a trick question in a game I refused to play. Since the issue was always framed as a battle between gender and race, I didn’t have the heart (or the stomach) to point out the obvious: Obama isn’t black.” [Oh my Lordy Lord! Miss Scarlet who might be that tan man in your bedroom, and especially before afternoon tea!]
There goes that historic win for racial equality in 2008! Dickerson thinks there should be an asterisk in the record books next to Obama’s title as the first black president — because he has white blood. [And where does that leave Bubbah?]

Wasn’t it white racists — along with eugenicists — who deployed the “single drop” rule to perpetuate their worldview?

Colin Powell, too, came under fire for being inauthentically black. Powell had the temerity to accept a position working for President George W. Bush as America’s first African-American secretary of state. Harry Belafonte lead the charge against Powell on Ted Leitner’s popular San Diego talk show, in 2002:
There is an old saying, in the days of slavery. There were those slaves who lived on the plantation, and there were those slaves who lived in the house. You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master, do exactly the way the master intended to have you serve him. That gave you privilege. Colin Powell is committed to come into the house of the master, as long as he would serve the master, according to the master’s purpose. [Oh that Harry, such the revolutionary! “Day oh, Day oh, Day light come and me wan go home”, You know the drill.]

And you thought the Taliban was tough? These race brown shirts [Nice choice of color, since Hitler felt that the US was irrelevant as an enemy since there were just too many Negros and Jews to produce a formidable enemy. Maybe a notch above the Slavs, maybe.] show little tolerance for people who don’t meet their code of blackness, and even less for intellectual disobedience. Their law is simple: Kiss the ring, and behave and believe as we tell you, or face excommunication from the race. [As with General Zod, lost in Oreo Cookie Land.]

Belafonte had similar unkind words for Condoleezza Rice, who responded with a simple and strong statement: “I don’t need Harry Belafonte to tell me what it means to be black.”
Poor Condi. She was thrown out of the brotherhood and sisterhood for the role she played in a Republican administration.

And then there was Bill Cosby.

It was the NAACP’s 50th-anniversary celebration of Brown v. Board of Education, in 2004, and Cosby had the audacity to talk about some of the serious challenges facing African Americans, particularly in America’s inner cities.

Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem,” he said. “We’ve got to take the neighborhood back. We’ve got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It’s right around the corner.”
Not exactly fighting words, you’d think. Cosby then addressed the problems confronting black Americans: senseless black-on-black crime in America, failing public schools that so poorly serve young black men, and a dysfunctional welfare state.

“There’s no English being spoken, and they’re walking and they’re angry,” he said. “Oh, God, they’re angry and they have pistols and they shoot and they do stupid things. And after they kill somebody, they don’t have a plan. Just murder somebody. Boom. Over what? A pizza?”

He went on to talk about the problem of illegitimacy as it affects black America: [Whose that basketball dude with the umpteen chlian and that tribe of wives?]

Five or six different children, same woman, eight, ten different husbands or whatever, pretty soon you’re going to have to have DNA cards so you can tell who you’re making love to. You don’t know who this is. It might be your grandmother. I’m telling you, they’re young enough. Hey, you have a baby when you’re twelve. Your baby turns 13 and has a baby, how old are you? Huh? Grandmother. 

He closed out the speech with some words about the legacy of all of those who fought the civil-rights battles of the 1960s: “I just want to get you as angry as you ought to be. When you walk around the neighborhood and you see this stuff, that stuff’s not funny. These people are not funny anymore. And that’s not [my] brother. And that’s not my sister.”

You would have thought Cosby would be celebrated for the speech, and for the courage it took to make it on such a big night.

But no. Out came the Blackness Panel’s chief enforcement agent. In a New York minute — or a Philadelphia nanosecond — University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson [Black America’s A#1 asshole.] challenged not only Bill Cosby’s comments, but Bill Cosby’s black bona fides.

“All who have made it need not have ‘Afroamnesia,’” Dyson told a University of Michigan audience, referring to successful blacks such as Cosby who forget where they come from. Dyson described the subsequent speeches Cosby made in defense of his original speech as Cosby’s “Blame-the-Poor Tour.”

Dyson even managed to mock Cosby’s successful TV series for not being black enough. It pandered to whites, he said, because the show was about an intact black family — father and mother together — living a traditional, upper-middle-class life.

How utterly unblack! [Shall we bring up that old term Niggerremus?]

Dyson wrote the book Is Bill Cosby Right? to offer a counterpoint to Cosby’s speech. In it, he attacked Cosby’s character — and his heart.

“No matter how you judge Cosby’s comments, you can’t help but believe that a great deal of his consternation with the poor stems from his desire to remove the shame he feels in their presence and about their activity in the world,” he wrote. “There’s nothing like a formerly poor black multimillionaire bashing poor blacks to lend credence to the ancient assaults they’ve endured from the dominant culture.” [There is nothing like a lame-o “Black Intellectual” fantasizing over his wine and cigars about the lives of two beat thugs that he feels are his underclass army, ready to over through the bourgeoisie, both black and white.]

Like Cosby, Tiger, Barack, Condi, and Colin, RG III will hear more challenges to his blackness in years to come. Luckily, he has his priorities lined up. When recently asked by a sports reporter what his biggest fear was about coming to Washington, D.C., to be an NFL quarterback, RG III had a simple answer: “You try not to fear too many things. I fear God.”

