Christina’s Common Sense

To be accused of “McCarthyism” is among the highest criticisms a politician can receive. It carries with it connotations of wild-eyed Red-scare-era witch hunting. The expression, of course, finds its origin with the infamous Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) in the early 1950s. The typical History 101 story goes as follows: Joe McCarthy needed a reelection platform, so he decided to go after Reds in the American government. Of course there were none, and McCarthy drank himself to death a few years later.

If that’s what you thought, M Stanton Evans stands ready to tell you why it’s wrong. And he does a darn good job.

As I’ve said before, I always like to challenge conservative authors to convince my Liberal Hat of how wrong it is. Evans could do it. Not only could he do it, he did it splendidly. I cannot imagine the patience Evans must have had to go through all that information and distill it into a 600-page book. That may seem like a lot, but Evans gives about 1200 pages’ worth of information in those pages.

Don’t be fooled—the book is deep. I will probably have to read it a few more times before I can make total sense of it. Evans combs through an unbelievable number of documents and weaves them into a historical account that feels like a spy novel (which is basically what the Red Scare was). And if you had any doubts about the authenticity of Evans’ research, he fills up pages and pages with scans of unadulterated original documents proving the existence of not just communist sympathizers, but actual Red spies within the State Department.

So yes, Evans did convince my Liberal Hat that it had been wrong about Joe McCarthy all these years. I defy anyone to read this book and maintain with good conscience that the History 101 story about McCarthy is true. Evans also informed my Conservative Hat, which had a nagging suspicion that McCarthy may have been right after all (after all, anything accepted by the respected historical community it automatically deserves a second look). If you want the other side of what you learned in History 101, go read Blacklisted by History.

The more I see of California, the more I think the movie 10.5 should become reality. At the end of it, California ends up floating in the Pacific Ocean, completely separated from the rest of the United States. That may not be such a bad fate for one of our looniest states.

The Golden State has once again demonstrated its lunacy in a state Supreme Court ruling last week. The Court struck down California’s ban on gay marriage and ruled that same-sex couples may begin to marry by mid-June.

It’s tempting for folks on my side of the aisle to blame the gay rights crowd for this. But it’s not their fault. The fault lies with us. Christians have fallen down in our duty to protect marriage. We’ve given in to no-fault divorce laws to the point that our divorce rate is as high as non-Christians’. And when asked to defend marriage, we stumble and bumble and drool all over ourselves. Is it any wonder the lefties laugh us off the stage?

It may be unpopular, but the truth is that a large homosexual population is not good for society. Since homosexual marriage has been legalized in Scandinavia, illegitimacy rates have climbed and marriage rates dropped. This has not been good for their society, so why should it be better for ours?

It won’t be. It’s politically incorrect to say this, but marriage and family are the bedrock of every healthy society. When they disappear, so does the healthy society. This has been proven again and again. Do we really want to end up like Scandinavia? Think about it.

If I may boast a bit, I made it myself :).

It seems like there’s an advocacy group for everything these days. Everything from disability to skin color runs to the government for money and advocacy. The blind are no different. Yesterday, a DC appeals court ruled that the government must redo paper currency so that blind people can identify what denomination of bill they are holding.

I know I’m going to come across as heartless and cruel here, but are blind people starving to death because they can’t figure out what bill they need to pay for their lunch? I sincerely doubt it. They’ve obviously figured something out. Beyond that, how much is this going to cost? I don’t have an exact figure, but it can’t be cheap. Can blind people not think of any way to design their own system for categorizing bills?

I’m sure they can. But we don’t live in a society where we do things ourselves anymore. We live in a society where we run to the government and hold the rest of the country hostage when things don’t go our way. The country is now going to have to spend billions of dollars to take care of something that can be taken care of without government help.

Loss of sight is a terrible thing to live with. But so’s a learning disability. I happen to have the latter. There are certain limitations that come with it. One of these is that I will probably never be able to balance my own checkbook. That stinks! But I’m not going to go to my bank and demand that they revamp their checkbook so my life can be easier. I use a calculator, or ask my parents for help. This is part of having my particular disability, and I’ve managed it without help from Uncle Sam. Is it impossible that blind people might be able to do the same?

I know what you were thinking: Since Sam Adams discontinued the freelancing program I’m finally going to shut my big mouth and leave you all alone. You thought wrong. I may be volunteer labor now, but I’m still going to maintain this blog as time permits.

Over the weekend, famous and infamous Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy was diagnosed with brain cancer. Naturally this sparked some concern, even among evil and misanthropic Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) who led a prayer meeting for Kennedy this morning. Of course questions abound: Is it fatal? How advanced is it? Whether or not the cancer is fatal, will the senator be able to serve?

I personally do not believe this is Ted Kennedy’s last stand. It can’t be! Kennedys don’t die of cancer. They die when people shoot them, or by playing flag football on skis, or when they mistake a lighthouse for a star and crash their airplane into it. Cancer would be far too mundane a way for a Kennedy to go out.

In all seriousness, however, this is going to cause quite a political shakeup even if Kennedy survives. He has basically run Massachusetts politics, and the US senate, for four decades. If Kennedy is no longer able to serve, it’s going to mark the end of a political era.

Also in all seriousness, I must now cement my status as an evil and misanthropic Republican by wishing the senator and his family all the best and remembering them in my prayers. Much as I despise Kennedy’s senatorial record, brain cancer is no small potatoes and this is going to be a hard time for the Kennedys and their friends.

