Right Wing Nut House

Those who don’t believe we need unions anymore should take a turn working in a grocery store.

It doesn’t matter where - cashier, bagger, stock person, meat cutter. The temptation for management to take advantage of employees and run them into the ground usually proves to much to resist in non-union operations. I imagine the same holds true for meat processing, farm workers, and a few other labor intensive industries where there is large turnover and poor base pay.

For other industries? I’m not so sure. Marginally necessary perhaps for worker protection and decent benefits but unions like the UAW have lost sight of the true value of labor. I doubt whether their members would make half as much in wages and benefits in a true socialist economy. Negotiating with government is a lot different than negotiating with companies concerned about a bottom line and public image.

That said, is there any justification for public unions? At one time, perhaps yes. The reason for such outstanding benefits for public employees - at least it was justified to taxpayers this way - was that public workers made so much less than their counterparts in the private sector. This is decidedly not true at the federal level. Federal workers make comparable pay while enjoying 4 times the cash value of benefits.

But not all federal workers are unionized. Only around 30% belong to a union. Pay at the state level is considerably less, with one study showing state and local workers receiving 3.7% less than their counterparts in the private sector. State and local workers are also first in line for pay cuts during budget crisis and last to get a pay raise.

Is there really a necessity for a union to make up this difference? A public union is not bargaining with the government, but rather with the people of that state or locality. Government is a middle man, representing the interests of citizens. Perhaps, as Governor Johnson is doing, unions should be allowed to negotiate issues relating to their pay while leaving pension and health insurance to the legislature. Given the pension bomb that is about to go off across America, it’s probably going to happen anyway.

Public employees have been able to negotiate jaw-dropping pension plans and gold plated health insurance benefits in many states. This is not true in all states, nor is it true that all municipal employees everywhere enjoy undeserved bennies and high pay. Making generalizations about public unions is difficult because there are so many different ways that states and localities approach negotiating with them. Some unions are forbidden from going on strike. Some are statutorily limited in how much of an increase in pay they can ask for.

What has happened in Wisconsin is a clash of extremes. Exaggerated claims on both sides, egged on by outside forces, has created a crisis. Walker is not trying to break the unions (nor will his proposals prevent collective bargaining), while teachers have overreacted to reforms that as government workers, they are going to have to get used to. The calumny that has been directed at the protestors is well deserved in my opninion. Calling Walker and “dictator” or “Hitler” is beyond absurd. They are making themselves a laughingstock, convincing no one while radically harming their cause.

When taxpayers are footing the bill for pensions that are out of whack with those in the private sector, they have a right to ask why those workers can’t contribute more to bring their contributions inline with their own pensions. When workers enjoy tax-payer funded health insurance far beyond what the average citizen can afford, they have a perfect right to demand that those employees pay a little more into the insurance fund. These are hardly unreasonable demands for teachers whose average salary for nine months of work is $46,000 in a state with a very reasonable cost of living. Citizens who make a lot less pay a lot more in to pensions and health insurance plans.

What really bothers many is the sense of entitlement demonstrated by the teachers and other public employee unionists. They don’t like to be reminded who they’re working for. This points up what some are saying about the coming battle over budgets at every level of government. The divide will be between the producers and the dependents - between taxpayers and those who receive direct payments from government.

It will be a splendid little war that will probably determine the fate of the nation.

My PJ Media piece yesterday wasn’t linked by a single blog (except this one) and yet, it garnered more than 150 comments. My guesstimate would be that 95% were extremely negative — abusive, belittling, and dismissive. I fully expected this, have come to expect it, whenever I write anything for PJM or other conservative websites.

No one likes to be called a paranoid, but frankly, I can’t think of another word that describes the divorce from reality that has been finalized by so many on the internet right. Theirs is a unique world where logic and reason have gone on permanent vacation, and the fantastical has been substituted for rationality.

The question can be rightly asked; why do you do it if it breeds such contempt from readers to point out the error in their thinking? It certainly isn’t advancing my writing career which, despite claims that I am doing it because it garners praise from liberals, or will get me a job with a Beltway conservative publication, has tanked in the last year. I’d like to say I have bravely gone henceforth into the breach carrying the standard of reason on high, but the opposite is true. No one likes to be unpopular, but beyond that, no one takes my writing seriously anymore. This has made me a little gunshy in writing about anything, much less the mortal danger posed to conservatism by the paranoids.

