C.S. Lewis, author of Chronicles of Narnia and That Hideous Strength

This is the conclusion of the three-part letter I’m posting in reply to Kelley Ross’ essay, “That Hideous Strength: Satan is a Democrat, It is the Blue States that are Red, & The Evil Empire Strikes Back.”

>Democrats and labor unions, with obvious hostility, drive industries out of whole cities and States and then lament that “Capitalism” has failed to provide employment. No. A good example is that the laissez faire Capitalism of 1906 delivered 1.7% unemployment, the very year that Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle portrayed hopeless hordes of the unemployed waiting for jobs at the meatpackers in Chicago. The real hopeless hordes of the unemployed are now in France, or Michigan, where socialism has reigned for decades.

And then one year later there was the Panic of 1907 when the stock market fell over 50%, the primary causes of which were a retraction of market liquidity by a number of New York City banks and a loss of confidence among depositors, exacerbated by unregulated side bets and speculation from “bucket shop” scams. As your own chart from “Historical Statistics and Analysis” points out, unemployment was at 8% by 1908. The more things change the more they stay the same.

While no one paid attention to Sinclair’s socialistic message in The Jungle, his realistic descriptions of animal feces being mixed in with meat products brought about the much needed Pure Food and Drug Act which regulated the meat market.

As of 2008, 12.4% of U.S. wage and salary workers were union members, down from 36% from the mid-1950s. The U.S. has the second lowest percentage of unionization of any developed democracy. Who’s the lowest? France.

> In 2008, Texas created more jobs than the whole rest of the United States put together. With no personal income tax, Texas is not famous for economically restrictive government. Thus, Texas grows, while Michigan, New York, and California shrink.

So because it has no personal income tax, Texas created more jobs than Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Washington and Wyoming put together…. even though those states also have no personal income tax. Nevada has the highest unemployment rate (14.4%) of all the states, including Michigan (13%). Florida (11.9%) is just under California (12.4%) and way above New York (8.3%). Also, 4 out of 10 of the states with the worst unemployment are red states, 4 out of 10 of the states with the least unemployment are blue states, and 7 of the top 10 wealthiest states are blue, excluding oil-taxing Alaska (#6), Virginia (#7) and Utah (#8), and including ultra-liberal Massachusetts (#9). All 10 of the poorest states are red states.

And this isn’t because of income redistribution. Despite Republicans being the loudest complainers about government spending, data going back 20 years shows that red states have actually been taking money away from blue states. Shankar Vedantam of Slate reports that, “The 28 states where George W. Bush won more than 50 percent of the vote in 2004 received an average of $1.32 for every dollar contributed. The 19 states where Bush received less than 50 percent of the vote collected 93 cents on the dollar.”

So what’s with Texas? Well first off, despite all those job creations, unemployment is still about the same as New York, below the national average, so the greater job-creation has more to do with the long-running trend of Texas always having a faster-growing employment and population. However, Texas is a lot better off this recession than the last one because of a combination of factors, including relaxed zoning codes and a larger area of land which kept appreciation and speculation down. Texas is also the home of large energy companies like ExxonMobil, which were largely unaffected by the crisis. Wind power created over 10,000 jobs and has attracted some foreign companies like Shell, Vestas, Iberdrola.

And although it may not be famous for it, Texas had comparatively strong regulations restricting consumers from using home-equity lines of credit to increase borrowing over 80% of their home value. This was probably because half the S&L’s from the 1989 crisis, which was brought on by a “surprisingly familiar set of precursors,” came from that state alone yet the entire country was forced to bail them out. Twenty years later, Governor Rick Perry is trying to court the Texas secessionist movement with references to pre-Civil War Texas s[e]cession rights.

Despite all that, there’s still a huge problem with Texas. Like Ireland, [Texas,] Britain, and Germany [were] used by the [R]ight to prove that draconian cuts and austerity brought a successful economy in the face of the economic crisis, but all four have fallen drastically since. As it turns out, Texas was the state that depended the most on those very stimulus funds Perry criticized to plug nearly 97% of its shortfall for fiscal 2010, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Now that the stimulus money has run out, the deficit is expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years, putting them in the same category as California. Not wanting to raise taxes, Perry has proposed huge cuts [in education] despite the fact that Texas already ranks near the bottom in education spending per pupil, while leading the nation in the percentage of residents without health insurance.

