First, for those who believe the British are the height of sophistication and are so much more couth than us Americans: This was the number one song in the U.K. today in 1986:
The chicken is not having a birthday. Pervis Jackson of the Spinners is:
So is drummer Bill Bruford, who played for Yes, King Crimson and Genesis:
Wikipedia provides a definition of the cars found on today’s blog:
A personal luxury car is an American car classification describing a highly styled, luxury vehicle with an emphasis on image over practicality. Accenting the comfort and satisfaction of its owner and driver above all else, the personal luxury car sometimes sacrifices passenger capacity, cargo room, and fuel economy in favor of style and perceived cachet, as well as offering a high level of features and trim Typically mass-produced by employing a two-door platform with common mechanical components beneath their distinctive exteriors, these vehicles were a lucrative segment of the post-World War II automotive marketplace.
Personal luxury cars are characteristically two-door coupés or convertibles with two-passenger or 2+2 seating. They are distinguished on the performance end from GT and sports cars by their greater emphasis on comfort and convenience. Even though they usually contain higher horsepower engines and the necessary support systems for the higher horsepower output (transmissions, tires, brakes, steering, etc.); these larger power trains usually only bring these vehicles back to the power-to-weight ratios that they would have had; if, their gross vehicle weights had not been increased to accommodate the installation of their luxury features and accessories. …
Typically, the per unit profit of the sale of a new personal luxury vehicle is measured in thousands of dollars; to both the manufacturer, and the dealer. While the sale of a new compact or intermediate sedan yields only a few hundred dollars in profit per unit. However, they have additional styling elements and sometimes “baroque” designs. They are typically equipped with as many additional features as possible, including power accessories such as windows, locks, seats, antenna, as well as special trim packages, leather upholstery, heated seats, etc.
Today’s blog could be said to be a variation on my previous work on types of cars not made anymore. By today’s definition these cars are battleship-size, but in their era there were, believe it or don’t, bigger cars on the road.
While the majority of cars have had four doors for decades, two-door cars used to signify that the owner (1) had a smallish sports car, such as a Corvette; (2) didn’t want to pay more for a four-door, including salesmen who owned business coupes, or (3) had enough status that he (or sometimes she) had a fine car, but wanted to drive it himself (or herself), and didn’t usually need the back seat for passengers.
A good starting point is 1949, when the automakers had been frantically redesigning their cars after frantically pushing new-before-World-War-II designs out the door after the end of WWII. In those days, Cadillac was the standard of the world, and not just in price, but in power. Cadillac’s 1948 cars were a new design, with its first “modern” V-8 added one year later:
The Coupe de Ville was a fancier version of Caddy’s standard car. Midway through the next decade, Chrysler took its new hemi V-8, put in a handsomely styled car, and created the Chrysler 300 …
… which Carl Kiekhaefer, owner of an outboard engine company, promptly raced on the stock car circuit.
(Notice the “Mercury” underneath “Outboards” under the C-pillar. So why, you ask, would someone who created the Mercury outboard brand not race Mercurys? Good question, perhaps one Kiekhaefer’s son, Fred, could answer. I don’t believe Kiekhaefer or Mercury ever had a business relationship with Ford Motor Co., though I may be wrong about that.)
One year later, Ford revived a model name it hadn’t used for several years, Continental, for briefly a new marque separate from Lincoln. The Mark II cost $10,000, five times the average car’s cost, yet Ford still lost almost $1,000 per Mark II it sold.
Not to be outdone, Studebaker introduced four Hawks in 1956, ranging from the six-cylinder Flight Hawk to the Packard V-8-powered Golden Hawk.
Either the 300 or the Hawk could be said to be the world’s first “personal luxury” car — at least one someone could actually afford to buy, though the 300 wasn’t cheap either. The second didn’t start as a personal luxury car, but the Ford Thunderbird, which started life with two seats similar to the Corvette …
… added two seats in 1958. Sales flew upward, you might say; in fact, in the recession year of 1958, the Thunderbird was one of only two American cars that sold measuredly better than in 1957.
Over at GM, big coupes were basically just the two-door version of their model line. Pontiac debuted the Grand Prix in 1962, though it wasn’t distinctive from other Pontiacs until 1963:
The bigger GM news in 1963 was the introduction of perhaps the most beautiful car of all time …
… the Buick Riviera, though I prefer the ’65 and its hidden headlights myself.
One year after the Riviera debuted, Pontiac debuted the 2+2 option on its Catalina — two bucket seats in front, two seats in back. It was meant to be to the Catalina as the GTO was to the LeMans.
GM took a while to make a big stand in the personal luxury market, but once the Cadillac Fleetwood of carmakers got going, the hits came quickly.
This is the Oldsmobile Toronado, the biggest car to that point powered by front-wheel drive since before World War II. The Toronado was a huge innovation, followed one year later by …
… the Cadillac Eldorado, also front-wheel-driven.
Three years later, the aforementioned Pontiac Grand Prix shrank to become …
… this beauty, still a Grand Prix, but based on a lengthened mid-sized chassis. So was, one year later …
… the Chevrolet Monte Carlo.
You may notice a design theme developing here — long hoods and, with the advent of the Riviera, shrinking trunks, or at least the part of the car behind the rear axle. The full-sized personal luxury cars — the 300 and so on — still had full-size trunks, but styling started to shrink the trunks because longer hoods looked better.
The Toronado, Riviera and Eldorado were redesigned to look either more or less conventional depending on your point of view in the early ’70s:
Meanwhile, over at Ford Motor Co., president Lee Iacocca told his stylists to “put a Rolls–Royce grille on a Thunderbird,” and thus was created …
… the Continental Mark III, followed in 1972 by the Mark IV …
… and in 1977 by the Mark V.
