By the way, I imagine that some on the right will be less than enamored with Connerly’s appeal to purely liberal principles of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to defend his right to engage in political activity in the state of Michigan. But is this not a correct application of liberal principles—the right to travel freely, to speak, to petition the government for redress of grievances? Would traditionalist conservatives deny this right?

Not this traditionalist conservative! I applaud Ward Connerly’s courageous response to the arrogance of power demonstrated by Lord Dingell.

From the “I wish I’d thought of that” department: a poster on lucianne.com today asks whether Dingell will send the same letter to Jesse Jackson, who has also come to Michigan….

As to Mr. Auster’s first point: Connerly’s appeal to the Constitution is right in principle and wise in tactics. If Dingell wishes to make an unprincipled exception in Connerly’s case, let the whole world know what the Congressman thinks of the Constitution he’s sworn to uphold. It’s Dingell who is the hypocrite, not a conservative who cheers Connerly on.

Mr. Auster,

You are being a little hard on the Rebels again. No Southerner wrote Dingell’s obnoxious missive, and if anyone is going to subject himself to the torment of reading it aloud, please do so in a flat Midwestern accent closer to the way Dingell actually speaks.

Dingell is an old liberal who may actually believe in affirmative action. More pertinently he is a Democrat machine pol (longest serving member of the House, he followed his father into the Congress) in a district where white Americans are becoming rarer and rarer and black Americans and immigrants (especially Arabs) are becoming more numerous. This is vote-driven pandering, spiced with the arrogant bullying that should be familiar to anyone who remembers Dingell’s tenure as Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. His district includes Ann Arbor, so maybe he considers his insulting letter a constituent service.

I suspect Dingell has done Connerly a favor. many non-Detroit Michiganders see greater Detroit as a blight on their state, in much the same way a lot of New Yorkers see New York City as a burden. Dingell is an ultimate Detroiter. His attack on Connerly may win Connerly a lot of sympathy elsewhere in Michigan. HRS

The most significant implication of Dingell’s screed is that he knows he can get away with it.

Why can he get away with it? Because racial egalitarianism is THE Sacred Dogma. It trumps the Constitution; it trumps every doctrine of every religion represented in our population; it trumps all other liberal values if it happens to conflict with them; and it surely trumps simple courtesy. No sacrilege is so horrid as a challenge to this dogma. So Dingell is safe, and he knows it.

Mr. Sutherland, your Southern patriotism has got me in a box! Not only must I not use the Civil War to illustrate a point, for fear of launching a whole debate about the Civil War,

http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/001618.html#7365

but I can’t use a familiar Southern stereotype to satirize a liberal Congressman, even though the Congressman’s own words cry out for exactly that satire, since he was using the very phrases that liberals once would have mocked Southerners for using. Also, to lessen possible offense, I described my satire as a liberal caricature, not as reality. Yet Mr. Sutherland still had to say that I was being too hard on the South. (However, to judge by personal anecdotes I’ve heard, there were indeed sheriffs in the older South who were like that.)

I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek, and seizing on an opportunity to deride Dingell, whom I have long despised.

As for the Civil War, passions still run high on both sides. It was the watershed event in our history. Perhaps I should say the first watershed event. The mass immigration of the last 30 years or so risks becoming such a watershed that the issues of the Civil War may become an arcane footnote to the history - if it survives to have much more history - of The First Universal Nation.

Pols like John Dingell are trying hard to bring about the multicultural mess. I checked his website because the letter was so rude I doubted it was real. It is prominently featured on the site - as is flowing Arabic script, for Dingell’s Arab “constituents.” HRS

Someone should ask Mr. Dingell, “Why do we need racial preferences if things are so wonderful in Michigan?”

Mr Auster asks, “…the right to travel freely, to speak, to petition the government for redress of grievances? Would traditionalist conservatives deny this right?”

It all depends on whether they agree with the issue in question or not. Conservatives have raised this same canard when, for instance, advocates for medical marijuana have crossed state lines to work in support of state initiatives/referenda.

Of course, when the Drug ‘Czar’ visits the same states to speak against such measures using taxpayer funds in his capacity conservatives tend to be silent. (The petitioners complain that they have to register with the state and comply with specific laws, from which the Czar seems exempt. Those opposed to said measures don’t seem to find a problem with this either.)

When wealthy folks like George Soros or Richard Dennis help fund these initiatives, a clamour is raised over ‘out-of-state’ money. Yet when Steve Forbes announced that he would fund radio ads opposing the medical marijuana initiative in D.C. several years ago, there was not even a whimper from conservatives — even a few words of praise. Mr. Forbes doesn’t live in D.C.

How many anymore are genuinely true to principle regardless of how that principle’s application might affect an issue they feel strongly on? Conservatives are typically no better than liberals in this regard.

I wasn’t aware that conservatives had ever made an issue of out-of-state activists involving themselves in a state referendum campaign. But even if they did, I’m sure they didn’t say anything like what Dingell said.