> Now we hear that Union members (“goons”? “thugs”?) have been threatening and strong-arming citizens who show up at the public fora.

Assuming you are referring to the Glenn Beck video, The Wichita Eagle reported that the video of the alleged assault on Kenneth Gladney “show[s] a scuffle but is inconclusive as to what exactly happened.” Less ambiguous are the cases of Joe Miller having his bodyguards arrest a reporter for asking him questions and Rand Paul’s supporters dragging a liberal activist to the ground while one of his campaign coordinators pinned her down with his shoe, earning him a police summons (after which he said she owed him an apology). Then there were also the death threats, the brick thrown through the window, and the cut gas line following health care being passed, and Al Franken’s window being shot, possibly by a pellet gun, following his criticism of the New York Islamic cultural center protesters.

>Democrats simply cannot believe, or don’t care, that their promotion of socialism will evoke a genuine visceral and spontaneous reaction from Americans.

Conservatives certainly have visceral reactions when Republicans frame the term as some sort of post-Soviet conspiracy, but social security is the most popular government program ever created, and Republicans decided the best way to attack Obama’s health care reform is to get conservatives to chant “No socialized medicine! And don’t touch my Medicare!”

Polls show almost half of Americans believe Obama initiated TARP, with only a third knowing that it was Bush. Only 12% of Americans know that tax bills for 2009 were lower (the lowest in 60 years) and twice as many believe taxes went up, while 38% believe Obama is “doing many of the things that Hitler did,” and 24% think he may be the Anti-Christ.

>They are also absurdly and hypocritically shocked and outraged that people should portray Obama or the Democrats as Nazis or Fascists (“We can’t allow this incivil discourse!”), when we heard no such cautions for all the years that George W. Bush was portrayed as a Fascist, Nazi, or Adolf Hitler himself. The grotesque conceit seems be that, well, smearing Bush was true, while labeling Obama the same way is an intolerable misrepresentation, outside reasonable political speech!

Bush was not compared to Hitler until he pushed for the invasion of Iraq. While I criticize any American president being compared to Hitler, it’s common for any military aggressor to be compared to him these days. Obama, in contrast, was immediately characterized before he was even elected, not as Hitler, but a hippie Stalinist Muslim elitist Hitler, complete with “terrorist fist bump.” Then after conservatives started getting tired of those words, D’Souza added “anti-colonialist.”

Aside from that, there’s the “birthers,” composed of the 20% of Americans who are sure he was born in Kenya and another 22% of Americans who are unsure, all of which gets help from Hannity, Rush, Savage, Levin, Dobbs making an issue of Obama’s birth certificate despite the fact that it was actually John McCain who lacks an American birth certificate, having been born in the Panama Canal Zone.

>Democrats want us to think that only Republicans promote corporate welfare, but we have recently seen their participation in that form of corruption in the corporate bailouts of 2009 — and they have all but institutionalized corporate welfare for the corn lobby in subsidies and mandates for ethanol (e.g. the Archer Daniels Midland Company).

Most liberals agree that the corn lobby should not be subsidized and are the biggest protesters of high fructose corn syrup. Ethanol mandates are unpopular with both parties, and I agree that it should not be funded because it causes food shortages and increases carbon emissions. Most Democrats and Republicans believe the corporate bailouts were necessary, but it’s liberals who made the loudest condemnation of the failure to cap bonuses.

>The logical goal of Democrat politics would be to put all business under the control of the government, a goal now achieved with General Motors, and to render all citizens into helpless peons who receive all goods and favors from politicians. Political enemies thus can be immediately deprived of jobs, housing, medical care, etc., as in the Soviet Union.

No, putting businesses under the control of the government would have meant the far more successful plan of nationalizing the banks like Sweden did during their 1992 crisis. The taxpayer just lent the banks money so they could turn around and lend it to the tax payer who just bailed them out at a higher rate. It’s the classic corporate strategy of “privatize the profits, socialize the losses” going back to the closing of the Second National Bank.

Christina Corbin at FoxNews.com tried to defend the tea party by saying the idea that “Obama wants to keep Americans unemployed so that they become dependent on government-run programs,” along with the idea that Obama is a secret Muslim, are part of the “mistruths, exaggerations and conspiracy theories that make Tea Party leaders cringe.” But I guess to you that’s just further proof Fox News isn’t really right wing.