Elsewhere in the Lincoln–Mercury showroom could be found Mercury’s brief answer to the Pontiac 2+2 …
… the Mercury Marauder X-100, a car so over the top (hidden headlights, fender skirts, buckets and console, and of course a 429 V-8) that I of course would love to have one. This looks like something a 1970s private eye would drive.
GM redesigned its Monte Carlo and Grand Prix, adding the companion Olds Cutlass Supreme and Buick Regal in 1973. Chrysler was selling big coupes, but not exactly anything special, until it introduced …
Most of these cars were redesigned and shrunk in the late 1970s into the 1980s. (Chrysler brought back the 300, which looked a lot like a Cordoba.) And then the market started to fizzle out, due to gas prices, their practicality, or the ephermal nature of style.
I didn’t have a personal luxury car in my early driving days, but I did have a big coupe …
… a 1975 Caprice. It wasn’t sporty, though it had Radial Tuned Suspension. But it had a certain style, and doors big enough to serve as weapons if necessary:
These cars are not and really were never practical. They had big engines but not necessarily great performance, but certainly bad fuel economy. Back-seat passengers complained about getting into and out of the back seat. Practicality was never the point; style was.
The only domestically produced personal luxury coupe that comes to mind today is the Cadillac CTS and CTS-V coupes:
On the one hand, style has certainly changed. On the other hand, with 556 horsepower under the hood, the CTS-V could run rings around any other car on this blog.
The number one British single today in 1962 was based on Peter Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite”:
The number one single today in 1964:
The number one album today in 1970 was Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s “Déjà Vu”:
Think the “Super Bowl Shuffle” created the singing jocks genre of music? Then you haven’t heard the number one British single today in 1970:
A YouTube video and a magazine have a somewhat related theme.
Facebook Friend Bryan Caplan, a George Mason University economist, did this video …
… the response to which ranges from unconvinced to quite hostile:
- Sure, you might be underemployed due to inflation raising prices on everything or a college graduate struggling with impossible debt you’ll never pay off, but at least we can all watch videos on YouTube on our iPhones telling us that that everything is perfectly fine.
- This video is giving false hope and does not take into account the cost of living during the 1900’s compared to today. In the 1900’s people did not need to make much money because everything was cheaper than it is today. The only reason why its hard for us to distinguish the poor and the rich on the street is because even when you are poor, you have still been trained to go out and buy expensive clothes and toys to play with.
- Surely human’s natural inclination to moan about absolutely everything is the reason why we’ve come so far? The wooden stick’s working just fine, why put a bit of flint on it? “CAUSE IT TAKES 80 STABS TO KILL A MAMMOTH WITH A STICK, do you know how tiring that is?” So voila, flint spearheads, if we were complacent as a species, we’d be in a different place, look at chameleons, they’re pretty smug with their superpowers, but they’ll never invent Flowbee.
- High inflation and a major correction in the DOW will just be little bumps on the overall uptrend… Hmm. What about the trend over the last decade for less economic freedom and more government spying in the US? What about the massive government debt globally? I guess in the long term we are all dead… So the short term is kind of important to We the Living.
I’m not an economist, but I think comparisons are kind of meaningless. Not that long ago in the scheme of human history our ancestors had daily fights for survival. So compared to then, of course things are better. Anyone who didn’t die from an infection thanks to antibiotics should think things are better. Your being able to read this on a computer sized somewhere between a box of 3×5 cards and a suitcase should think things are better, at least in an overall sense.
Note the comment that infers that you need a college education for certain professions. The concept of professional licensing is a topic that deserves more space than this, but to say that things are worse because people feel compelled to improve themselves through education is bizarre.
Democrats nationwide and statewide are fixating right now on income inequality, which is interesting given that income inequality has worsened during the current administration in Washington, and given that there are more really, really rich Democrats than Republicans. And those really, really rich Democrats are not putting their money where their mouths are by altruistically sharing their wealth, with the possible exception (depending on how you define “sharing”) of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Besides that, the rich will always take care of their own money (which is how they became rich in the first place); the bigger question is how are the non-rich doing.
As a UW student I was taught macroeconomics and microeconomics separately within the same class, but it seems likely to non-economists that someone’s perception of the latter influences that person’s feelings about the former. Caplan also doesn’t really address today’s rampant unemployment and underemployment, which is at levels that do not make noticeable economic growth that benefits most people sustainable. (Great legacy you’re leaving there, Barack.) Employment, doing something productive, is key to one’s happiness (to the extent that we’re supposed to be happy), and private-sector employment is the key to real live economic growth.
Caplan essentially is arguing that because things are better now than 100 years ago (and even pessimistic readers must admit that none of us is going to die fighting World War I, nor are we going to die from the 1918 influenza outbreak), they will be better in the future. That brings to mind the fine print in financial planning ads: Past performance does not necessarily predict future results, particularly when bad people advocating bad policies are in power in Washington. (This means you, Barack, on both scores.)
All this brings to mind a question that was actually asked before Caplan’s video. I commend to readers the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute‘s May issue, the theme of which is “Can the Dream Be Restored?”.
Editor Charles J. Sykes introduces two of the many must-reads in the magazine:
In a thoughtful interview with WPRI President Mike Nichols, [U.S. Rep. Paul] Ryan explains how entrenched poverty is a symptom of the decline of the American Dream. Ryan is careful to distinguish between two frequently conflated terms: inequality and mobility. While President Obama focuses on the need for spreading wealth around, Ryan asks a very different question: What are we going to do to remove barriers to allow more people to be where they want to be and do with their lives what they want to do?
