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Reece Terry, publisher
Opinion
Mark Boehler, editor
4 • Saturday, August 24, 2013
Corinth, Miss.
Letter to the editor Who asked him anyway? To the editor, In July, the House passed a version of the Farm Bill that included an extremely hazardous amendment, introduced by Iowa Republican Steve King, that is a major threat to states rights, animal welfare, environmental protections and food safety. This amendment would repeal already passed state laws from protecting puppies in puppy mills, to preventing horses from being slaughtered inhumanely, and would legalize previously banned animal agriculture practices such as tail-docking, putting arsenic in chicken feed and keeping impregnated pigs in small crates. “My language wipes out everything they’ve done with pork and veal,” King said of his amendment. Personally, I don’t really care how badly Rep. King misrepresents his own state, but I certainly don’t want him dabbling with Mississippi’s sovereign rights to pass and enact our own statutes and laws. Just who does this jumped up Yankee boy think he is? Last time I checked, not a single Mississippi state legislator felt the need to consult with him regarding anything, given he was one of 11 in Congress to vote against the Hurricane Katrina Aid package, which our state, and others devastated by the storm, so desperately needed. Thankfully, the Senate does not include this unsafe language yet, so there is still time to remove the amendment from the final version of the Farm Bill. The conference committee will decide the future of the bill and Sen. Thad Cochran will be on that committee. I am strongly urging him to do everything in his power to strike this amendment out of the final version and protect these important state laws from being repealed. Regardless of where we stand on the political spectrum, there is something in Rep. King’s ill-conceived amendment for each of us to be against and want to see omitted from a bill as important and necessary as this one. Please join me by calling Sen. Cochran at 202-224-5054 and urging him to send this Carpetbagger and his exasperatingly obtuse amendment, packing. LuAnne Parrish Corinth
Prayer for today We pray, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” Amen.
A verse to share “The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound;” — Isaiah 61:1
A verse to share Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. — Albert Einstein
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Ted Cruz, a traitor to his class Henry Adams said that politics is the systematic organization of hatreds. For the left in the past year, it has seemed at times to be the systematic organization of hatred of Ted Cruz. The freshman senator is not the first Texan to be so honored. In fact, the state isn’t holding up its end if, at any given moment, it isn’t throwing onto the national scene at least one Republican reviled by the other side. The party’s highest-profile Texans, George W. Bush and Rick Perry, tended to match inarticulateness with cowboy swagger and lend themselves to mockery as intellectual lightweights. Bush went to Yale and Harvard Business School, yet no one naturally thinks of him as an Ivy Leaguer. The two Lone Star State governors played into the left’s stereotypes so nicely that if they didn’t exist, the New York Times editorial board would have had to invent them. Cruz is different -- a Princeton and Harvard man who not only matriculated at those fine institutions but excelled at them. Champion debater at Princeton. Magna cum laude graduate at Harvard. Supreme Court clerkship, on the way to
Texas solicitor general and dozens of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Rich Cruz is Lowery from the intellectual National elite, but Review not of it, a tea-party conservative whose politics are considered gauche at best at the storied universities where he studied. He is, to borrow the words of the 2008 H.W. Brands biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a traitor to his class. Democrats and liberal pundits would surely dislike Cruz no matter where he went to school, but his pedigree adds an element of shocked disbelief to the disdain. “Princeton and Harvard should be disgraced,” former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell exclaimed on MSNBC, as if graduating a constitutionalist conservative who rises to national prominence is a violation of the schools’ mission statements. It almost is. Princeton and Harvard aren’t quite the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, the French school that trains
that country’s political class, but they are close. In a Washington Post column a year ago, Dana Milbank noted Cruz’s schooling and concluded that his tea-party politics must be a put-on, that he is, underneath it all, an “intellectually curious, liberal-arts conservative.” Note the insulting assumption that an interest in books and ideas immunizes someone from a certain kind of conservative politics. One of the left’s deepest prejudices is that its opponents are stupid, and Cruz tramples on it. At hearings, Cruz has the prosecutorial instincts of a ... Harvardtrained lawyer. Watching Attorney General Eric Holder try to fend off Cruz’s questioning on the administration’s drone policy a few months ago was like seeing a mouse cornered by a very large cat. Cruz hasn’t played by the Senate rules that freshmen should initially be seen and not heard. In fact, he joined the upper chamber with all the subtlety of a SWAT team knocking down a drug suspect’s front door. For people who care about such things -- almost all of them are senators -this is an unforgivable offense.
At another hearing, as Cruz says that the highest commitment of senators should be to the Constitution, another senator can be heard muttering that he doesn’t like being lectured. Chairman Pat Leahy (probably the mutterer) eventually cuts him off and informs him he hasn’t been in the Senate very long. Cruz lacks all defensiveness about his positions, another source of annoyance to his opponents, who are used to donning the mantle of both intellectual and moral superiority. None of this is to endorse all of Cruz’s tactical judgments or to deny he can irk his own side at times. His push to defund Obamacare this fall is a grass-rootspleasing slogan in search of a realistic path to legislative fruition. It is no secret that Cruz has presidential aspirations. Even if he ascends no higher, though, he will be a force in the Senate. He could spend decades making liberals recoil at what Princeton and Harvard hath wrought. (Daily Corinthian columnist and editor of the National Review, Rich Lowry can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com.)
When ordinary days still had magic One of the highlights of my summer experience was the 50th reunion of my graduating class from St. Brigid elementary school on Long Island. Back in 1963, 60 children sat in a small classroom hoping for big things in the future. We had spent eight years together, but now high school beckoned, and all of our lives would change dramatically. Back then, America was a far different place than it is today. John F. Kennedy was president but had fewer than six months to live. The Beatles were just emerging. Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” was scaring everybody in the movie theaters. “The Andy Griffith Show” dominated on TV. There was no war, but civil unrest in the South was intense. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was making great strides in securing human rights for black Americans. Twenty-two of my classmates made the reunion, and it was good to see all of
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them. Their lives have unfolded in mostly conventional ways. Most remain in Bill the middle O’Reilly class and still believe The O’Reilly in the funFactor damental goodness of their country and religion, although some are no longer practicing Catholics. The reunion deal is the same all over. Folks who don’t succeed in life often don’t show up. The happy people usually come armed with pictures of their children and grandchildren. My reunion was very family focused. Many of my classmates have led interesting lives, but unfortunately, I was the center of much attention. My visibility on television engendered much discussion, and I was happy to answer their questions. Since
I was always a loudmouth, my classmates delighted in reminding me that I haven’t changed a bit and pointed out that only in America could I be well paid for doing something that got me a slap from Sister Thomas way back when. The thing that is so different today is that children have little time to be innocent. We only had each other at St. Brigid. There were no cellphones, computers or video games. There was no Facebook. In fact, outside intrusions were rare. We played games like dodgeball and keep away. We attended square dances and Christmas concerts. It was all so basic, so simple. And there was a magic to it. Today, children are thrust into an adult world at warp speed. I remember a kid named Billy McDermott explaining to me and the other 8th-graders that his older brother knew some girls who were “easy.” Easy? We were all confused. And
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so was Billy as he struggled to define the term. Today, many 8th-graders are thinking about tattoos and drugs. We all know how graphic the Internet is, and believe me, kids know how to access this stuff. So I ask you: Wasn’t it better to be a kid in 1963? By the way, the answer is yes. I feel sorry for the urchins these days. Responsible parents can mitigate some of the cultural damage but not all. We are living in fast times, in an era of selfishness and narcissism in which lowbrow entertainment envelops children like the chilly fog of San Francisco. Good memories are forever. I had them back in 1963. (Daily Corinthian columnist and veteran TV news anchor Bill O’Reilly is host of the Fox News show “The O’Reilly Factor” and author of the book “Pinheads and Patriots: Where You Stand in the Age of Obama.”)
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