What Ron Paul should have said is that Mitt Romney never meant to reveal his indifference to the suffering of other people.  I am sure this is true, and if we look closer at his language, we can see exactly what he meant to say.  "Concern" is an ambiguous, if not a dodgy word.  Its primary meaning meaning  is something like "be related to to, involved in."  As in "this book concerns the Franco-Prussian War."  A derived meaning is to care about.  All Romney meant to say was that in thinking about economic policies, he was not primarily addressing himself to welfare dependents who were taken care of by the government but to working class and middle class people who were slipping between the cracks, that is, to the class of people who have been badly hurt by the Bush and Obama administrations and their policies.

The fact that a scoundrel like Newt Gingrich could make hay out of this in the press tells us more, perhaps, than we need to know, both about Gingrich himself and about the literacy of the press.  It also tells us something about Romney who, even in defense of his career and his ego, could not come up with a coherent explanation of his harmless gaffe.

December 23, 2011.  Thousands of Sunni Muslims in Samarra, Ramadi, Baiji, and Qaim have taken to the streets.  Many of them carry signs and banners protesting the Shi'ah-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki and expressing support for threatened Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi.

Day Five

December 22, 2011.   Dozens of people were killed as bombs exploded in several Baghdad neighborhoods.  While some of the attacks had the earmarks of Sunni militants linked with al-Quaeda, others were aimed at Sunni and mixed neighborhoods.  Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki blamed the attacks on his political rivals, while Sunni leaders claimed that the bombs were part of a organized campaign to plunge Iraq back into the bad old days of violence, before the Americans had brought peace and stability to Iraq.

Day Three

December 20, 2011.  US officials expressed concern that all the billions of dollars spent on building up Iraqi security, the judicial system, and the media are now being used to stage political show trials that will exacerbate sectarian tensions.

Day Two:

December 19, 2011. The Shi'ite dominated government of  PM Nouri al-Maliki issues warrant for the arrest of Sunni  Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi.  the al-Maliki government made the arrest order a prime time television special. The warrant cannot be executed because  the  vice president was in Kurdistan, which the Baghdad government does not control.

Day One:

December 18, 2011.   Last US troops leave Iraq.

Watch this space

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Read on in my blog on RightMinds at The Daily Mail.

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The big noise is, again, President Obama's job's plan that will require a tax on the rich, the so-called "Buffet Plan."  Now, I'd be ticked pink if all the Warren Buffets of America could be taxed out of their dirty business.  What has Mr. Buffet ever manufactured, what has he ever done worth doing?   He is a money-manipulator like George Soros, the sort of person  our ancestors despised.  Take all their money, I say, and leave real businessmen--who make, distribute, and sell things--alone.

That would not get us very far, as Rush Limbaugh has been saying.  Successful people in general pay far more than their share of the taxes, and squeezing the porno-kings, Ponzi-schemers, and Warren Buffets who pay too little will not put us into the black.  Mr. Limbaugh thinks we should tax the Democrats, but that is both short-sighted and unimaginative.  If we started taxing Democrats, we'd quickly run out of them, and then who would be left for the Republicans to blame?

Rush is right about the basic point though, and this is a subject I have been meditating on for years.  Justice demands that the guilty, not the innocent pay, and the guilty parties to the national debt are the congressmen and officials of both parties who took bribes and pandered to the lobbyists and ward heelers.  When elected legislators and bureaucrats go into debt, it is their fault as much as it is the fault of the board of directors and managers of a business.  Let the responsible parties be held accountable.  If every member of Congress and White House flunkey who got us into this mess were held responsible, we'd have about 500 people to pay back the trillions of debt they--not we--owe.

Oh, yes, they'd whine, but they were happy enough to take credit for passing all these boondoggles.  Now it is their turn to pay.  But that is just a one-time deal.  What we need is a system by which all elected officials are held responsible for the debts they run up.  Naturally, we would then require them to put down a deposit, of some hundreds of thousands for local  offices and some tens of millions for a state-wide office, some billions for the Presidency.  Of course, if they went over the limit we had established, they would have to pay that, too, and no bankruptcy relief for politicians, nosiree!

"But then the only people who would  get elected to high offices  would be the rich and their flunkeys!"  As if that were not the case now.  Under my plan, at least they would have to buy their licenses to steal, and it would be fun watching them squirm.  We should also have to make one minor adjustment in our system of jurisprudence.  Politicians being politicians, the presumption would be guilt, and the dirty politicos would have to prove their innocence.  Ron Paul and a few others would go Scot free; the rest would go where they belong.