In a related piece, Robert L. Woodson, Sr., founder of the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, reflects on a listening tour that he arranged for Ryan to learn from community and faith-based leaders about the problems of poverty. “My goal in arranging these visits,” explains Woodson, “was to move beyond the traditional conservative and liberal understanding of how to address the needs of the poor.”
Nichols’ interview with Ryan can be read here, and Woodson’s piece can be read here.
Rick Esenberg also writes about the pluses and minuses (yes, there are some) to a market economy:
Economic arguments only go so far in the face of the natural desire of people to have more of what they do not have and their sense that the wealth enjoyed by others is “unfair.”
But we can hardly decide whether inequality is a problem and, if so, what to do about it, without understanding what we are talking about.
Our envy is not really over the 1% — a group that begins at somewhere in the neighborhood of $400,000 to $500,000 in annual income. This is a tidy sum, to be sure, but not nearly enough to finance the life of the rich and famous. We are actually green over some fraction of the 1% — those who earn millions every year and enjoy private jets and villas in Martinique.
But even then, we aren’t bothered by all of these people. We complain about CEOs and investment bankers. We don’t complain about pop stars and utility infielders. There’s a reason for that.
Most of us understand that someone who can play in the NFL or star in “Breaking Bad” is highly talented and earns huge sums of money for those paying the bills. We can’t see that with CEOs who seem to be doing something less extraordinary — sitting behind a desk and managing an organization. It doesn’t seem so special.
But, in economic terms, we are wrong about that. Liberal economist Robert Frank, in his book The Darwin Economy, explains that the only thing surprising about CEO salaries is that they are not higher. The reason, he says, is that the quality of the decisions made by people who run extremely large entities can add or subtract hundreds of millions of dollars to or from the bottom line. It is, Frank argues, perfectly rational to pay huge salaries to maximize the possibility of getting the right person to make the right decisions.
This doesn’t mean that companies will always choose wisely. The argument for markets is not that they are perfect, just better than command economies. To be sure, there was a time when the most highly paid earned less than they do today. Many on the left long to return to those days, calling it the Great Compression. This is more than a tad ironic. Back in the ’50s and ’60s, when that world still existed, the left hated it. …
As Frank and others point out, the old economy was riddled with regulatory and cultural barriers that tended to protect established producers and discourage competition. The freer global economy that we have today tends to reward people at levels more commensurate with the economic value of their contributions, and that certainly increases income inequality.
There is a robust debate among economists as to whether globalization and the turn to markets have helped the majority. While we hear claims that wages have been stagnant over the past 30 years and that mobility of generations is not what it should be, measuring these things over time is far more complicated than the sound-bite critics allow.
When you peel this statistical onion, I think you’ll find that the standard of living for almost all Americans is far better than it was when I was young.
Having said this, I think it’s fair to say that the new economy places a premium on marketable skills in a way that makes it more difficult for those lacking these skills to keep up.
This will require policy responses. But, as [Alexis de] Tocqueville and [James] Madison noted long ago, the greater challenges may be political. They saw that envy could trump reason. Avoiding that will require a conversation rooted in fact and not passion.
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto reports a deadline before “climate chaos,” which apparently is not Wisconsin spring:
Uh-oh. “In two languages, French Foreign Minister Lauren Fabius started the countdown Tuesday to climate change disaster, speaking in Washington before a meeting with American counterpart Secretary of State John Kerry,” reports TheBlaze.com:
“We have 500 days to avoid the climate chaos,” Fabius said in French. . . .
Speaking then in English, Fabius touched on Iran, Syria, and Ukraine, but then quickly returned to climate change.
“And very important issues, issue of climate change, climate chaos,” the foreign minister said. “And we have–as I said, we have 500 days to avoid climate chaos, and I know that President Obama and John Kerry himself are committed on this subject and I’m sure that with them, with a lot of other friends, we shall be able to reach success on this very important matter.”
Taranto reports the deadline before whatever “climate chaos” is is Sept. 25, 2015.
My favorite online meteorologist, Mike Smith, anticipated all this last year by repeating Taranto’s list of climate “tipping points”:
- “Global Warming Tipping Point Close?”–headline, ClimateArk.com, Jan. 27, 2004
- “Warming Hits ‘Tipping Point’ “–headline, Guardian, Aug. 11, 2005
- “Earth at the Tipping Point: Global Warming Heats Up”–headline, Time, March 26, 2006
- “Global Warming ‘Tipping Points’ Reached, Scientist Says”–headline,NationalGeographic.com, Dec. 14, 2007
- “Twenty Years Later: Tipping Points Near on Global Warming”–headline, Puffington Host, June 23, 2008
- “Global Warming: Those Tipping Points Are Closer Than You Think”–headline, WSJ.com, April 29, 2009
- “Have We Reached the Tipping Point for Planet Earth?”–video title, StudioTalk.tv, May 11, 2010
- “Must-Read Hansen and Sato Paper: We Are at a Climate Tipping Point That, Once Crossed, Enables Multi-Meter Sea Level Rise This Century”–headline, ThinkProgress.org, Jan. 20, 2011
- “Earth: Have We Reached an Environmental Tipping Point?”–headline, BBC website, June 15, 2012
- “In spite of the continued released [sic] of 90 million tons of global warming pollution every day into the atmosphere, as if it’s an open sewer, we are now seeing the approach of a global political tipping point.”–Al Gore, interview with Washington Post, Aug. 21, 2013
Smith added:
As far as I know, the earliest reference to global warming “tipping points” was in 1989. I did Google and Bing searches yesterday evening and there are more than one hundred alleged tipping points over the last 20 years.