>If Barack Obama admitted that he wants a “single payer” government medical system, and that the “reform” of the Democrats is designed to drive insurance companies out of the medical insurance business, the debate over “reform” would be a lot clearer.

According to Politifact.com, “Obama’s statements on single-payer have changed a bit,” prompting them to rate the change a “Half Flip.”

Since at least 1987, polls have shown the majority of the public favor a single-payer system. Between 2003 to 2009, 17 opinion polls from multiple sources showed a simple majority of the public supports a single-payer system in the United States.

>On the other hand, ignorance, unfortunately, is now the stock-in-trade of American education, all levels — as the Democrats and the leftist allies of the Democrats have seized the educational institutions — from the worthless Schools of Education, to the accreditation agencies, to the professional societies (the Modern Language Association, the MLA, may be the worst), to the administrations and faculty of the schools themselves. The higher the education, the purer the Marxism and Leninism, although leftist anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism infuse all levels of education. One way this could happen is that most college students who go into education major in “education” rather than in any real disciplines. What they pick up otherwise is from the humanities, rather than the sciences, and they soon discover that courses, for instance, in English departments have little to do with literature and language and much to do, like Sociology and now History departments, with political propaganda.

Apparently it’s so infused that no one even notices it. I must be the only English major who studied Dante instead of Lenin. By the way, your B.A. is in history, languages and philosophy and your M.A. is in philosophy. Are those “real” disciplines? Because you appear to believe it makes you better at economics than economists and better at physics than physicists and climate scientists.

>As “tenured radicals” have come to dominate academia, the press, and the intelligentsia, a major conceit of leftist and Democrat politics is how smart they all are. In turn, the common theme of trendy humor and opinion is how stupid Republicans are, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush.

I believe the general Republican strategy has little to do with even pretending to be intelligent because it conflicts with their demonization of “elitist” intelligentsia, as you just demonstrated above. Bush seemed to dumb down his own speaking habits on purpose and take on the Reagan-esque cowboy image because people generally want to elect presidents they “want to have a beer with.”

A new study from the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, authored by a Libertarian, says there is a statistical correlation between high intelligence and liberalism, atheism, and male monogamy. Young adults who identify themselves as “very liberal” have an average IQ of 106 while those who identify themselves as “very conservative” have an average IQ of 95. A 2007 study in the journal Nature Neuroscience suggests liberal brains are more adept at processing new ideas. Stephen Hawking is in the Labour Party and it was Democratic representative Rush Holt who just recently beat IBM’s supercomputer Watson at Jeopardy.

>After the Democrats took Congress in 2006, however, the American public has had a good chance to see a lot of Democrat politicians in action. What seems obvious about the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, or Barney Frank, then, is that they are just idiots.

Barney Frank is often called the “smartest guy in congress.” Jim Leach, the former Republican Congressman from Iowa who preceded Frank as committee chairman and worked with him for 30 years said “I think he’s probably Congress’s smartest member in sheer IQ.” He’s certainly a very quick-witted speaker with a verbose vocabulary and the ability to use effective references. Typically, when you call someone stupid, you give a stupid quote. Bush has dozens of “Bushisms.” No one, Republican or Democrat, has ever called him the smartest man in anything. I’d put my money on Barney Frank or even Pelosi beating Bush, Palin, Bachmann, or O’Donnell in an IQ test any day of the week.

>They make George W. Bush look like Albert Einstein. They will say anything just because they want it to be true, however absurd or incoherent it may be.

Albert Einstein was put on the FBI list for being an anti-McCarthy socialist (of course, MLK Jr. was put on the list too, and he’s now fraudulently called a conservative by revisionists). In his article, “Why Socialism?”, Einstein wrote, “The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules…. Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society.” No doubt if Einstein was alive today you would be calling him an idiot.

Stephen Hawking considers global warming to be just as dangerous to the survival of mankind as nuclear weapons, but I guess he’s just an anti-science “Post-Copernican” who’s against “human progress and the betterment of human life on earth,” so you must be smarter than him too. After all, as you fully admit, science has nothing to do with what’s written in “journals like Nature, the National Science Foundation, or the Royal Society of Britain,” or indeed any and all science organizations and journals throughout the world!! No sources from any climate scientists or physicists are necessary for your claim that 2010 was the coldest in 100 years. We can just assume you know more than NASA, NOAA, and every other science organization on the planet that says 2010 tied for the hottest year ever recorded and that every decade has been hotter than the last. The world’s scientists are all just politically biased, even though the science literature never touches on which political solutions should be used, unlike you, who are unable to even write a review on Star Trek without basing its worth completely on the fiscal policies of today’s world that it presumes (Even if they do have replicators and holograms that can create anything and everything, the Federation are still fascists for not having a capitalistic trade system based on supply and demand!). How 97% of climate scientists reached a consensus based purely on a form of closet Communism that somehow causes the world’s glaciers to melt and the famed Northwest Passage to open up is unimportant: that’s just “Official Science,” not “Real Science,” which can only be decided by what you say it is.

