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Opinion
Reece Terry, publisher
Mark Boehler, editor
4A • Friday, January 6, 2012
Corinth, Miss.
Other Views
New legislation: Doing job for which they were elected In a few short days new and veteran lawmakers of the Great State of Mississippi will head to the Capitol with a new governor, lieutenant governor and, most obviously, a different political party in the majority. Big changes? Probably not. The governorelect, Phil Bryant, cut his political teeth on the political coattails of the outgoing, strong, aggressive Gov. Haley Barbour. The lieutenant governor-elect has been in Jackson and state government for most of his career. Neither is expected to change dramatically his style just because he has a new title. The greatest potential for change is in the lawmaking body. For the first time in more than 100 years, the majority of the 122 members of the House of Representatives will be registered with the Republican Party instead of the Democratic Party. We say party-shmarty. We say the job of legislating is about doing the right thing, be it for the voters, their children or their children’s children and being as responsible as possible to carry out the wishes of the constituencies. The last Legislature — the 122 representatives and the 52 members of the upper body, the Senate — could not make a decision on redrawing the state’s legislative lines that determine the makeup of the bodies. That failure to act has been and will be costly. It’s costing money to prepare information for potential litigation, it’s costing money for elections that probably will be scheduled next year to pick lawmakers for the new districts — had the lines been drawn earlier, the voting along the new lines could have come in the just-completed election season — and, most importantly, it is costing faith Mississippians could have had in the legislators. Had they acted with the efficiency and timeliness expected by voters, the party-affiliation makeup might not have been so different from the last Legislature’s. Lawmakers, there’s your sign. Get in there, cut through the layers of politics, refuse to be swayed by your own wishes. Do the job for which you were elected. Draw the lines, and then get on with taking care of this great state of Mississippi. — The Vicksburg Post
Prayer for today Dear God our helper, remind us every day of the power of your love. thank you that you love us so much that you gave your son, Jesus, for us. Your love gives us strength to continue despite all life’s sufferings, failures and pains. Open our spiritual eyes to see the gifts of your grace. Amen.
A verse to share Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” — John 8:12 (NIV)
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Reece Terry publisher rterry@dailycorinthian.com
Innocent or interfering in nations’ affairs? Last Friday’s lead stories in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal dealt with what both viewed as a national affront and outrage. Egyptian soldiers, said the Post, “stormed the offices” of three U.S. “democracy-building organizations ... in a dramatic escalation of a crackdown by the military-led government that could imperil its relations with the United States.” The organizations: Freedom House, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute. Cairo contends that $65 million in “pro-democracy” funding that IRI, NDI and Freedom House received for use in Egypt constitutes “illegal foreign funding” to influence their elections. “A Provocation in Egypt,” raged the Post. An incensed Freedom House President David Kramer said the raids reveal that Egypt’s military “has no intention of allowing the establishment of genuine democracy.” Leon Panetta phoned the head of the military regime. With $1.3 billion in U.S. military aid on the line, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi backed down. The raids will stop. Yet this is not the first time U.S. “pro-democracy” groups have been charged with subverting regimes
that fail to toe the Washington line. In December, Vladimir Putin Pat claimed that Buchanan h u n d r e d s of millions Columnist of dollars, mostly from U.S. sources, was funneled into his country to influence the recent election, and that Hillary Clinton’s denunciation of the results was a signal for anti-Putin demonstrators to take to Moscow’s streets. In December also, a top Chinese official charged U.S. Consul General Stephen Young in Hong Kong with trying to spread disorder. Beijing, added the Post, has been “jittery following this year’s Arab Spring and calls on the Internet for the Chinese to follow suit with a ‘jasmine revolution.’” The Jasmine Revolution was the uprising that forced Tunisia’s dictator to flee at the outset of the Arab Spring. Yet one need not be an acolyte of the Egyptian, Chinese or Russian regimes to wonder if, perhaps, based on history, they do not have a point. Does the United States interfere in the internal affairs of nations to subvert regimes by using NGOs to funnel cash to the opposi-
tion to foment uprisings or affect elections? Are we using Cold War methods on countries with which we are not at war -- to advance our New World Order? So it would seem. For, repeatedly, Freedom House, IRI and NDI have been identified as instigators of color-coded revolutions to replace autocrats with proAmerican “democrats.” Ukraine’s Orange Revolution was marked by mass demonstrations in Kiev to overturn the election of a pro-Russian leader and bring about his replacement by a pro-Western politician who sought to move his country into NATO. The Orange Revolution first succeeded, but then failed. A U.S.-engineered Rose Revolution in 2002 overthrew President Eduard Shevardnadze of Georgia and brought about his replacement by Mikheil Saakashvili, who then invaded South Ossetia, to be expelled by the Russian Army. Following the assassination of ex-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, a Cedar Revolution, featuring massive demonstrations in Beirut against Syria, effected the withdrawal of its occupation army from Lebanon. In Belarus, however, marches on parliament failed to overturn an election that returned Alexander Lukashenko to power.