Take, for example, the December, 2007, tipping point reference from National Geographic. Here are world temperatures (the same ones used by Al Gore’s friends at the IPCC) since 2000:
See any accelerating upward trend since January, 2008?
Plus, there is no upward temperature trend (actually, it is downward) since we passed 400 ppm in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. It, too, was supposed to produce an acceleration in the rate of warming.
This is ridiculous.
By any definition of the scientific method of advancing a hypothesis (i.e., a given tipping point exists) and measuring the results (lack of the predicted acceleration of warming) the tipping point hypothesis is falsified.
Global warming, more and more, has become a matter of ‘faith,’ not science.
I bring this up only to keep readers abreast of one of my favorite subjects, end-of-the-world predictions. Remember when the world ended in December 2012 as predicted by the Mayans?
The number one British single today in 1959:
The number one album today in 1971 was Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s “4 Way Street”:
David Blaska honors former Gov. Patrick Lucey, who died Saturday:
No one did more than Patrick Lucey to transform Wisconsin into a two-party state. He died Saturday at age 96, the longest-lived governor in state history.
Mr. Lucey was elected to the State Assembly in 1948, the state’s centennial, the same year as my grandfather John M. and a young Ruth Bachhuber Doyle, wife of Jim Doyle Sr. and mother of a future governor. All were Democrats. Warren Knowles and Mel Laird (still living!) were already veterans of the upper house when Gaylord Nelson joined them that year.
Pat Lucey played hardball in his politics, as did his allies, the Kennedys, who were never shy about lubricating the electorate if it would help them win. My friend John Nichols has written a lovely remembrance of the man, true as far as it goes, but Patrick Lucey was no populist, however much John may wish.
He was the last overtly pro-business Democrat to be elected governor of Wisconsin, elected from the hamlet of Ferryville, in picturesque Crawford County, where he was recently honored.
He was very definitely a one-percenter, like Mary Burke, but oh so much more accomplished. Lucey and his combative wife, Jean, deigned not to move into the governor’s mansion; it would have been a step down from their own Maple Bluff home.
In contrast to Ms. Burke, Lucey made his own money and knew how to encourage others to make wealth. It was he who enacted the Machinery & Equipment exemption from property taxes, which resulted in the Wall Street Journal naming Wisconsin “the [economic] star of the snowbelt.”
Yes, Patrick Lucey was a tax cutter, like his hero JFK. He grew the pie instead of cutting it into ever-thinner slices. The Democrat who chairs the party today, as Patrick Lucey once did in its glory years, calls tax cuts a “gimmick.” As my father (he also served in the Legislature) said near the end of his life, I did not leave the Democratic Party, it left me.”
Lucey did the hard work of getting the Democratic Party back into relevancy in the late 1940s, when Wisconsin’s two parties were the Republicans and the Progressives. For being the nation’s oldest political party, the Democratic Party in Wisconsin was rather irrelevant for a long time, until after World War II.
Tom Still, who covered Lucey as a young Wisconsin State Journal reporter (whose work was read by a young WSJ reader), adds:
Lucey, who died May 10 at 96, was elected governor twice in the 1970s before resigning late in his second term to become ambassador to Mexico. A few years later, disappointed in the Democratic president who appointed him, Lucey ran as independent John Anderson’s vice presidential running mate in an election won by Ronald Reagan.
It was his stint as governor, and his knack for campaign tactics and hard-nosed party politics, that defined Lucey much more than his time in the national limelight.
Along with a handful of other familiar names in Wisconsin politics – John Reynolds, William Proxmire, Gaylord Nelson and James Doyle among them – Lucey was an architect of the state’s modern Democratic Party. It arose in the late 1940s and early 1950s, just as the Progressive Party’s influence was waning, and quickly became a force in an otherwise Republican state.
In part, that was because Lucey took political organizing to a new level. During his years as director and late as chairman of the Democratic Party, Lucey made sure the party fielded candidates in virtually every race for the Wisconsin Legislature. That hard work paid off. When Democrats finally won the Assembly in 1958, it was the party’s first working majority since 1933.
Much of the political capital Lucey earned by working in party vineyards was available to spend during his years as governor. He dusted off the idea of merging the University of Wisconsin in Madison, which also included the UW Extension and campuses in Milwaukee, Green Bay and Racine-Kenosha, with the nine-campus Wisconsin State University System. At the time, both systems had a Board of Regents.
He believed a merger would control costs at a time when “baby boomer” enrollments were taxing most campuses, diminish duplication, improve education and give the combined UW System a larger voice.
The move was initially unpopular with legislators in both parties and many people within academia, particularly those on the Madison campus who believed it would water down the quality of the state’s flagship university.
Lucey cracked heads, cut deals, cajoled and threatened (“I had to be pretty heavy-handed – no merger, no budget,” he said later) and won in October 1971 by the slimmest of margins. In some ways, the “merger wars” of that era wage on, as evidenced a few years ago when a proposal to carve out more autonomy for the UW-Madison was shot down, basically from within the UW System itself.
Lucey rarely shied away from a fight. His push for changes in the state’s shared revenue system – the mechanism by which state tax dollars are redistributed to local governments – and the state aid formula for local schools were among other political rumbles.
And while Democrats were closely identified with labor unions then and now, Lucey was still governor in mid-1977 during events that led to a major state employee strike. He was generally suspicious of the civil service, in general, and not afraid to put political appointees in place within state agencies to make sure his policies were being carried out.