Imagine Mitch McConnell joining Harry Reid, doing life at hard labor.

I turned 91 in prison

Doing life without parole.

"No one could steer me right,"

Obama cried, Obama cried,

"Ron Paul tried to learn me better,

But his pleading I denied.

And now I'm breaking rocks

Because I lied"

In the aftermath of the greatest loss of American life in a single attack since Pearl Harbor—and probably ever—our first thoughts must be for the victims of an attack that was neither cowardly nor senseless (as it is already being called), but a well-coordinated demonstration of American vulnerability. This is a time for prayer, not analysis. Unfortunately, even the chief executive of the United States—a professing Christian—could not find the courage to pray in front of the cameras. Faced with the evidence of a probable Islamic suicide attack carried out by men—perhaps Muslims—willing to die for their beliefs, the President could only ask for a moment of silence, a prayer to nothing. Score one for the terrorists.

The terrorists also defeated the Bush advisors who deflected his return flight and sent him into hiding. Of course the President's life is potentially threatened; but thousands of lives were lost in New York and Washington, while the CIA was asleep at the switch. This is the same CIA, remember, who helped to install the current Islamic terrorist regime in Afghanistan—the regime that ironically said, echoing Bill Clinton, that they "feel America’s pain," and which has given asylum to Osama bin Laden, who, although he is denying responsibility, has threatened such an attack repeatedly.

It would be wrong to blame President Bush for a decision clearly made by his top advisors, but he needs to be in the nation's capital, bravely defying the threats to our security.  If he cannot go home, how can anyone feel secure in his home or office? A large part of the President’s responsibility is public relations, and this administration is so far flubbing its greatest challenge. As I write, the President has "disappeared down the rabbit hole" in hiding, according to ABC News reporter Ann Compton.

If Islamic extremists turn out to be behind these attacks, will anyone in Washington wake up to the danger they have created by humiliating Muslims in the Middle East and, simultaneously, giving them easy access to the United States, where they are building their mosques and agitating against any public expression of Christian faith? Such a response is unlikely.

What will our government do in the weeks to come? The decision to close the border is too little too late—closing the barn door once the horse thieves have got in. It is important to keep in mind that in America, every disaster will be used as a pretext for more stupid government programs. Despite the obvious fact that this kind of terrorist attack, which we have been predicting, could not have been stopped by the President's missile defense program, the Republicans will certainly claim that American security interests demand immediate funding. Predictably, Democratic leftists will blame the openness of our society and call for more stringent controls on guns and travel. This attack should cinch the argument for national identity cards and strengthen the hand of those who don't think we have enough police check points. The already depressed stock markets may turn suicidal, the price of oil will soar; Arafat's little rebellion has run out of steam, and President Bush will be blamed for not supporting Ariel Sharon with sufficient zeal.

Meanwhile, John McCain and Al Haig are calling for a declaration of war, only they won't say against whom; but a permanent state of war, as Chronicles' Executive Editor Scott P. Richert points out, is exactly what would suit the Washington hawks who pine for the good old days of the Cold War.

I do not claim to have been paying very close attention, but the lack of  stories is the Ron Paul Story.  Today, on the way back from lunch, I tuned in for a minute to Rush Limbaugh.  Unfortunately, it was one of those days when Rush is off.  It's is clear to anyone how he choses his replacements--they have to make him look good, make the audience long for Rush's return.  Listening to Mark Steyn repeat himself, babbling on in search of an object for his verb, is excruciating,  Mark Belling, today's replacement, is even worse: he has a voice for print.  An annoyed listener had called in to complain about the lack of attention to Dr. Paul.  Belling, who poses as a populist type, told him the truth, as he saw it.  Ron cannot win, therefore it is pointless to pay attention to any polling numbers until he can consistently get numbers of 17-25%.

Get it?  Commentators do not report on or analyze actual events.  They decide in advance what is significant, because they know, dear listeners and readers, what is important, who can win and who cannot.  I feel sure it has penetrated into the cheese curds that fill the head of Milwaukee's toast of talk radio that these are self-fulfilling prophecies.  If even "conservatives" will not talk about Ron Paul, then we can scarcely take him seriously, can we?  Certainly not seriously enough to turn off the TV and go out and vote for him in a primary.

The exception that proves the rule is the most honest and intelligent news anchor in television, Jon Stewart.  Yes, Mr. Stewart is on the left, and yes he typically ridicules conservatives, but he does take a lively interest in the zaniness of the American scene.  Occasionally he even deviates into rectitude.  Recently he derided the big networks for openly refusing to talk about Ron Paul.  He hit the nail on the head, when he pointed out that all Dr. Paul has going for him is that he believes what he says and has been repeating a consistent message for decades: limited government, low taxes, dismantle the fed, bring the troops home, legalize marijuana, give up our imperialist  dreams, and restore the republic.  Is it wrong to dream?

I like Ron Paul.  He is not my dream candidate, and I do not believe he has much of a chance of winning.  But that is not why he is being ignored.  He is being ignored because unlike every other candidate of either party in the field, he is issuing  a fundamental challenge to the regime.  Rick Perry, for all his insincere secession and God talk, is the lackey of the regime who led the Al Gore campaign in Texas.  Michelle Bachman does not simply look like the deer in the headlights: she Is the deer in the headlights.  And if anyone is  going to oppose the establishment, it won't be a wealthy member of the Romney clan.

Talking endlessly about Michelle and Mitt, commentators never have to face the realities of American life, never have to consider the tissue of lies on which the regime is founded.  Ron Paul probably cannot win, but he can make the voters begin to think or least to wonder if it is possible to confront the truth and give up the fantasies of equality that underly the American ideology, the self-evident lies both parties tell in order to maintain their power-shared control of 300 million people.

Ron Paul cannot be forgiven for speaking truth to power.  The conservatives and liberals don't take him seriously, not because he gives silly speeches--which he does--or looks funny--which he does or takes politically unwise positions--which he does.  No, they love all that, because they can use it against him.  What they hate about Ron Paul is that he believes what he says, and that, my dear readers, listeners, and sports fans everywhere, is not playing by the rules.

La Rochefoucauld's caustic observation on the false simplicity of young people who mistake crudeness for nature tells us that the cult of the primitive antedates both Rousseau and the Romantic writers who wrought so much mischief.

Society and civilization, say these nature-lovers, are artificial, and only savages in a state of nature are real and authentic.  To discover this reality, one has to find an old knife-grinder with wisdom to impart or go live in the woods, as Henry David Thoreau actually did not:  Thoreau built his cabin on the village pond and made the short walk home to eat his mother's supper any time he liked.  Better still, one could follow Gauguin to the South Seas, but, again, Gaugin found the life miserable and invented a myth about his experiences that helped him sell his paintings.

We have all known the type, and many of us have been the type: the hippie, the beat, the bohemian, the footloose vagabond going down that long and lonesome road who leaves his sleeping bag rolled up behind her couch, who dares to break the commandments made for lesser men, the free and easy guy or gal who stays until it is time for you to go, the true American individual, Captain America and Billy who make the big score in order to live free.  Yes, I have at one time or other known all these types and as a dumb teenager pretended to be one and might have been, if it hadn't meant wearing really stupid clothes and hanging out with the high school Harries who switched from beer and sit coms to smoke dope and read Hermann Hesse.  Some of the girls were amazingly cute, until they opened their mouths and recited their bubblegum philosophy of life. "You know, man, like we're free, etc. etc."  Even the SDSers were less boring, though, God knows, they were boring enough.

Naturalism is an affectation, and it is an act, in which success does not come easily or cheaply.  French courtiers got it right, when they dressed up as shepherds and enjoyed an afternoon's frolic in the gardens of Versailles.  "Man's nature is artifice," as an obscure scribbler observed not too long ago, and nothing is more phony--or more costly-- than the affectation of naturalness.  Chesterton once conceded that he would have loved to lead the simple life but he just couldn't afford it.  Only the very rich have enough money to pretend to go native.

Real primitives are generally ugly and dirty, and, unlike courtiers, students, and other animals in captivity, they do not have time and energy for endless fornications.  To go native is not to live like primitive natives, who have to spend a good deal of their time and wits finding subsistence.  No, in going native, one actually has to turn feral, like a junkyard dog.  The ambition of the natural man is to unlock the beast that has been enchained by morality, manners, and custom.  Alcohol, drugs, sex, extreme sports—they all have their uses in stupefying any finer impulses we might retain.  This was understood by one of the deepest writers of the 19th century:

Enivrez-vous sans cesse!
De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise.