I have also discovered that I am not a very persuasive writer, probably doing more harm than good to my cause by chastising the right for their blinkered view of reality. It is a fact that few like to be told they are wrong, much less crazy wrong. I should probably have recognized this early on and tried another tack, but would that really have mattered? Besides, crazy is as crazy does, to paraphrase Mr. Gump, and any attempt to minimize the distance between what many conservatives believe about Obama and liberals in general and the real world would probably have been met with similar resistance.

When I began to question cotton candy conservatives like Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin, I actually believed that applying a little logic to the irrational things they were saying might convince some on the right to abandon this shallow, unserious flirtation with pop conservatism. The ease with which these charlatans “explain” what Obama and the liberals are up to by ascribing the worst possible motives to them should be a tip off for any rational observer who values reason. Gleaning motives, or intent, from results is backasswards. It beggars belief that any thinking person would fall into this logic trap.

Allow me to explain: The entire basis for “Obama wants to destroy the country,” Cloward-Piven, and even Rules for Radicals as a gameplan for Obama rests on the results of policies enacted by the administration — unemployment, massive debt, government “takeovers,” etc. From there, the paranoids walk their assumptions backwards to a supposition, i.e. Obama wants to destroy the country. “What else could it be but that Obama is evil and deliberately wants to bring America down?” is the question they ask.

Well, you have offered as much evidence that aliens are telling Obama what to do as you have proven that Obama is evil and wants to destroy the country. In short - zero, nada, nil, nothing. Not one shred of evidence that Obama initiated these admittedly idiotic policies except that the results of those policies were bad. No evidence of meetings where Obama and his advisors mapped out the destruction of America. No paper trail that shows that this was the administration’s intent. No tape recordings of Obama or his advisors plotting America’s downfall. No insider tell all book detailing how the president and his men sought to destroy the United States.

How then, can anyone with an ounce of reason or logic draw the ridiculous, paranoid conclusion that because Obama’s policies have resulted in near economic ruin (a dubious supposition given the previous administration’s profligacy and nearly 30 years of continuous deficit spending with an expanding state), that the only possible explanation is that he is evil and trying to destroy us?

The problem for the paranoids is that they start, not with a supposition, but an assumption. By assuming evil intent, the only possible supposition is that Obama is trying to destroy us. But what is easier to believe? Occam’s razor would teach us that beginning with the supposition that Obama is incompetent would lead to the exact same results that the paranoids believe proves Obama is evil! Is it easier, more rational, more reasonable to believe that Obama is a horrible chief executive or a Machiavellian president who has been able to hide the proof of his intent to destroy us - except from the eyes of those chosen few who claim special knowledge not in evidence of the president’s intent?

When looking at Obama through this kind of paranoid prism, all manner of evils can be attributed to him. He doesn’t “love” America. He wants to weaken us so that the Mooooslims can establish Sharia law in America. He is conniving to turn our capitalist economy (such as it is) into a socialist, or even a Marxist one.

Obama’s words are twisted beyond any reasonable definition of intent in order to “convict” him out of his own mouth. The president’s redistributive rhetoric, naive liberal idiocies about America’s role in the world, his juvenile, Keyenesian view of economics, his dangerously expansive view of constitutional principles all point to Obama being a far left liberal, out of his depth, who is seeking to “remake” America into his vision of of what a “socially just” nation should be.

He is not the first American who has had these ideas. He’s just the first president who has been elected to try it. How’s it working out? Not very well and it’s getting worse.

Wrong not evil. A poor leader, not Satan. A misreading of the country, not an extra-constitutional authoritarian. Isn’t it more reasonable to believe the former and not the latter of all of those assumptions?

I am not a psychologist so getting to the bottom of many on the right’s paranoia about Obama and the liberals will have to be explained by someone else. In the meantime, I will continue, as best as I am able, to try and inject logic and reason into the debates of our time, while leaving the witless paranoids to stew in their own conspiratorial muck.

My latest is up at PJ Media - another gangbusters article about the paranoid right and how some of their beliefs have entered the mainstream of conservative Obama critiques. This is especially true of the “Obama is deliberately trying to destroy the country” theme that is so prevalent on the right.