Although a tactician who loved the art of organization, Pat Lucey probably wasn’t a politician who would fit in well today. He joked about his own lack of charisma, wasn’t especially telegenic and often disagreed with his own party on major issues.
Lucey represents a bygone, more personally civil, and more politically independent era in Wisconsin politics, as opposed to what we’ve seen in this state since the Scott Jensen/Chuck Chvala era. For one thing, Lucey was a real estate agent, and no legislator until the 1970s had the words “full-time legislator” appear in his or her Wisconsin Blue Book biography. Lucey was the last governor who could say that Wisconsin’s per capita personal income growth exceeded the national average.
The Machinery & Equipment property tax exemption is a tax cut that would never be supported by Democrats today. The M&E exemption was a huge tax break for Wisconsin’s manufacturers, who obviously have a lot of capital tied up in machines. (Including Georgia-Pacific, owned by the Evil Koch Brothers.) Democrats today see business as a necessary evil at best.
Democrat Mary Burke refuses to support tax cuts, including business tax cuts in a state with one of the highest corporate income tax rates in the entire world. Which is interesting because her family organized Trek Bicycles as a subchapter-S corporation so that the company didn’t have to pay corporate income taxes. There is nothing illegal or inappropriate about that, just hypocritical for someone running for governor based on her business experience. It’s also disingenuous for Burke to claim that Trek never made decisions based on tax impact; if a business isn’t taxed on its income (sub-S shareholders get all the company’s profits and thus pay taxes on those profits), there are no tax decisions to be made. And as a manufacturer, Trek certainly has taken advantage of not only the M&E exemption, but of the later computer equipment exemption.
I’m not sure which is more ironic — the fact that Democrats desperately need more business presence in their party (instead of government employees and career politicians), or the fact that their supposed business candidate doesn’t espouse pro-business policies.
Matt Walsh has some provocative things to say about Jesus Christ …
If you want to adopt some blasphemous, perverted, fun house mirror reflection of Christianity, you will find a veritable buffet of options. You can sift through all the variants and build your own little pet version of the Faith. It’s Ice Cream Social Christianity: make your own sundae! (Or Sunday, as it were.)
And, of all the heretical choices, probably the most common — and possibly the most damaging — is what I’ve come to call the Nice Doctrine.
The propagators of the Nice Doctrine can be seen and heard from anytime any Christian takes any bold stance on any cultural issue, or uses harsh language of any kind, or condemns any sinful act, or fights against evil with any force or conviction at all. As soon as he or she stands and says ‘This is wrong, and I will not compromise,’ the heretics swoop in with their trusty mantras.
They insist that Jesus was a nice man, and that He never would have done anything to upset people. They say that He came down from Heaven to preach tolerance and acceptance, and He wouldn’t have used words that might lead to hurt feelings. They confidently sermonize about a meek and mild Messiah who was born into this Earthly realm on a mission to spark a constructive dialogue.
The believers in Nice Jesus are usually ignorant of Scripture, but they do know that He was ‘friends with prostitutes,’ and once said something about how, like, we shouldn’t get too ticked off about stuff, or whatever. In their minds, he’s essentially a supernatural Cheech Marin.
Read the comments under my previous post about gay rights militants, and you’ll see this heresy illustrated.
That post prompted an especially noteworthy email from someone concerned that I’m not being ‘Christlike,’ because I ‘call people names.’ He said, in part:
“You aren’t spreading Christianity when you talk like that. The whole message of Jesus was that we should be nice to people because we want them to be nice to us. That’s how we can all be happy. Period. It’s that simple.”
Be nice to me, I’ll be nice to you, and we’ll all be happy. This is the ‘whole message’ of Christianity?
Really?
Jesus Christ preached a Truth no deeper or more complex than a slogan on a poster in a Kindergarten classroom?
Really?
A provocative claim, to say the least. I decided to investigate the matter, and sure enough, I found this excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount:
“We’re best friends like friends should be. With a great big hug, and a kiss from me to you, won’t you say you love me too?”
Actually, wait, sorry, that’s from the original Barney theme song. …
I don’t recognize this Jesus.
This moderate. This pacifist. This nice guy.
He’s not the Jesus I read about in the Bible. I read of a strong, manly, stern, and bold Savior. Compassionate, yes. Forgiving, of course. Loving, always loving. But not particularly nice.
He condemned. He denounced. He caused trouble. He disrupted the established order.
On one occasion — or at least one recorded occasion — He used violence. This Jesus saw the money changers in the temple and how did He respond? He wasn’t polite about it. I’d even say He was downright intolerant. He fashioned a whip (this is what the lawyers would call ‘premeditation’) and physically drove the merchants away. He turned over tables and shouted. He caused a scene. [John 2:15]
Assault with a deadly weapon. Vandalism. Disturbing the peace. Worse still, intolerance.
In two words: not nice.
Not nice at all.
Can you imagine how some moderate, pious, ‘nice’ Christians of today would react to that spectacle in the Temple? Can you envision the proponents of the Nice Doctrine, with their wagging fingers and their passive aggressive sighs? I’m sure they’d send Jesus a patronizing email, perhaps leave a disapproving comment under the news article about the incident, reminding Jesus that Jesus would never do what Jesus just did.
Personally, I’ve studied the New Testament and found not a single instance of Christ calling for a ‘dialogue’ with evil or seeking the middle ground on an issue. I see an absolutist, unafraid of confrontation. I see a man who did not waver or give credence to the other side. I see someone who never once avoided a dispute by saying that He’ll just ‘agree to disagree.’