But wait, when writing about Gordon Liddy, you said, “Liddy may be wrong about Global Warming, which may be affected by human activities.” I guess you were a closet Communist and “planet catastrophe and terrorist friend” when you wrote that. Then your article on Michael Crichton says Global Warming is unstoppable, but later you added a quote that says the world is cooling without changing any of the stuff that says its non-antrhopogenic warming. Talk about “incoherent.” Plus you complain that Arnold Schwarzenegger “suddenly became a Believer in Global Warming” (like he didn’t before?). So which is it? Is the world cooling or going through unstoppable warming? I guess in your world of doublethink, it’s the same thing as long as both arguments agree with closing off subsidies to clean energy (but not tax-dodging oil companies of course!). After all, as you’ve told me before, investing in clean energy would somehow kill more people than runaway global warming even though France somehow managed to get 80% of their energy from nuclear without anyone dying.

>They also had reason to hope that they could entangle him in the bogus Valerie Plame affair. Although the Special Prosecutor in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, determined quite early that no laws had been broken, he continued his investigation anyway.

So if the Plame affair involved evidence being found of a connection between Saddam Hussein and uranium, and it was the Democrats who outed her for political reasons, you would still have been critical of the investigation?

>This may have started in 2000. The election was close, and the outcome would be determined by Florida, where the vote itself was very close. The strategy was adopted of successive recounts. With each recount more Republican votes could be disqualified and more Democratic votes “discovered.”

In Volusia county, Florida, a voting machine claimed those 412 voters had somehow given Bush 2,813 votes and in addition had given Gore a negative vote count of -16,022 votes. An internal memo from the Diebold company who created it said: “If you strip away the partisan rancor over the 2000 election, you are left with the undeniable fact that a presidential candidate conceded the election to his opponent based on [results from] a second card that mysteriously appears, subtracts 16,022 votes, then just as mysteriously disappears.”

Also, Bush lawyers specifically argued against counting methods that Bush personally adopted as governor.

A study cited by Factcheck.org notes that while Bush would have won with the limited recounts that both he and Gore asked for, a broad-based recount would have shown Gore winning from between 42 to 171 votes.

>As the Florida Supreme Court was going to allow endless recounting in the whole State, contrary to all State and Federal law, the United States Supreme Court stepped in and stopped the farce. The Democrats, having brazened out their own attempt to steal the election, then began screaming that the Republicans had stolen the election.

In 1997, G.W. Bush signed “HB 330” into law stating hand recounts were necessary following a close election in Texas. Having the federal supreme court overturn the state supreme court also goes against the typical conservative narrative that the states should be allowed to govern themselves, an especially important consideration given that Gore would have won had the election been based on the popular vote rather than [by state] electoral college. And if the justices who made that decision are so proud of what they did, why did they ban the court’s action from ever being used as a precedent for future elections? No doubt different measures would have to be taken if the exact situation happened again with the roles reversed.

The four justices who dissented against the federal court ruling wrote: “Counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable harm… Preventing the recount from being completed will inevitably cast a cloud on the legitimacy of the election.” The dissenting justices argued that stopping the recount was an “unwise” violation of “three venerable rules of judicial restraint,” that is, respecting the opinions of state supreme courts, cautiously exercising jurisdiction when “another branch of the Federal Government” has a large measure of responsibility to resolve the issue, and avoiding making peremptory conclusions on federal constitutional law prior to a full presentation on the issue. Judge Stevens, who was nominated by Ford, said, “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

>Meanwhile, the Democrats have perfected their strategy and have now stolen two major elections. In 2004 the Republican Dino Rossi won the Governor’s race in Washington State by a small margin. The Democrats then began endless recounts, especially in urban districts with Democrat officials, until the Democrat, Christine Gregoire, moved ahead and could be proclaimed the winner.