A sample:

One of the most confounding critiques of President Obama from the right has been the expressed belief that the president of the United States has deliberately initiated policies that he knew would injure the economy and the country. In short, Barack Obama wants to destroy America.

Several different motivations are given for this traitorous behavior. Rush Limbaugh thinks it’s because Obama wants as much of the population as possible to fall into dependency on government, thus giving Democrats a permanent majority because everyone knows poor people vote Democratic. Others believe it’s because the president is a socialist/Communist and in order to remake America, it must first be destroyed.

Darker conspiracies that combine the most paranoid parts of the birther narrative with Cold War revanchist nightmares involving a plot line ripped from the film The Manchurian Candidate (the sublime Frank Sinatra version, not the Denzel Washington turkey) provide a little comic relief to the dourness of the subject matter. Obama as the unholy offspring of Frank Davis or Malcolm X, groomed from birth by the international Communist conspiracy to become leader of the free world, programmed to remake America into a Marxist dictatorship, gives the entire proposition of Obama as Destroyer of America a slightly hysterical tinge.

Thankfully, most on the right don’t go quite that far over the cliff in positing the notion that President Obama has deliberately set out to bring America down. Still, there is a desperate paranoia at work among some conservatives if one were to take the notion seriously that this president — any president — would purposefully set the nation on a course where America’s destruction would be the end result. In order to believe that proposition, you have to also believe that the president is not just an incompetent, indecisive, empty suit in way over his head as chief executive, but that he is the personification of evil.

Conservative film critic, talk show host, and political commentator Michael Medved recently penned an article for the Wall Street Journal that attempted to address this phenomenon and place it in a realistic political context:

None of the attacks on Mr. Obama’s intentions offers an even vaguely plausible explanation of how the evil genius, once he has ruined our “strength, influence and standard of living,” hopes to get himself re-elected.

I also take conservatives to task for believing in the Cloward-Piven nonsense as well as thinking that the White House is following the Saul Alinksy playbook found in Rules for Radicals. Both critiques descend into the paranoid conspiracy level by making the claim that Obama wants to destroy America.

As you can imagine, I am getting slammed in the comments. Apparently, I am some sort of liberal Obama-lover. This points up a related issue for those conservatives who go off the reservation and think as I do; we are accused of not hating Obama enough.

We can strenuously oppose his policies, even think him personally arrogant, incompetent, narcissistic, and in over his head. That doesn’t matter to the paranoids. Unless you hate the president with every fiber of your being - and believe the absolute worst about his motives - your fealty to conservatism is openly questioned.

Is this a way to judge someone’s philosophy? If you’re a right wing fanatical hater of Obama, I guess so.

I take comfort in the fact that I am smarter, prettier, richer, and more grounded in objective reality than most of my critics.

The recent poll showing that an astonishing 51% of GOP primary voters believe that Obama is a “foreigner” has proved what I wrote more than a year and a half ago; the Birthers are poison and threaten the party and conservative movement.

Me in July, 2009:

The question then becomes do we try and isolate, chastise, and ultimately drive out the paranoid purveyors of utterly fantastical notions of Obama’s origins while they are still a small enough group that a concerted effort could succeed? Or do we wait and see how big they get before acting, thus risking a backlash against the right from the voter?

To prevent many diseases from harming our health, we inoculate ourselves so that an illness will not develop. I propose something similar in dealing with the Birthers. For my part, anyone who leaves a comment on this site, on any post, that advances any birther “theory” will be banned from accessing my writings.

Some might think this a bad idea in that I will forgo “debate” or perhaps not allow a Birther to be convinced otherwise. That’s nonsense. My experience with Birthers has been that they don’t want to hear any contrary evidence, that they have closed their mind so completely to the truth that arguing with a brick wall would be easy by comparison.

Besides, for most Birthers, it’s not about discovering the truth. It is about delegitimizing the president. For months they demanded to see the president’s birth certificate. When the state of Hawaii released a “Certificate of Live Birth,” we heard from the Birthers that it wasn’t good enough, or it was a fake. “All we want is to see the president’s birth certificate,” they innocently ask. And they take the president’s reluctance to do so - indeed, his fight in the courts to prevent the release of it - as “evidence” that there is something amiss.

[...]

I am open to any and all ideas on how to marginalize these kooks before conservatism itself becomes a victim of the Birthers unbalanced lunacy. We can no longer turn the other way when confronted with Birther blather. Since they won’t listen to reason , shame and humiliation would seem to me to be the best way to closet them with the other nutcases of American politics

Karl Rove yesterday:

ROVE: Republicans had better be clear about this.

We had a problem in the 1950’s with the John Birch Society, and it took Bill Buckley standing up as a strong conservative and taking them on.

Within our party, we’ve got to be very careful about allowing these people who are the birthers and the 9/11-deniers to get too high a profile and say too much without setting the record straight.

BILL O’REILLY: What percentage of Republican voters — 5%, 10%?

ROVE: I don’t know, but whatever it is, it ought to be less, because we need the leaders of our party to say “Look, stop falling into the trap of the White House and focus on the real issues.”

O’REILLY: You know this stat that was put out — that 51% of Republicans…

ROVE: … look, this is a lousy poll.

O’REILLY: I know it is, but it’s going to be picked up — it already has been by the mainstream media.

ROVE: Absolutely.

O’REILLY: To demonize the rest of the Republican party.

ROVE: Sure, it fits into the White House theme-line.

O’REILLY: But isn’t that smart of the White House to do that?

ROVE: Oh, absolutely.

Look, these guys may be lousy at governing, Bill, but they’re damn good at politics.

O’REILLY: So it’s a smart strategy….

ROVE: … sure it is, because if we are where we are, which is we have a group of people out there who keep repeating this, and we’ve yet to get into a place where candidates are being asked about this in debates — look, don’t you think in the Fox debate or one of these debates that’s gonna be televised, candidates are going to be asked about this?

If they’d step forward and say “Look, we’ve got better things to talk about, then to fall into this trap that the White House has laid for us”, this issue will start to go away.

Rove wants the “leaders” of the party to take a stand and marginalize these kooks. Fat chance. John Boehner - incredibly - said the other day that it wasn’t his job to tell the American people what to think.

That’s real leadership, eh?

Birtherism, the loony idea that Obama is deliberately trying to destroy the country, Cloward-Piven nonsense, Saul Alinsky’s ludicrous gameplan — what all of these have in common is paranoia. Part of the reason is just plain ignorance — a lack of applying logic to a supposition and coming to a rational conclusion. Opposing Obama is not irrational; seeing evil in the results of his policies is. It is a leap of illogic to posit that Obama’s policies are having a monstrously bad effect on the economy, ergo, this automatically means that he has it in for America. I’ll never understand that kind of thinking, tinged as it is with an hysterical view of one’s political opponent. Isn’t it bad enough that the president is an incompetent boob? Why invent motivations that are so off kilter that one wonders how those who hold these views function in society?

A sizable segment - easily more than a third - of conservatives and Republicans are bat guano crazy. A similar percentage who are nutso on the left subscribe to idiotic conspiracies involving the Koch Brothers or the Chamber of Commerce, or some other right wing target. We are at the exact moment in American history when we can least afford to have a third of the electorate held in thrall to fantasy. We need hard headed realism, not mushy headed conspiracy theories.

What happens if things fall apart? With millions divorced from objective reality, I leave it to your imagination.

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You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative political talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome Aaron Gee of the American Thinker, Doug Mataconis of Below the Beltway, and Steve Eggleston of No Runny Eggs. We’ll have a look at Obama’s budget proposal, discuss events in the Middle East, and debate the question of whether President Obama wants to deliberately destroy America (?).

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

My latest is up at FrontPage.com and the subject is the utter cluelessness of a man who is supposed to know what’s happening in the world.

I don’t know why James Clapper said that the Muslim Brotherhood was a “largely secular” organization that “eschews violence.” The first proposition is radically wrong while the second is radically naive. Even reporters covering Egypt were searching for words to describe how off base Clapper was in his statements.

His is a special kind of incoherence that either reflects the shockingly ignorant consensus of our intelligence community or he is going easy on the Brotherhood because we may have to deal with them as part of any new government in Egypt. Either way, we’re in trouble. The Brotherhood has not “eschewed” violence. They made a tactical decision to de-emphasize their reliance on it. Few who know the Brotherhood agree with Clapper. That ought to seal his fate right there.

Time for Clapper to spend more time with his family. He should go - today.

A sample:

Examining Clapper’s remarks before the Intel Committee, one can’t help but be astounded, and not a little bewildered at his cluelessness about the Brotherhood. It’s not like the Islamists are trying to hide the nature of their organization, their goals, their history, or their reason for being.

As former CIA operations officer Brian Fairchild writes, there are no secrets between the Brotherhood and the rest of the world. Muhammad Mahdi Akef, the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, from 2004-2010 repeatedly made clear the religious nature of his organization. He said on December, 11, 2005, “The Muslim Brotherhood is a global movement whose members cooperate with each other throughout the world, based on the same religious worldview — the spread of Islam, until it rules the world.”

Akef went on to say, “[W]e are in the global arena, and we preach for Allah according to the guidelines of the Muslim Brotherhood. All the members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the international arena operate according to the written charter that states that Jihad is the only way to achieve these goals.”

This is the organization Mr. Clapper referred to before the Intelligence Committee as “largely secular.”

Again, it’s not as if the spooks have to dig very deeply to ferret out the truth about these extremists. Here’s a quote from Akef in which he makes it crystal clear that Clapper’s contention that the Brotherhood has “eschewed violence” to be slightly premature. On August 17, 2004, he stated: “Islam considers the resistance to be Jihad for the sake of Allah and this is a commandment, a personal obligation [fardhayn] incumbent on all of the residents of the occupied countries. This commandment takes precedence over all other religious duties. Even a woman is obligated to go to war, even without her husband’s permission, and youth are permitted to go out and fight.”

How very peace-loving of them.

Here I go again - delving into an issue where my position is diametrically opposed to the social cons, as well as many traditionalists in the conservative movement.

My latest blockbuster is up at Pajamas Media where I take the social cons and others to task for trying to eject the conservative gay advocacy group GOProud from CPAC and the conservative movement for their stance on gay marriage.

A sample:

It can be extremely unnerving to discover that the grounded, safe, familiar, secure cocoon in which we exist is being invaded by what appears to be radical ideas and radical people that throw our notions of what is “normal” out the window. We try to shelter our children by drawing them into the cocoon, just as our parents, and their parents before them tried to keep the outside world from intruding on our peaceful existence. It never works. Sooner or later, we discover that America has other plans. A nation that prides itself on being a revolutionary society where there is the chance for change every four years does not sit still for long. For better or worse, America is constantly in motion, and like a steamroller, flattens the past and readies the ground ahead for whatever transformation is to occur.

Beyond the front gate, there are all sorts of people we wish would just go away and not disturb us with their problems. Fifty years ago, it was African Americans being asked to be “patient” while society continued its glacial pace of progress toward granting dignity and freedom from oppression. Then it was women who were told to go back to the kitchen and shut up. The disabled were asked to keep a low profile so as not to upset our delicate sensibilities. The homeless became invisible. The mentally ill, exorcised from our consciousnesses.

And now, the turn of the gays. Do we learn nothing from history? Are we condemned to constantly retreat into our cocoons and fight like hell to try and maintain an outmoded, antiquated notion of what is “normal?” You would think that knowledge is liberating and that having discovered that homosexuality is not a disease, that genetics more than environment determines your sexual orientation, we might cautiously reach out and try and understand the unnecessary burden carried by the gay community in that they have to constantly fight for what you and I take for granted; the simple, decent, American ideal of equal rights under the law.

There is nothing “unconservative” about this, despite what some on the right are saying about GOProud and CPAC. This is especially true as it relates to the fundamental truth about gays that many opponents of gay marriage refuse to concede; that people in love — even if they are of the same sex — should not be denied the legal and social advantages gained by being married.

What is fascinating to me is that most of those who strenuously object to my position do so on “moral” grounds. That is to say, they believe that homosexuality is intrinsically immoral. Barely a majority in this survey disagree but note the huge change in attitudes since 1973 when 80% thought gay love was immoral.

This buttresses the point I try to make in the article. Very little in America is static and unchanging. As more and more gays come out of the closet to their families, their friends, their co-workers, attitudes toward gay people change. When they are seen as people - real, live, flesh and blood humans - rather than objects of fear or derision, attitudes toward their behavior and lifestyle soften. It is a long process and will be decades more before wide-spread acceptance is gained. But the question confronting us today is why isolate a group of conservatives who agree with the right on almost every single issue save gay marriage and DADT repeal? You don’t even have to accept gays as full citizens to do that, although you have to do some fancy intellectual footwork to make it happen.

It strikes me as ludicrous that conservatives would deny membership in their little club to people who agree with 90% of their agenda. The same goes for the brawl over whether libertarians can be conservatives. What an extraordinary example of tribalism that there would be objections from the likes of Mike Huckabee and Erick Erickson to libertarians having a role in the conservative movement. And it’s not just libertarians or homosexuals who these jamokes want frozen out of CPAC and other gatherings on the right. They actually want to ban their supporters as well - those who don’t mind if gays or libertarians participate.

If these “conservatives,” who don’t act or think very conservatively, don’t watch out, their next CPAC will be held in a conference room in Cody, Wyoming.

My latest is up at FrontPage.com titled “Spy versus Pakistan” in which I detail the case of American diplomat Raymond Davis who is languishing illegally in a Pakistani jail as the result of his involvement in a shooting incident where two young men were killed on January 27th.

It should be noted that all we know about Mr. Davis does not add up. But the only thing that concerns us should be his legal status in Pakistan. Given that the consulate in Lahore where he was working has identified him as a “diplomat,” Pakistan should respect international law and give him immunity.

A sample:

The Pakistani court ruled that Davis must remain incarcerated for another 8 days while the police investigate the matter further. Police sources have already admitted that the incident appears to be a cut and dried case of self-defense. The windows on Davis’s car were shot out and a gun was found lying next to one of the dead robbers.

But the Pakistani people are unconvinced. The families of the victims want Davis brought up on terrorism charges and news about the incident has been on the front pages for a week. Opposition politicians are demanding that Davis be tried for murder and there have been several protests at the jail where Davis is being held.

The Pakistani people are already up in arms over what they see as American interference in Islamic justice. Recent efforts to spare the life of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman condemned to death for blasphemy, brought thousands of protesters into the streets demonstrating in favor of the law. Reform efforts collapsed when one of the major sponsors of the effort was gunned down. And recent drone strikes that have accidentally killed Pakistani tribesmen have received a great deal of coverage. In short, one of the most anti-American countries in the world has found even greater cause to increase its animosity toward the U.S.

The Pakistani High Court will determine whether Davis is entitled to immunity. But there are elements to this story that don’t quite fit, suggesting complexity to Davis and the incident itself that defies explanation.

Indeed, some of the background for Davis reads “intelligence” pretty strongly:

Pakistani authorities claim that Davis is ex-Special Forces, having served in Afghanistan for 4 years. His take-down of the two robbers was an awesome display of coolness under fire. Six of the seven shots from his pistol found their mark despite Davis taking fire from the thugs.

Then, there was this curious piece of information offered by Dawn in their first report on the shooting:

A senior police officer told Dawn that Raymond David was among four people who were detained by security personnel near Lahores Sherpao Bridge on Dec 9, 2009, when they were trying to enter the Cantonment area in a vehicle with tinted glasses. They were armed with sophisticated weapons. The intervention of the US consulate led to their release, the officer recalled.

There’s more. UPI is reporting that the two men who were killed by Davis were intelligence operatives connected to the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service. An anonymous security official told Pakistan’s Express Tribune that “[t]hey found the activities of the American official detrimental to our national security.” He also hinted that the ISI was very upset over American accusations that it had helped facilitate the Mumbai massacre in 2008.

WaPo intel blogger Jeff Stein talked to a former State Department security specialist who thinks Davis might have been the victim of an intelligence double cross. Questions about his exact duties at the consulate as well as why he was armed and driving a rented car in one of the most dangerous areas in Lahore also hang over Davis.

None of this should matter. He may very well be some kind of intelligence agent, or contractor. But he has a diplomatic ID and that should suffice. Instead, he is sitting in a Pakistani jail waiting on the High Court to rule on his status.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative political talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome Monica Showalter of IDB, Fausta Wertz of Fausta’s Blog, and Jazz Shaw of Hot Air’s Green Room for a discussion of hot topics making news today.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

It has been 39 years since I sat in a high school classroom fantasizing about doing it with Donna Alpers, daydreaming about becoming a Major League baseball player, and wondering what was for lunch. That pretty much describes my academic achievements, although as I recall, I was very good in physical education and got an “A” in religion.