The Tulip Revolution brought about the overthrow of President Askar Akayev in Kyrgyzstan. But that, too, did not turn out as well as we hoped. When one considers the long record of U.S. intervention in nations far from our borders, that an ex-chairman of Freedom House is the former CIA Director James Woolsey, that the longtime chairman of IRI is the compulsive interventionist John McCain, who has been trading insults with Putin, and that Kenneth Wollack, president of NDI, was once director of legislative affairs for the Israeli lobby AIPAC, it is hard to believe we are clean as a hound’s tooth of the charges being leveled against us, no matter how suspect the source. And if we are intervening in Egypt to bring about the defeat of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis, and the Islamists win as they are winning today, what do we expect the blowback to be? Would we want foreigners funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into our election of 2012? How would Andrew Jackson have reacted if he caught British agents doing here what we do all over the world? (Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”)
‘Stupid is the new smart’ in America A friend of mine hands me what looks like a business card. It says, “Don’t Die Stupid.” As America begins another round of voting to select the next president, or retain the current one, what we need is a stupid test. Flunk it and you shouldn’t vote. Evidence of the dumbingdown of America is everywhere. Some of it is chronicled in a new book, “Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America” by Daniel J. Flynn. Flynn contends popular culture has divorced itself from the life of the mind. He has plenty of examples in case television, texting, video games and improper use of English (“she was like and then I was like”) are not enough. Flynn calls the digital age “Idiotville,” because it has made us less intelligent. “Stupid is the new smart,” writes Flynn. He says we arrived at this lower level of brain activity because as recently as the last century “the everyman aspired to high culture and ... intellectuals
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descended from the ivory tower to speak to the everyman.” Today, he says, “Those Cal who pursue Thomas the life of the mind have Columnist insulated themselves from popular culture. Speaking in insider jargon and writing unread books, intellectuals have locked themselves away in a ghetto of their own creation.” That has left the nonintellectual class to fend for itself. One library in Portland, Me., rather than leading, is being led by the unformed teenage mind. “Video gaming is just a new form of literacy,” says the “teen librarian.” Flynn quotes from Steven Johnson’s book, “Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter.” Sure, and sugar makes us slimmer. Johnson says, “Reality shows ... challenge our
emotional intelligence.” Emotional intelligence? In an age when feelings trump everything and too many reality TV programs feature well-heeled housewives and love-starved bachelors, “emotional intelligence” is a contradiction. Here’s a potent example of what Flynn means when he writes about the destruction of our minds: “At the tony Cushing Academy in western Massachusetts, $40,000 in tuition doesn’t even get you a library anymore. ‘When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’ the prep school’s headmaster notes, adding, ‘This isn’t ‘Fahrenheit 451.’” “It is, and ‘1984,’ too,” comments Flynn. “In place of the twenty thousand discarded books, the school spent $500,000 on an Orwellian ‘learning center’ complete with three giant flat-screen televisions and a cappuccino machine. School officials guessed that only a few dozen books had been checked out at any one time.” The solution? Get rid of
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the books. Don’t get kids interested in books when they’d rather play “World of Warcraft,” or if younger, watch cartoons, which can’t be that different from “The Canterbury Tales,” right? Our intellectual depth increasingly resembles floor wax; shiny on top, but lacking depth. A muscle atrophies if it is not used. Similarly, a mind becomes lazy if it is not well fed. And a weak mind dumbs-down our politics. We elect people we come to dislike because too many of us require no more of them than we require of ourselves. In Iowa this week, followed by New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida, Republican voters began the process of selecting a presidential nominee. It’s not that sufficient information about the problems confronting us are not available. It’s just that we’re not reading much about them. Like, ya know, man, that’s just the way it is. Like, ya know what I’m sayin’? (Readers may e-mail Cal Thomas at tmseditors@tribune.com.)
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