Monday, November 1, 2010

In Passing

 I watched a panel discussion on the Tea Party on BookTV yesterday.  The two conservatives on the panel were former Congressman Dick Armey and media personality Tucker Carlson, both of them libertarians.  They both seem to me to be honest people, with integrity that others lack.  I like them both.  They both defended the essential integrity of the Tea Party movement from charges of racism or manipulation by the wealthy.

The Purpose of Dissent, Even When Wrong.  "By remaining on the margins of American discourse, outside the compacency and triumphalism of the dominant prowar consensus, Macdonald enjoyed a critical detachment not widely shared among his peers.  That distance permitted him to be the kind of 'irreconcilable' presence Randolph Bourne represented a generation earlier, a voice skeptical of official slogans, sensitive to the human costs of the conflict, alert to shifts in 'moral temper,' and general free to explore questions invisible to mainstream observers."  --Gregory Sumner, on the WWII radical journal politics and founder Dwight MacDonald. 

It seems that this could apply as well to comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, whose "Rally For Sanity" over the weekend on the Washington Mall was magnificent in its call for social sanity, tolerance, reasonableness, and peace.

The '60 Minutes' segments last night with David Stockman, calling for tax hikes on the wealthy and admitting the fundamental illusion of the economy of the last 30 years, and with Bill Gates Sr., calling for tax hikes on the wealthy in the state of Washington, were pretty amazing.

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