Wednesday, June 11, 2008

THE BARBARIAN MOB SEEMS TO BE WORKING TWO JOBS

I would have thought the yowling rabble would have their hands full tearing off Hillary Clinton's clothes and flogging her with a rawhide whip (see the post by one of Larry Johnson's co-bloggers that I wrote about yesterday), but apparently the savages are simply tireless in their brutality. Via Ta-Nehisi Coates and John Cole, there's this, from Mary Grabar of TownHall:

An Obama presidency would signal the final salvo by the Left in the culture wars. Obama's advance troops have already taken over our college campuses, have bound and gagged our conservative professors, have ravished our virgins, have pillaged our stores of wisdom, and have ensconced themselves in the thrones of power in deans', presidents' and department heads' offices....

Flogged matriarchs ... ravished virgins ... this is what shows up in certain fantasy lives just after we settle on a nominee who's a black guy. Interesting.

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On a somewhat less fevered note, Grabar says this:

... Claes G. Ryn, in the Fall 2007 50th anniversary issue of Modern Age, accurately attributes the decline of intellectual conservatism to an abandonment of tradition, philosophical foundations, and artistic expressions, for a focus on political pragmatism, manifested in a fondness for economics and business....

Even for the well-being of the business world we need to refocus on the humanities. As [Claes G.] Ryn points out, the "honesty, good manners, and social responsibility" of Western businessmen is formed by "an ancient civilization." But the increasingly popular business school major offers little in terms of appreciation for the hallmarks of our Western civilization....


A right-winger telling us business school is bad? Yup, and this was posted just before David Brooks of The New York Times gave us this:

The people who created this country built a moral structure around money. The Puritan legacy inhibited luxury and self-indulgence. Benjamin Franklin spread a practical gospel that emphasized hard work, temperance and frugality. Millions of parents, preachers, newspaper editors and teachers expounded the message....

Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded.... the most rampant decadence today is financial decadence, the trampling of decent norms about how to use and harness money....


Brooks went on to chastise, among others, Wall Street, credit card companies, and payday lenders.

What's going on here? Did right-wingers decide to throw businesspeople, their long-time heroes, under the bus, just as it became clear that businesspeople are screwing up? What's more, are the problems with business our fault -- us decadent liberals, with our postmodernism and contempt for traditional morality and values? Is that it -- if you screw up, automatically you're a decadent pomo liberal? Even if you're JPMorgan Chase, fer crissake?

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