You will likely have to read this post, and the Boston Herald article, at least twice before you believe what you see. I know I did.

Even if you’re not a big baseball fan, you’d have to live under a rock to not have some knowledge of the near-century-long rivalry between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. Normally it’s all in good fun—until about the 7th Inning Stretch, at which time a fair amount of liquid courage has been ingested by fans on both sides.

That’s pretty much what happened a couple of years ago, when a Yankees fan and a Red Sox fan met in a sports bar in California. When Mr. New York cheered for the Yankees over the Cleveland, Mr. Boston, who was cheering for the Sox over Tampa Bay, uttered some unkind words in his rival’s direction.

As noted in an earlier paragraph, the Yankees/Sox fun and games vanishes darn quickly after a couple of beers. As such, the altercation became physical and resulted in Mr. Yankees punching Mr. Red Sox in the mouth. Such is not terribly unusual between Yankees fans and Sox fans. But it is unusual to sue the assaulted for damage done to your hand by his tooth.

This lawsuit has just been settled, costing the Red Sox fan $25000. The Yankees fan won because, as a musician, he depends on his hands to make a living and having his opponent’s tooth lodged in his knuckle was a major inconvenience. Therefore, some idiot judge decided to slap the Red Sox fan with $25000.

This was a silly case, and the judge who agreed to hear it should be disbarred and not allowed to practice law ever again. So should whichever lawyer agreed to take this case. If this Yankees-fan-turned-musician wants to protect his hands, maybe he should consider not decking people over baseball games. But he won’t, because the legal system has taught him that he can run to a lawyer and sue the person he assaulted over the damages.

I could also use this to make disparaging comments about Yankees fans. But I won’t.

Well guys, finals are over and I’m back to writing about stuff that actually matters.

Ben Stein’s new documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is making liberals in general and specifically evolutionists everywhere squirm, which is what they do when their agenda is scrutinized.

I have yet to see this movie, but the New York Times gave it a scathing review. This means I will probably love it. The newspaper refers to Expelled as “a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry.”

Well, they’d know.

People who say liberals are against free speech are wrong. They love it—for them. They don’t want anyone else’s speech to be free of their regulation. If liberals were really confident in their positions, they wouldn’t be worried about Expelled. They’d offer evidence, debate Stein on Hannity & Colmes, and engage in discussion over it. But since their positions are indefensible and they know it, all they can do is whine like a four-year-old girl. And I love watching every minute of it.

I promise, this is my LAST non-post. Finals are almost over. 

When a baseball team wins the World Series, it has two options for next season: win again or do worse. And everyone will be comparing its performance in the next season to its performance last season. Such is James Bradley’s predicament in Flyboys: A True Story of Courage. Having hit a grand slam with Flags of our Fathers (which is really awesome, and it’s a good movie too), he can either repeat that performance or not quite hit the mark. And all his readers are watching his every move wondering if he can do it.

He can’t. Flyboys is not all bad—in fact, most of it is quite good. Bradley’s way with words leaves nothing to be desired. It’s no small feat to keep your readers interested when narrating the ins and outs of a battle. If you didn’t know it was real, you could be tricked into thinking Flyboys was a novel.  And Bradley does repeat some elements of his epic Flags of our Fathers performance. He does a marvelous job of showing the stark differences between the Americans and the Japanese and why that made the Japanese such a vexing enemy. How do you fight an enemy who doesn’t want to get out alive?

Unfortunately, Bradley also takes some pretty serious pitfalls. The first few chapters of the book are various moral equivalency arguments that the Americans were just as guilty as the Japanese. He does point out legitimate things that our side did wrong, but the idea that they are equal to the Japanese’s treatment of POWs—heck, their own guys—is patently absurd. Bradley poses the question “how do you fight an enemy who wants to die?” and then argues with how it’s done: killing the lot of them. He should know better, especially considering that his father was a Navy Cross recipient on Iwo Jima. 

Bradley’s second pitfall is his completely blatant bias. When he refers to the Japanese he interviewed, he attaches the suffix “-san” to their last names. This is a Japanese sign of respect. However, when referring to Gen. Curtis LeMay, Bradley calls him “Curtis.” One who fancies himself a military historian does not call high-ranking officers by their first names. It doesn’t take a particularly astute observer to see that the Japanese are getting the bigger share of Bradley’s respect allotment. 

However, Flyboys still has plenty to recommend it. I particularly enjoyed getting new insight into George HW Bush’s experience as one of the flyboys. Bradley does have a keen eye for detail and a unique way of telling a story. It’s pretty impressive, especially coming from a guy who, to the best of my knowledge, never wrote a darn thing in his life before Flags of our Fathers. It’s definitely worth the read, as long as you’re not expecting the home team to win another World Series.

And as for my misbehaving layout, I have discovered that this is remedied when I use Internet Exploder Explorer instead of Firefox. So if you have Firefox and my blog looks like a bomb just went off in it, try Explorer. I’m still working on fixing this.

You can tell it’s finals week because my posts are done late at night and are of little substance…

I’m not a fan of Chris Tomlin, but this is a really nice music video done for the movie Amazing Grace. If you have not seen it, I recommend you do—particularly if you’re interested in political activism and/or the intersection between faith and politics.

Also, I have changed my blog’s format as a result of the homepage not displaying properly on my screen and this being the most legible layout for such a situation. I hope it displays properly for you, and if it doesn’t I am trying to fix it.

I don’t know who made this video, but it sure is funny.