I see a Christ who calls the Scribes and Pharisees snakes and vipers. He labels them murderers and blind guides, and ridicules them publicly [Matthew 23:33]. He undermines their authority. He insults them. He castigates them. He’s not very nice to them.
Jesus rebukes and condemns. In Matthew 18, He utilizes morbid and violent imagery, saying that it would be better to drown in the sea with a stone around your neck than to harm a child. Had our modern politicians been around two thousand years ago, I’m sure they’d go on the cable news shows and shake their heads and insist that there’s ‘no place for that kind of language.’
No place for the language of God.
Jesus deliberately did and said things that He knew would upset people. He stirred up division and controversy. He provoked. He didn’t have to break from established customs, but He did. He didn’t have to heal that man’s hand on the Sabbath, knowing how it would disturb others and cause them immense irritation, but He did, and He did so with ‘anger’ [Mark 3:5]. He could have gone with the flow a little bit. He could have chilled out and let bygones be bygones, but He didn’t. He could have been diplomatic, but He wasn’t.
He could have told everyone to relax, but instead He made them uncomfortable. He could have put them at ease, but He chose to put them on edge.
He convinced the mob not to stone the adulterer [John 8], and you’ll notice that He then turned to her and told her to stop sinning. Indeed, never once did He encounter sin and corruption and say: “Hey, do your thang, homies. Just have fun. YOLO!”
The followers of Nice Jesus love to quote the ‘throw the first stone’ verse — and for good reason, it’s a beautiful and compelling story — but you rarely hear mention of the exchange that occurs just a few sentences later, in that very same chapter. In John 8:44, Jesus rebukes unbelieving Jews and calls them ‘sons of the Devil.’
Wow.
That wasn’t nice, Jesus.
Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you can catch more flies with honey, Jesus?
Of course, you’d catch even more flies with a mound of garbage, so maybe ‘catching flies’ isn’t the point.
While we’re often reminded that Jesus said, ‘live by the sword, die by the sword,’ we seem to ignore his other sword references. Like when he told his disciples to sell their cloaks and buy a sword [Luke 22], or when He said that He ‘didn’t come to bring peace, but a sword’ [Matthew 10].
Now, It’s true that He is God and we are not. Jesus can say whatever He wants to say. But we are called to be like Christ, which begs the question: what is Christ like?
Well, He is, among other things, uncompromising. He is intolerant of evil. He is disruptive. He is sometimes harsh. He is sometimes impolite. He is sometimes angry.
He is always loving.
Christ was not and is not a cosmic guidance counselor, and He is not mankind’s best friend, nor did He call us to be. He made dogs for that role — our destiny is more substantial, and our path to it is far more challenging and dangerous.
And nice?
Where does nice factor into this? …
Christians in this country sound too similar to the the Golden Girls song, and not enough like the Battle Hymn of the Republic. There’s too much ‘thank you for being a friend,’ and not enough ‘lightening from His terrible swift sword.’
We’re all hugging and singing Kumbaya, when we should be marching and shouting Hallelujah.
We’re nice Christians with our nice Jesus, and we are trampled on without protest.
Enough, already.
I think it’s time that Christianity regain its fighting spirit; the spirit of Christ.
I think it’s time we ask that question: ‘What would Jesus do?’
And I think it’s time we answer it truthfully: Jesus would flip tables and yell.
Maybe we ought to follow suit.
… and about Barack Obama or any president:
Of all the flaccid refrains constantly shrieked by the hordes of Statist sycophants, the worst is probably this:
“Even if you don’t respect Obama, you should still respect the office!”
Respect ‘the office,’ they say.
Definition of respect: to hold in esteem or honor.
Synonyms for respect: deference, awe, reverence.
As you might imagine, I was recently reacquainted with the rather sickening idea that I have a duty to show reverence for a political office, when I wrote a post last week where I merely called the president a liar. Indeed, anytime you criticize the president with an intent more serious than playfully teasing him for picking the wrong team in his March Madness bracket – anytime you attack authority, particularly presidential authority, particularly THIS president’s authority — the ‘respect the office’ propagators will come streaming in, fingers-a-wagging and heads-a-shaking.
‘Respect the office,’ they gush. Noticeably, the folks most concerned with respecting Obama’s office weren’t to be heard from during that certain eight year period where Bush was daily cut down as anything from Hitler Incarnate
to a barely literate monkey
to the subject for a slapstick Comedy Central sitcom.
In any case, Republican or Democrat, Hitler or Secular Messiah, is there anything to be said for this ‘respect the office’ notion?
I don’t think so, but then, the whole concept confuses me. Honestly, I don’t even know what ‘respecting the office’ means in the context of our constitutional republic, where our politicians are supposed to be public servants, and where they don’t do anything to earn the office other than spend a lot of money on political ads.
I know what it means to honor and respect your parents just because they’re your parents. I know what it means for a child to respect his teacher just because she’s his teacher. I know, and have written about, what it means for a woman to respect her husband because he is her husband, and a man to respect his wife because she is his wife. But, as far as I can tell, the responsibility to respect the ‘office’ of a politician falls squarely on the shoulders of the politician who holds it. And, even in that case, his job isn’t to respect the office, so much as to live up to the expectations of the voters who awarded him the position — and, far more important than the feelings of the voters, to uphold the law.
The ‘office’ is, after all, just an office. It isn’t some detached entity that exists on its own somewhere in the dimensions of time and space, and will live on even without being physically occupied.
The office is also not a divine birthright. This is not a monarchy. They are not royalty. Why should I respect the ‘office of the presidency’ anymore than I should respect the office of a plumber or a secretary? If a plumber or a secretary lied all the time, I’d call them a liar.