After receiving an outpouring of support from African Americans all over the country, and white Americans as well, RG III had this to say to his fans on Twitter about the whole ESPN incident: “I’m thankful for a lot of things in life, and one of those things is your support. Thank You.”

Pure class. He never bothered to dignify the claims of his critic, whose shrill commentary is a reflection not of Griffin’s blackness, but of Parker’s refusal to respect the rich diversity of his own people and the choices they make.

Blackness enforcers such as Parker are the ones fixated on race as America lurches forward to a truly post-racial society, one in which black people fall in love with white people and get married and few people care.

Just the racists — white and black alike.

— Lee Habeeb is the vice president of content at Salem Radio Network, which syndicates Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, and Hugh Hewitt. He lives in Oxford, Miss., with his wife, Valerie, and daughter, Reagan.

Saturday, December 1, 2012




It’s at times like this I’m ashamed to admit I live inside the Beltway.

Well, that’s probably not specific enough, since I’m usually ashamed to admit I live inside the Beltway.

Still, the second you try to explain the stupidity of this “fiscal cliff” fiasco to a normal person, it makes William F. Buckley’s famous declaration that he’d rather be governed by the first few hundred people listed in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard seem all the more reasonable.

While there are some responsible politicians and policymakers in Washington, if you look at the whole place collectively, Uncle Sam starts to look like a junkie. [Frank Sinatra as the “Man With the Golden Arm”?] The logic of addiction dictates that you make a deal that allows you to avoid all of your problems now and enjoy a quick high in exchange for a painful confrontation with reality down the road.

Almost exactly a year ago, during the famed debt-ceiling negotiations, Speaker of the House John Boehner boasted that he’d forced tough concessions from the Democrats, achieving the first real cut in government spending in ages. He claimed his “real, enforceable cut” amounted to $7 billion for fiscal year 2012. The Congressional Budget Office objected, saying the real savings were closer to $1 billion.

“Which of these numbers is accurate?” asked columnist Mark Steyn at the time. Answering his own question, he wrote: “The correct answer is: Who cares?”

And he was right. At the time, the U.S. was spending $188 million of largely borrowed money every hour of every day. [Don’t you just love the Chinese, so ready to be The Middle Kingdom, so ready to accept the power that is their due after the humiliations of the last thousand years? “Ah, we have regained the Mandate of Heaven”, or so they think.] So, going by the CBO number, if you started watching the official Godfather trilogy box  set right after the deal was cut, the government would have burned through its “savings” before Fredo went on his last fishing trip. If you went by Boehner’s math, you could actually watch the whole trilogy about four times before the “savings” ran out.

America already has a more progressive tax system than Europe, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The Democrats insist that the rich need to start paying their “fair share,” which means even more progressivity. The Republicans, meanwhile . . . agree! The difference is that the GOP wants to eliminate loopholes and exemptions while keeping rates where they are. Democrats would prefer simply raising the rates. [Except for Rep. Gomert, Forbes and the rest. They are calling for a flat tax, a tax in which Buffet’s secretary would pay the same percentage as he. Guess that’s just too simple.]  

Now here’s a distinction that the first few hundred people in the Boston phone book would probably grasp better than the folks at Harvard (or in Congress): A tax increase is a tax increase. If I make the same amount of money as I did last year but pay more in taxes, then my taxes have gone up. If I pay less, my taxes have gone down. Whether the numbers moved this way or that because of closed loopholes or rejiggered tax rates, the result for me is the same. That doesn't mean tax simplification doesn't make sense, but dodging a rate hike isn't the same as dodging a tax hike.

So the Republicans are, in fact, in favor of raising taxes by the rules of the real world. In exchange for doing this, they want the Democrats to deal with the real problem: spending. You could confiscate 100 percent of income over $1 million, and it would cover about a third of the deficit (and crush the economy in the process). You’d still have to deal with spending, particularly entitlement spending.
But the Democrats want to do . . . nothing. Or at least that’s the position they seemed to be taking this week.

The White House and the Democrats have been floating the idea that we can worry about entitlements later, if ever. [Been there, done that in the Reagan, Bush, and Bush, administrations and it never works out. Dems promise cuts, sometimes large ones, but they never put out; would you still buy jade finger rings for such a puta?] The urgent thing is to raise taxes on the wealthy as soon as possible. When asked what he was prepared to cut, Senate majority leader Harry Reid said Wednesday, “Now remember, we've already done more than a billion dollars’ worth of cuts. We've already done that. So we need to get some credit for that.” [And such cuts are?] Okay, here’s the credit: That is about .09 percent of the deficit. Take .09 percent of a bow, Harry.

Meanwhile, the GOP seems to be obsessed with Talmudic interpretations of Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge. You see, if the Bush tax cuts expire, we’ll all pay a lot more in taxes. But letting them expire wouldn't violate the pledge, while voting for a smaller net tax increase would.

As Republicans sort all that out, the guy who actually won the election by claiming he had a better plan hasn’t proposed any plan at all. That’s life inside the Beltway for you.[Meanwhile the first nuclear carrier Enterprise is being retired, after 44 years. Is she being replaced, refitted, who knows, not our Great Helmsman, he’s made statements about horses and bayonets but that’s as far as it goes.]

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can write to him by e-mail atJonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO© 2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc.