And Rightly So

November 24, 2008

This Bulletin goes to the printer on the eve of the 2008 election. Thus this "And Rightly So" column is bound to be out of date almost as soon as it's written. The conventional wisdom (which is being pushed, hard, by the mainstream media in a transparent effort to depress Republican turnout) is that Barack Obama will win in a landslide. But there's no way of knowing for sure who our next President will be, or how Democrat a Congress he'll have to work with.

While I'm still holding out some hopes of (and saying some prayers for) victory next Tuesday, I figure we'd better be prepared for defeat. Let's face it: Even a McCain win would hardly be a triumph for conservative principles. McCain and (especially!) Sarah Palin are our best chance to stop the liberal juggernaut before we get socialized medicine, a New New Deal, and a worse-than-Warren Court. But the "bipartisan" godfather of unconstitutional campaign finance "reform" is no hard-core conservative candidate. The very fact that such a moderate Republican finds it difficult to compete with a Democrat who hobnobs with terrorists, favors socialist redistribution of wealth, and clearly despises middle America says something about just how far in the wrong direction the electorate has moved over the past few decades. (Those public school teachers may not do a great job with the three Rs, but they're experts at liberal indoctrination!)

But it also says something about the importance of articulating conservative ideas -- a job that John McCain seemed to warm up to only in the last days of the campaign. This is why conservatives miss Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Not because if we just reverted to the old campaign themes of the 1980s we'd go back to winning elections as we did then. (For a variety of reasons -- not least the success of Reagan's and Thatcher's reforms -- Republicans and Tories can't expect to win today by running on tax cuts and welfare reform.) No, it's that those politicians were able to make the case for conservative principles by showing voters how liberal policies and beliefs were out of sync with -- in fact, flatly contradicted -- important realities those voters knew and cared about.

Ronald Reagan showed up Jimmy Carter's "idealistic" foreign policy and his declinist economics as cowardly abdications of America's responsibilities and our strength. Margaret Thatcher highlighted the fundamental immorality of Labour's economics: The enticing illusion that government can take care of us all means in practice (as we may have cause to remember, to our sorrow, under an Obama administration) punishing hard work and thrift to reward sloth, the politics of resentment, and political cronyism.

While no political party or movement has a monopoly on the truth, the current program of the Left is built on a number of astounding falsehoods. Our two "lies"-themed Main Selections this month highlight a few of them. Whether conservatives are heading into a long exile in the wilderness, or if a McCain Presidency gives us a respite before we have to fight off the threats of full-bore socialism, a taxpayer-funded assault on the unborn, and feckless surrender to our foreign enemies once again, it's going to be vital for us to be able to make the case for conservatism and against the lies of the Left. We at the Conservative Book Club hope we can help -- by getting the Right books into the Right hands: yours.

--Elizabeth Kantor

andrightlyso@ConservativeBookClub.com

And Rightly So

November 3, 2008

We at the Conservative Book Club believe in traditions, great and small. One of the modest traditions around here is our annual Christmas book column, introducing you to the books we think will make good presents for your friends and family. So here goes:

Our selection of children's books is particularly good this year. Besides wonderful old standards from years gone by -- The Miracle of St. Nicholas), Goops and How to Be Them: A Manual of Manners for Polite Infants, ) -- we bring you two new patriotic books for children. We the People), is the newest of Lynne Cheney's wildly successful illustrated children’s book on America, this time on the history and significance of our Constitution. Lessons on Liberty),is an even more remarkable book. It teaches American history and values from, among other sources, really neat excerpts from three books that shaped the old-fashioned American character: the 1828 edition of Webster's Dictionary (the politically incorrect version, before the religious references were scrubbed out of it), the King James Version of the Bible, and Poor Richard's Almanac. The illustrations are great, too -- this is one of those books that a younger reader can pore over for hours.

For more children's -- and other -- books, and especially if you're bargain hunting (and who isn't trying to be thrifty this Christmas?), be sure to check out our website for dozens of other books at deep discounts.

For grownups, I've got room for just a sampling of what you'll find in this Bulletin. Two of the greatest men of the twentieth century (or any century, for that matter) speak for themselves in Churchill by Himself: the Definitive Collection of Quotations), and Ronald Reagan's America) (book with CD), the text and audio of Ronald Reagan's most important speeches, including on the "evil empire," "boys of Pointe du Hoc," "city upon a hill" and, of course, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" History buffs and controversialists will also enjoy Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson' Arch -Enemy Betrayed the American Revolution--and What It Means for Americans Today) by Thomas DiLorenzo. And for the golfer on your list, we're offering two hilarious classics by P. G. Wodehouse(Wodehouse on Golf)). Speaking of hilarious, Walter Williams may be most entertaining economist writing today: his Liberty vs. the Tyranny of Socialism) is both fun and informative. Michael Yon's The Moment of Truth in Iraq) tells you the story the mainstream media's been hiding. And Bill Bennet's The American Patriot's Almanac) has patriotic facts and stories for every day of the year.

And finally -- as one of us here at the Club said in a sarcastic summary of the case against Robert Spencer's new book as a December Main Selection: "Nothing says Merry Christmas like Stealth Jihad)." The fact is, sometimes a flippant comment spoken in a black mood can have a grain of truth in it. While Spencer's expose of Muslim attempts to impose sharia law on America is not brimming with holiday cheer, the book actually has quite a bit more relevance to Christmas than you might realize. And it's not just that we won't be celebrating Christmas as we've been used to do if the folks pushing Islamic law on the U.S. get their way.

Islam differs from Christianity in quite a few important ways. But it may be that the most important difference is Muslims' lack of belief in the Incarnation. In Islam, God most certainly never "became flesh and dwelt among us." Muslims call Allah "the merciful, the compassionate," but his compassion seems always to be outweighed by his absolute power and holiness. The God they picture would never humble himself as Jesus did, leaving a throne in heaven to rush to our rescue, sharing the sufferings and poverty and humiliations of man's life. Maybe the fact that Muslims want to impose what they think is God's law on our society by violence (and by strategy) has something to do with their tragic ignorance of the gentleness and the generosity of God. That, in the words of the title of the Fulton Sheen classic that we're offering for the first time this year, is The True Meaning of Christmas). --Elizabeth Kantor

andrightlyso@ConservativeBookClub.com