It’s true that we shouldn’t hurl racial slurs and dishonest ad hominem insults at the president — regardless of who he is — but that isn’t because of his office. That’s just because he’s a person, and we shouldn’t do that to any person. It’s not the dignity of any office that we have a responsibility to uphold, but the dignity of a human being.
Coincidentally, the dignity of the human being is the precise sort of dignity that this president desecrates when he promotes infanticide and wishes ‘God’s blessings’ on a room full of wealthy abortionists, or when he brutally murders hundreds of women and children via drone attacks and then brags that he’s “really good at killing people,” or when he arms terrorists and drug cartels without a thought as to the innocent lives that will be lost as a result.
It’s a sad state of affairs, indeed. We’ve reached a point where a wide swath of the country finds itself more concerned with respect for a political office than for life itself.
Of course, I’m sure there are some people who vehemently disagree with Obama, yet would sing in the ‘respect the office’ choir, and would consistently apply the principle to all presidents, regardless of affiliation. I respect that. I actually respect it. I respect it because I honor it, and I honor it because it is a conviction born of integrity and pure intention. A politician’s job, on the other hand, is born of mere necessity, and I feel indifference towards it, until I’m given a reason to feel disgust or admiration (usually it’s the former, obviously).
These people aren’t necessarily in the Statist horde I mentioned above, but they’ve unwittingly aligned themselves with that mob, and so I’d urge them to reconsider.
The Bible tells us to submit to governing authority, and that such authority comes from God (Romans 13). But nobody in America thinks that this requires us to lie before the Powers that Be like dogs, and follow them blindly into our own slavery. If they did interpret that passage in that way, I imagine they’d already have returned to the British Motherland and said ‘sorry, my bad,’ over that whole unfortunate Revolution misunderstanding.
Besides, here in America, the governing authority is the Constitution. The Constitution — a set of laws, rooted in respect for life and liberty, planted in the soil of Natural Law and watered, as Jefferson said, with the blood of tyrants. The Constitution is our authority. The Constitution is the law. In this nation, the law does not rest with one man, or any collection of men.
In this nation, we prostrate ourselves to no one, other than the Lord.
Let our president bow to royalty if he so desires, but, as free people, that is not our warrant.
Respecting the office, when considered by someone other than a progressive hypocrite, seems well and fine. But I’m afraid that, in application, it makes it difficult for us to hold for our politicians that one feeling that the preservation of Liberty surely requires: skepticism.
Here in the United States, where the power allegedly resides with the people, the one thing that a political office automatically earns from its constituents is a healthy apprehension. The one thing, above everything, that we MUST do with political authority is question it. On this point, you really can’t have your American Pie and eat it too. It’s one or the other. Either our duty as watchful citizens is to doubt our politicians and their offices, or it is to respect them. One protects liberty, the other destroys it.
For a man who respects his wife, or a woman who respects her husband, or a child who respects his mother, it is understood that their apprehensions should be tamed by their respect for the other — respect that isn’t earned, but owed. The loving husband and the dutiful child give their wives and their parents, respectively, the benefit of the doubt.
A citizen, on the other hand, unless he or she is a total fool, knows that politicians should be given the benefit of the doubt about as often as it’s given to sex offenders or kleptomaniacs (especially considering the fact that our presidents have sometimes fallen under all three categories, *cough* Bill Clinton).
There’s a logistical problem with respecting the office, too. Namely, the Office of the Presidency as prescribed in the constitution is one thing, while the Office of the Presidency as currently resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is quite another. If I was at all inclined to respect the office, I could only consider respecting the former, as the former has Constitutional authority, and the Constitution is the law, and a just and righteous law is the Providence of God. But I run into the technical difficult that the former no longer exists, and hasn’t, arguably, since the conclusion of the Civil War.
The Office of the Presidency now possesses powers that stretch far beyond anything ever lawfully granted it, and it wields an authority that has accumulated over the decades through the illegal conquests of power hungry politicians.
When you respect the Office of the Presidency, you are either respecting the president himself, or you’re respecting this bloated perversion of a political station, one that has been used to murder and oppress.
Respect? If anything, the office should be hated. Hated until some respectable person is elected by respectable voters to convert the monstrosity back to the limited, yet important, post that our Founders established.
The number one British album today in 1983 (with the clock ticking on my high school days) was Spandau Ballet’s “True”:
The number one British album today in 2000 was Tom Jones’ “Reload,” which proved that Jones could sing about anything, and loudly:
The Wall Street Journal:
The four-year effort by Democratic prosecutors to criminalize political speech in Wisconsin has hit the wall of the U.S. Constitution. In a ruling that could have consequences nationwide, federal judge Rudolph Randa issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday ending the secret John Doe probe of allies of Governor Scott Walker.
We’ve been telling you for months about the secret Wisconsin John Doe, which operates like a grand jury and forces targets to remain silent. The targets are right-of-center groups disliked by Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, his special prosecutor Francis Schmitz, and the left-leaning state Government Accountability Board that regulates campaign finance.
Prosecutors were able to leak details with impunity until one of the targets, Eric O’Keefe, went public to us last November about the abuse of power. He also sought Washington attorney David Rivkin to file a federal civil-rights lawsuit to shut down the probe, and that’s what Judge Randa responded to [last] Tuesday.