The state Supreme Court decision allowed 732 ballots to be reconsidered in King County, a Democratic stronghold, because those ballots had been mistakenly thrown out because of problems scanning signatures into a computer. Most Republican pundits don’t even challenge recounts but instead make the unsubstantiated accusation of voter fraud, which in reality is very rare.

>The next case would be of greater national significance. In 2008, Minnesota Republican Senator Norm Coleman won his race by 725 votes. After eight months of recounts and challenges, Democrat comedian Al Franken was credited with a victory by 312 votes. Perhaps an all too typical Republican, Coleman, instead of appealing to Federal Courts, conceded defeat, as Richard Nixon had in 1960. The result was firm Democrat control of the United States Senate, enabling them to pass socialized medicine, or whatever else they want, and override all opposition.

Factcheck.org says: “Unlike many right-leaning blogs and commentators, Coleman makes no claim of partisan funny business by the five members of the Canvassing Board, which has only one clearly identified Democrat. Coleman’s lawyer once praised the panel’s makeup, in fact. Coleman’s appeal challenging the board’s certification, which a three-judge panel began hearing Jan. 26, lays out his theory: “Not every valid vote has been counted, and some have been counted twice.” Coleman raised several issues, among them: duplicate ballots, “missing” ballots, “improperly” rejected absentee ballots, and discrepancies in rulings made on ballots concerning voter intent. Factcheck wrote: “The burden is on Coleman to prove all these claims, and even if he wins on each point it’s not clear whether he would gain enough votes to change the outcome.” After a six-month legal battle in which he lost each of his contests, the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously declared Franken the election winner.

>It is remarkable to me that people in a democracy would want to steal elections, but I have no doubt that the Democrats are willing to do this, as historically they often have. Sometimes self-righteousness and lust for power may not be enough to explain it. Or, since the most radical Democrats and their supporters are clearly Communists, it is clear that they have no respect for elections, majorities, legality, democracy, or anything else that would stand in their way. But I am also perfectly willing to consider the possibility that Supernatural Evil is involved, as in the N.I.C.E. (“National Institute for Coordinated Experiments”) institution of C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength [1945]. Much of what the Democrats do looks like N.I.C.E., in both its rhetoric and its police state reality [note]. If I were a Christian, and if I thought that abortion or homosexuality were morally wrong, I think it would hard not be believe that Satan, as in Lewis’ novel, was behind Democrat politics. The mix of lies, seduction, death, sterility, and corruption seems Satanic in its combination of fair face and vicious substance, hedonism and rot.

This is rich considering your own misgivings about Christianity based on critical readings of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the gospels. In your [essay], “Why I Am Not a Christian”, the third reason you give for not being a Christian is the gospel injunction for the rich to give all their money to the poor in order to attain salvation because it implies that economics is a “zero-sum” game, which you yourself associate with Marxism. So you’re not a Christian because Christian teachings are too Marxist, but Democrats are Satanic for being too Marxist as well.

The condemnation of the rich is one of the strongest themes found in the gospels. Some Christians have tried to explain this away by claiming the “needle’s eye” for which the camel going through would be easier than for a rich man to enter heaven was actually a gate in Jerusalem. The proclamations against the rich have become so disassociated with conservative religious beliefs that Obama’s “spread the wealth around” comment has largely been connected with the pre-Marxist saying “to each according to his needs” without any acknowledgment that it originates from Acts 4:35, which describes the apostles disowning all possessions and holding all things common “according as he had need.”

As C.S. Lewis himself writes in Mere Christianity, a Christian society would [have] “no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them. There would be no ‘swank,’ no ‘side,” no putting on airs. To that extent a Christian society would now be what we now call Leftist…. We should feel that its economic life was very socialistic and, in that sense, ‘advanced’, but that its family life and its code of manners were rather old fashioned–perhaps even ceremonious and aristocratic.”

Ayn Rand, who has been so much an inspiration to not just Greenspan but Christians like Reagan, Armey, Delay, Lott, Limbaugh, Coulter, and George Will, mocked Christianity as “the best kindergarten of communism possible” and based her philosophy on the worship of selfishness that many Christians accuse all atheists of. Her influence on Greenspan’s political combination of government intervention-hating Libertarianism and government intervention-loving corporate socialism inspired Christianity Today to call her the “Goddess of the Great Recession.”