The Viatorians who taught me tried their best. That they succeeded in pounding enough knowledge into my thick skull so that I could graduate and go on to a decent college speaks volumes about their perseverance and concern for their students. Beyond that, the one life lesson I took away from being under their tutelage for 4 years was that acquiring knowledge for the sake of knowing was a worthy attribute that would serve you well for life.

Is this what’s wrong with students today? I’m sure there are many wonderful teachers out there willing to give their all for their students. But has imparting the sheer joy of learning - something that must be nurtured and tended like a tiny shoot of an evergreen - been lost in the drive to teach students how to take standardized tests so that the school achieves some arbitrary mark set by government to judge their progress? Or has the thirst for knowledge in students been quenched by overly zealous administrators who believe schools should be hives of political correctness and sensitivity to those different than oneself?

The various textbook controversies over the years don’t really touch on this subject. To me, it’s never been about what’s in the textbooks as much as it should be about firing the imaginations of students to seek out additional information on their own. We aren’t just talking about “critical thinking skills” - a buzz phrase that means little to high school kids. More important than learning how to think is learning to accept challenges. If that means that some will fail, so be it. There is failure in life as much as there is failure in school and until kids are taught this, they will continue to fool themselves into believing that passing a standardized test is the same as being a good student.

If these statistics about the percentage of high school graduates who are adequately prepared for college and well paying jobs from New York state can be believed, something is radically amiss:

New York State education officials released a new set of graduation statistics on Monday that show less than half of students in the state are leaving high school prepared for college and well-paying careers.

The new statistics, part of a push to realign state standards with college performance, show that only 23 percent of students in New York City graduated ready for college or careers in 2009, not counting special-education students. That is well under half the current graduation rate of 64 percent, a number often promoted by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg as evidence that his education policies are working.

But New York City is still doing better than the state’s other large urban districts. In Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Yonkers, less than 17 percent of students met the proposed standards, including just 5 percent in Rochester.

The Board of Regents, which sets the state’s education policies, met on Monday to begin discussing what to do with this data, and will most likely issue a decision in March. One option is to make schools and districts place an asterisk next to the current graduation rate, or have them report both the current graduation rate and the college ready rate, said Merryl H. Tisch, the chancellor of the Board of Regents.

The move parallels a decision by the Regents last year to make standardized tests for third through eighth graders more difficult to pass, saying that the old passing rates did not correlate to high school success.

They’re missing the point, of course. The reason the kids aren’t prepared isn’t because the tests aren’t hard enough. The reason is they aren’t learning. At a time when America is losing its competitive edge to China, India, and 2 dozen other industrialized countries, the Regents want to bring test scores up. Perhaps concentrating more on what the students are learning - better yet, what they aren’t learning - would be more to the point.

But such introspection by schools cannot be done. That way leads to madness - and conflicts with the teacher’s unions, school districts, education advocates, and Washington, D.C. Instead of challenging kids to learn, we are forcing a results-oriented template on their education that inevitably leads to figuring out how to beat the test, rather than learn for the sake of learning.

The current regime discourages independent thinking, the wonder of discovery, and the self satisfaction in meeting personal and public challenges. Looking back on my rather indifferent academics, I can see where most of my high school teachers challenged me in one way or another. The point wasn’t to inure me to success or failure but to force me to better myself. Grades weren’t superfluous but the goal was to point me to my own process of discovery.

I may romanticize a bit about my schooling but I know that no matter how much I hated some of it, I have never lost my thirst for learning new things. If that is the least that an education should accomplish - and given my grades that, would seem to be the absolute least - then my schooling should be judged a success in anyone’s eyes.

Can the same be said today? Is this still part of the philosophy of education? Or is it more important to teach kids not to hate another because of their skin color, or sensitize students to bullying, sexual harassment, and other societal ills? Does class time spent on these subjects come at the expense of more important subjects that will affect the future of the student as much or moreso than wringing out their prejudices and bigotries?

Surely those are worthy subjects to pursue, although I question whether much good is accomplished in their teaching. For every kid that graduates more tolerant a human being than they went in, I would like to see another who is embarking on a lifelong quest for knowledge.

That’s a fair trade in my book.