Prosecutors had justified their dawn raids and harassment in the name of exposing illegal coordination between the Walker campaign and conservative groups. But Judge Randa ruled that the investigation was based on a mistaken reading of campaign-finance law that violated Mr. O’Keefe’s First Amendment’s rights. “The defendants are pursuing criminal charges through a secret John Doe investigation against the plaintiffs for exercising issue advocacy speech rights that on their face are not subject to the regulations or statutes the defendants seek to enforce,” the judge wrote.
Mr. O’Keefe, director of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, had merely advocated for issues he cares about, which is protected speech. “O’Keefe and the Club obviously agree with Governor Walker’s policies,” the judge added, “but coordinated ads in favor of those policies carry no risk of corruption because the Club’s interests are already aligned with Walker and other conservative politicians.”
It’s worth noting that Judge Randa is the second judge to find that the prosecutors are wrong on the law. In January Wisconsin Judge Gregory Peterson quashed subpoenas that he ruled were based on a misreading of campaign-finance law. Prosecutors are appealing Judge Peterson’s ruling, which we told you about on Jan. 13 though it is under John Doe seal.
It’s worth noting that prosecutors would still be continuing their harassment without legal or political accountability if not for Mr. O’Keefe’s willingness to go public—at considerable personal risk. Mr. Chisholm and his deputy, Bruce Landgraf, are noted Democrat partisans with a vindictive streak.
Whether or not they ever brought charges, they also knew their probe would effectively shut down center-right spending as Mr. Walker and Republicans try to win re-election this year. The Wisconsin Club for Growth spent some $8 million on advertising or grants to other groups in 2012 during the recall campaign against Mr. Walker. In 2013 it spent $1.7 million but has been silent since the John Doe subpoenas hit in October.
Similar damage has been done to conservative groups across the state. According to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce spent some $4 million during the recall campaign in 2012, but aside from a small local radio campaign about an asbestos trust issue this year, the group has been off the air.
Like the IRS targeting of conservative nonprofits, the Wisconsin John Doe shows how campaign-finance laws have become a liberal weapon to silence political opponents. Prosecutors claim to be fighting the risk of corruption from “dark money” in politics. But their enforcement attempts, done in secret and unrestrained by Constitutional guardrails, have become far more politically corrupting.
The prosecutors’ cynical manipulation of Wisconsin’s campaign laws is more than the mere appearance of corruption. Eric O’Keefe’s refusal to be intimidated by lawless law-enforcement officials produced Randa’sremarkably emphatic ruling against an especially egregious example of Democrats using government power to suppress conservatives’ political speech.
Wisconsin’s sordid episode began, appropriately, with a sound of tyranny — fists pounding on the doors of private citizens in pre-dawn raids. While sheriff’s deputies used floodlights to illuminate the citizens’ homes, armed raiders seized documents, computers, cell phones, and other devices.
As a director of Wisconsin Club for Growth, which advocates limited government, O’Keefe had participated in his state’s 2012 debate surrounding attempts by Democrats and state and national government-employee unions to recall Republican governor Scott Walker and some state senators. The recalls were intended as punishment for legislation limiting the unions’ collective-bargaining rights.
Walker prevailed. The Democratic prosecutors, however, seeking to cripple his 2014 reelection campaign and to damage him as a potential 2016 presidential aspirant, have resorted to a sinister Wisconsin process called a “John Doe investigation.” It has focused on the activities of O’Keefe and 28 other conservative individuals or organizations.
In such investigations, prosecutors can promiscuously issue subpoenas and conduct searches. The identities of the targets are kept secret, and the targets are silenced by gag orders, thereby preventing public discussion of the process. Thus John Doe investigations are effective government instruments of disruption and intimidation. …
O’Keefe and the other harassed conservatives had engaged only in issue advocacy, not express advocacy. That is, they had not urged the election of specific candidates. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that government regulation of political speech is permissible only to prevent quid pro quo corruption — money purchasing political favors — resulting from express advocacy. Hence there is no justification for the prosecutors’ punitive investigation of O’Keefe’s and others’ issue advocacy. As Randa said, this hasno “taint of quid pro quo corruption” and thus “is not subject to regulation.”
The Democratic prosecutors must know this. Again, they ignore it because their aim is mayhem, not law enforcement. Their activity is entirely about suffocating conservative activity. Because the prosecutors know Wisconsin law, they are patently disingenuous in arguing that O’Keefe and others illegally “coordinated” their advocacy with Walker and other candidates or campaigns. Randa said “the record seems to validate” O’Keefe’s and the others’ denial of coordination.
Besides, and even more important, Randa said his court “need not make that type of factual finding.” Wisconsin law forbids coordination between third-party groups, such as O’Keefe’s, and candidates only for express advocacy, and Randa said “it is undisputed” that O’Keefe and his group engaged only in issue advocacy. The prosecutors’ indifference to this is their corruption.
Liberals inveighing against “dark money” in politics mean money contributed anonymously to finance political advocacy. Donors’ anonymity thwarts liberals’ efforts to injure the livelihoods of identifiable conservatives by punishing them for their political participation and thereby deterring others from participating.
O’Keefe’s persecution illustrates the problem his lawyer David Rivkin calls “dark power” — government power wielded secretively for vengeance and intimidation. Judge Randa quoted the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens Uniteddecision: The First Amendment is “premised on mistrust of governmental power.” And he noted that “the danger always exists that the high purpose of campaign regulation and its enforcement may conceal self-interest.”
Randa is insufficiently mistrustful. Campaign regulation, although invariably swathed in lofty rhetoric, is designed to disguise regulation’s low purpose, which is to handicap political rivals. If Wisconsin is serious about eliminating political corruption, it can begin by eliminating corrupt prosecutors and processes, and the speech regulations that encourage both.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 