As to the “police state,” the only political controversies that can reasonably affiliated with that is the Drug War, started by Reagan and [] to this day supported by the Right and opposed by the Left, and the War on Terror, leading to some of the most massive Constitutional breaches to the right to a fair and speedy trial, supported by you, Obama loyalists, and all the Neo-Cons who are congratulating Obama for breaking his campaign promises so he can go even further than Bush in “keeping America safe.”

Satan, as portrayed in Revelation, is a symbol of Rome, associated with a seven-headed dragon representing the seven hills of Rome. The “Number of the Beast,” 666, is largely accepted as being numeric code for “Nero Caesar.” The gospels likewise hide sentiments against the Roman occupation behind allegories of demonic possession of a demonic horde “named Legion,” which inhabit a large number of swine symbolizing the Tenth Legion’s boar emblem and sending them to their deaths into the sea. And it’s the Neo-Cons of today who act most like Rome in defending the realpolitik of Middle Eastern occupations and alliances with corrupt dictators which in turn cause the insurgence of theocratic regimes like Iran’s Islamic Revolution and al-Qaida in Iraq, just as Rome’s occupations and alliance with King Herod brought about the brutal insurgence of Sicarii assassins, symbolized in the gospels by Judas “Iscariot.”

Classic liberals were most inspired by Cicero. Anti-war Libertarians identify themselves with Cato, as in the Cato Institute, whose motto is: “Individual liberty, Free Markets, and Peace.” Marx sympathized most with Spartacus. And the original godfather of neo-conservatism, Irving Kristol — father of Bill “Crystal Ball” Kristol — complained that conservatism “is so influenced by business culture and by business modes of thinking that it lacks any political imagination, which has always been, I have to say, a property of the Left…. What’s the point of being the greatest, most powerful nation in the world and not having an imperial role? It’s unheard of in human history.” Clearly, Kristol and the Neo-Cons are for Caesar.

Rome also partly inspired the “Evil Empire” in Star Wars which you reference in your sub-title, “The Evil Empire Strikes Back,” but George Lucas wrote Star Wars in 1971 in reaction to Nixon and the Vietnam War. Star Wars Episode III, chronicling the decay of the Republic into the Empire, was written with the Bush Administration in mind, with Darth Vader’s quote “If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy,” being an obvious jab at Bush’s “Either you are with us or with the terrorists.” Lucas himself said Star Wars is a wakeup call to Americans about the erosion of democratic freedoms under George W. Bush and identified Obama as a Jedi when testifying in front of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. Dick Cheney even referred to himself as the “Darth Vader of the Bush Administration,” and commented that his wife believed the role “humanized him.” Lynn Cheney even presented Jon Stewart with a Darth Vader figurine on-air in a full embrace of the caricature.

So, added all together, you have completely reversed the symbolism for Christianity, Satan, C.S. Lewis, the Roman Empire, and Star Wars without any acknowledgment or irony.

>In August 2009, the London Telegraph reported that NICE “intends to slash by 95 percent the number of steroid injections, such as cortisone, given to people who suffer severe and chronic back pain. This is, of course, the kind of rationing and degradation of care that is characteristic of socialized medicine. Similar provisions in the Democrat’s 2009 health care “reform” bill are what led Sarah Palin to brilliantly dub the envisioned “end of life” services “death panels,” to the fury and indignation of the Democrats. NICE, whether in C.S. Lewis or in modern reality, is a “death panel.”

She went a lot f[u]rther than that. She said, “And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.” Politifact.com rated it “pants on fire” and it later won their “Lie of the Year” award.

>Unfortunately, there is no modern politician with the wisdom of Jefferson, the wolves are among us, and the teeth and claws are in us. These are the Democrats, supposedly the heirs of Jefferson’s own Party. It is their own party.

Before you go off claiming Jefferson for the Republicans, Jefferson said:

“Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests. In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. Call them therefore liberals and serviles, Jacobins and ultras, Whigs and Tories, Republicans and Federalists, aristocrats and democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same parties still and pursue the same object. The last one of aristocrats and democrats is the true one expressing the essence of all.” –Thomas Jefferson to H. Lee, 1824

Jefferson’s fear that national banks would draw most of the money away from the workers and traders and into the higher finance classes came to fruition immediately preceding the Great Depression, the Panic of 1907, the Savings and Loan Crisis of the Reagan era, and now the Housing Loan crisis of the Bush era. But it’s the Republicans who thwart attempts at financial reform all the while blaming the entire crisis on the government shifting blame entirely to two private companies with government support.

