Professor Kesler on The 2008 Election

Professor Charles R. Kesler, head of the Salvatori Center and The Claremont Review of Books, wrote a piece for Real Clear Politics. (Hat tip: David Dreshfield)

Kesler highlights the contrasts between conservatives and liberals, presumably in preparation for the talk Bill Kristol's giving at the Ath. (Remember, Kristol has connections with the Salvatori Center.) Liberals, Kesler says, have gotten so enamored with change that they have ignored substance.

Modern liberals, in other words, like to obscure the difference between change and improvement. Marketing executives like to instill the same confusion when they trumpet new needs and products. A change can be for better or worse. If you keep that in mind, you will be disposed to weigh proposed changes, to deliberate about their advantages and disadvantages. That will eventually make you a conservative, not in the prevailing political sense necessarily, but in the prudential sense of someone who wishes to preserve the goodness of existing arrangements against the changes (or so-called improvements) that actually make things worse, and sometimes even against real improvements whose attendant costs are too high.

People from the Left believe that the desire for change is so behind them that they will be arrogant and ultimately overplay their hand much the same way they overplayed the 2006 mid-term elections. Do Americans want change? Absolutely. But Americans only want certain things to change and most of that change, contrary to the wishes of our Democrat friends, will be provided with Bush's departure.

Coulter Speaks At USC, Claremont Republicans Were In The Audience

I went to see Ann H. Coulter with my fellow Claremont Republicans in observance of Islamo-Fascism Awareness week.

Here she is giving a response to one of the audience members. (It's difficult to make it out on the main photo, but Claremont students are sitting in the fourth rows.) The picture here is of David Daleiden. Yours truly took it.

Would you believe she even answered one of my questions? She answered that hate crime legislation is really thought crime legislation and liberals use them not to address real crimes, but to politicize the legal system.

Of course, my question pails in comparison to Jaron Abelsohn's: Who would win in a fight between Coulter and Michael Moore? Coulter's reponse: "Let's just say I'm quick." Here's Jaron, the quasi-libertarian/liberal, getting his shirt with the caption, Narrow Mind, Open Heart signed.

Claremont Independent Publishes

Over at The Claremont Independent, I have a write up of the racial retreats. The focus of the article was using the words of the students themselves who experienced these racial groups. The money quotation:

At its heart, these retreats try to break down class unity. "These retreats make you feel worthless," said one international student. "You feel as if you've picked CMC, that it's a good fit for you and suddenly, you're told by your fellow classmates that there's no such thing as a good fit because 'they' - who the hell they is I do not know - are racists out to get you. Now this view is at odds with my experience. I don't know anyone anywhere who has felt any racial tension. Not from teachers, not from students, not from the administration. In fact, the only real racial tension I feel is when these groups tell me that the 'white people' are out to get me. This is just not true."

David Daleiden, head of Life Chain, a pro-life group I've joined, writes eloquently about the campaign of sexual misinformation.

In fact, the questions posed to freshmen regarding sexual diversity were rivaled in number only by those concerning mental health. Apparently, orientation planners felt that the class of 2011 could better bond with each other by sharing their experiences with depression, suicidal ideation, and alcoholism. Granted, bearing one another's burdens is wonderful, but attempting to turn freshman orientation into a 12-step program seems a little excessive.

Look in the coming days for my write up of the flaws with Bono.