Scott Coomes
Pages upon pages of John Galt self-righteously sneering at all the ‘looters’ (socialists, vegetarians, Christians, liberals, Buddhists, academics, environmentalists, Mexicans, etc.) seem not only like a pathetic attempt to overwhelm a reader who would be impressed by the volume of pages, but also like the product of a small mind. John Galt’s cheery speech was more than my well meaning young-Republican-lite ideology could take. Rand helpfully packaged this ideology in weapons-grade concentration and laid it all out for easy scrutiny and swift rejection.
Kevin Hilke
“The challenge for all of us,” as Obama said yesterday, “is to identify good ideas.” And so Vandiver’s demand, the demand to roundly understand, must become our own. Having something shown to you in the Missourian sense is a process not of credulous reception but of active and incessant evaluation. For the product of the pragmatic Missourian’s deep skepticism, his demand to know not only the what but also the why of the what, is precisely the elimination of unworkable ideas in favor of workable ones. His search for proof is a continual querying and reconfirming of both the proof itself and the integrity of the criteria from which the proof derives meaning and legitimacy. We must help Obama find or create his whys and whats, and to articulate useful, socially productive, and popularly understandable relationships among them. Being shown is not a passive process. Proof, telling or irrelevant, genuine or counterfeit, is not found but made, and our new president has only two hands.
Darren Franich
In a world in which the president was talking about defending the institution of marriage from activist judges—which is kind of like defending the institution of spelunking from firefly ninjas; or defending the institution of friendship from Hitler—this was like the voice of a loving relative talking you out of a coma nightmare, reminding you that there was a real world where Republicans stood for things and Democrats stood for things and they could argue about those things until the end of time, but that all of those things had a basic ring of truth. McCain wasn’t the Republican who Democrats could love; he was the Politician who Sane People could love, cutting through the endless bounds of bullshit and trying to just, well, talk to people. That was straight talk, and no bullshit. Now, he’s all bullshit, all the time.
Kevin Hilke
A President Huckabee, despite espousing wrongheaded “family values” proposals similar to those of George W. Bush, could find himself with a cultural legacy diametrically opposed to that of our current president. Such a legacy would be inadvertent, that of a president who made our a more pluralistic and empathetic society by revealing to the religious right and the secular left, entirely by accident, that their core beliefs are versions of one another, that they are and always have been animated by a shared injunction to humanitarian charity that finds roots in the classical and the Christian alike.