Only when drunk (or drugged) can we be deaf to reason and decency, only when drunk are we free to be "natural," not natural as an Apache, but natural as an intelligent man with a brain injury that makes him fit only for playing with children. This is what Dr. Henry Jekyll understood.  Dr. Jekyll had two natures, one mild and charitable, the other filled with enthusiasm for the seamier side of life.  He was, he assures us, not worse than other men who like to blow off steam occasionally by drinking spirits and bedding women, but his moral side was always repenting for the follies of his wild side.  As a scientist, he hit upon the brilliant scheme of dividing his two selves:

"If each, I told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil."

When Dr. Jekyll did succeed in liberating the beast, Mr. Hyde did not turn out to resemble a Nordic god but something more like a Randian or Rand herself: short, dark, and ugly, a leering goblin too stupid, really, even to savor the evil he did.  "Evil…had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay.  And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome.

Since anyone even vaguely literate has read Stevenson's brilliant tale, I need go no further. In unlocking the unnatural natural man, Jekyll now had a dependable ally.  "Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter.  I was the first that ever did so for his pleasures," but inevitably the degraded servant seized power and enslaved his former master.

The rational individualism of the Enlightenment, like Dr. Jekyll, had its wilder side.  Voltaire and his collaborators lived it up—imagine a more nearly human Hugh Heffner with above average intelligence.  In the end reason had to be overthrown, if the party was to continue and reach even lower depths.  The trends set by the Duc d'Orléans (aka Philippe Égalité) and his PR man Choderos Laclos (author of Les Liasons dangereuses) culminated in the life and works of Sade, who for all times epitomizes the fulfillment of the Enlightenment dream of individualism and the pursuit of happiness.  Sade was to Enlightenment France what Charles Manson is to modern America: the mirror in which we can see ourselves, stripped of hypocrisy and affectation.

The natural man is the Old Adam.  He is not man as God created him, but a fallen creature who has failed, as my grammar school teachers used to write on my report cards, "to live up to his potential."  He is not simply someone who enjoys his physical existence but a degraded being who rejects the higher aspects  of human life.  He despises not just good manners and decent clothes but any form of art that requires cultivation.  He has a tin ear for any music that does not arouse his appetites, and, if he finds himself in a church, he scoffs as Lincoln did.  Only a fool or a hypocrite would aspire to either the life of the mind or the life of the spirit.  "The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him."

Georgie had been spoiled by a doting mother and aunt, but most boys had to undergo the harsher judgment of their fathers and the even more severe criticisms of their peers.  I thought I was clever, as a boy, and used my clever tongue a bit too freely.  One time, when I had got myself beaten up, I complained a bit to my father.  "Well, you used your best weapon—words—and your inarticulate friend used his best weapon, his fists.  You really cannot complain."  No, I couldn't.

In time boys growing up chastised by older boys, would  develop a code, or at least pretend they had: Games have rules that must be observed, and it is bad form to cheat.  They may even understand that if "what's mine is mine" then what's yours must be yours.  But this is a development imposed on the boy's naturally bestial desire to possess everything he wants.  By 10 or 12, boys used to know how to play by the rules, but that was in the bad old days before child psychologists revealed the natural goodness of children.

These days many boys grow up believing they are rulers of the world or at least the heir apparent to the throne.  In studying the lives of some of the more colorful Roman emperors—say, Nero or Caligula or Commodus (the villain of The Gladiator)—I have often thought how much they resembled the typical American teenage boy.  Instant gratification of every whim is all they wanted.  Is that too much to ask from an unfeeling world?  The only thing that prevents all the little Justins and Jeremies and Tylers from acting out their imperial fantasies—apart from the juvenile justice system--is the ugly fact that every little Brad and Bret and Jason is on the same mission to despoil the universe.

Popular psychologists have described a certain kind of American male as suffering from the Peter Pan syndrome:  They never want to grow up.  But their inability to make attachments is a comparatively minor problem that only affects us if Peter Pan happens to be our son-in-law.

The Jerk, however, is omnipresent.  We cannot leave our house, get in a car, travel by plane, or pick up the telephone without the risk some Jerk ruining our day.  Admittedly, there are degrees of Jerkitude, and there are many species with the genus.   We can easily recognize the egoist who has to have things his own way, the Egotist who spoils parties with his endless accounts of personal triumphs, Don Juan  the Jerk who is God's gift to womankind, the pushy Jerk who has to be at the head of every line, the self-righteous Jerk who goes through life correcting everyone else of bad driving and uncouth behavior without ever stopping to consider what others might be saying of him, but underneath all the  apparent distinctions varieties there is the spoiled child who never learned to play by any rules except the ones he makes up as he goes along.  Life for them is a never-ending game of "Calvinball," which may never be played the same way twice.