>Libertarians: Ideological crackpots, tilting at windmills, who nevertheless are the most sensible people around — an appalling circumstance.

So both major American political parties are so terrible that even the crackpots are better off than them, but you’re the one who has the most “optimistic” conception of this country full of Three Terrible Parties?

>Republicans: Who think that it is more important to attack Charles Darwin than to enforce the Constitution or stand for principles that will make the Democrats and the media call them names.

If only they stood more for your principles of doing nothing but lowering taxes and hating Democrats, then you could switch parties.

>Democrats: Who hate almost everything about America, including the very ideas of limited government, individual rights, private property, self-defense, free enterprise, free speech, etc. A history of slavery, sexism, and homophobia naturally discredits everything about America and its history — but these are only minor idiosyncrasies in Islâmic fundamentalism, which of course is fully redeemed by its hatred of America (and, well, Jews). Any Democrats who do not agree with attitudes like these, it is time for you to get out of that Party. If you don’t believe that the Party involves attitudes like these, it is time to get wised up.

Summaries tend to provide a short form of what is better expressed throughout the body of the argument, yet in 13,400 words you were unable to get around to explaining why “the party of Wicca” is somehow also the party of Islamic fundamentalism. This makes about as much sense as Newt Gingrich proclaiming Democrats will lead us to “secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists…” Isn’t it Dick Armey who promoted the interests of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran? Isn’t it Obama who is shredding the Constitution in order to assassinate an American-born Islamic Fundamentalist?

Reading this article is actually quite sad. For many years I was a huge fan of your site for its historical pages, and I still consider your article on “Roman Decadence” to be one of the most interesting and entertaining articles I’ve read on the subject. But your politics has obviously been completely distorted by sanctioning yourself off into the closed information systems of Fox News and Conservative Radio. As conservative blogger and Bush speechwriter David Frum writes:

“Too often, conservatives dupe themselves. They wrap themselves in closed information systems based upon pretend information. In this closed information system, banks can collapse without injuring the rest of the economy, tax cuts always pay for themselves and Congressional earmarks cause the federal budget deficit. Even the market collapse has not shaken some conservatives out of their closed information system. It enfolded them more closely within it. This is how to understand the Glenn Beck phenomenon. Every day, Beck offers alternative knowledge — an alternative history of the United States and the world, an alternative system of economics, an alternative reality. As corporate profits soar, the closed information system insists that the free-enterprise system is under assault. As prices slump, we are warned of imminent hyperinflation. As black Americans are crushed under Depression-level unemployment, the administration’s policies are condemned by some conservatives as an outburst of Kenyan racial revenge against the white overlord.

Meanwhile, Republican officeholders who want to explain why they acted to prevent the collapse of the U.S. banking system can get no hearing from voters seized with certainty that a bank collapse would have done no harm to ordinary people. Support for TARP has become a career-ender for Republican incumbents, and we shall see what it does to Mitt Romney, the one national Republican figure who still defends TARP.

The same vulnerability to closed information systems exists on the liberal side of U.S. politics as well, of course. But the fact that my neighbor is blind in one eye is no excuse for blinding myself in both.”

It’s always a good idea to question old presumptions, as you did in the Roman Decadence article, but it’s another thing entirely to present yourself as an authority on economics when you don’t even know what the majority of economists believe, or an authority on climate science while demeaning the entire scientific community as being nothing but closet Communists, or an authority on Nietzsche when you completely dismiss the entirety of Nietzsche scholarship as a bunch of liberals projecting their own politics into the past.

On the one hand you criticize those who went into the humanities, as you chose to do, yet on the other hand you appear to think your philosophy degree makes you an expert in all fields, and your declarations that the entire problem lies in the fact that the universities throughout the nation have become safe-havens for Communistic propaganda would have appeared to be the ravings of the mentally ill even during the Red Scare, but today could easily be mistaken for a retro-generational parody. You do a fantastic job of creating an innovative archive out on a wonderfully-constructed and well-linked internet platform. Your confession towards your alienation towards fundamental precepts of Libertarianism and your acceptance of generic Neo-Con talking points, epitomized by a Christianized demonization of the Democratic Party coming from a non-Christian, proves that you have completely embraced the Right and have completely forfeited your status as Libertarian.