I have long contended that what makes America unique is the way that we assimilate unlimited diverse cultures without losing what makes them unique. We may be Irish, Italian, Muslim, Jewish, Asian, or Hispanic, Hindu or Catholic, but we shop at the same stores, use the same banks, and address our differences in the same courts.

Jeff Jacoby articulated this far better than I have in Making Americans in The Boston Globe, 11/23/11.

Excerpt:

The key to what Peter Salins, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, calls “assimilation, American style” was a balancing act. On the one hand, newcomers streaming to the United States found out quickly that they were expected to become honest-to-God Americans. That meant learning English, getting a useful job, embracing America’s democratic values and institutions, and eventually taking the oath as new citizens.

On the other hand, immigrants weren’t obliged to shed their ethnic pride, or to drop the foods and customs and festivals they brought with them from their native land. They were free to be “as ethnic as they pleased,” writes Salins. The goal of assimilation was not to make all Americans alike; it was to get newcomers, however dissimilar their backgrounds and cultures, to believe that they were “irrevocably part of the same national family.”

There was one other key ingredient, which we too easily overlook. Immigrants understood that the country they had come to was in some indispensable way better than the one they had left. They might retain a soft spot for the scenery or clothing or rhythms of life in the old country, they might always prefer their mother tongue to English, they might even pay tuition at a private or parochial school so that the religious or linguistic values they had grown up with would be passed on to their kids.

But underlying everything would be the awareness that they had chosen to be Americans. America was better than their native land — perhaps because its rulers were corrupt, or because it was riven by war, or because economic opportunities were limited. Perhaps, as in my father’s case, because totalitarian tyrants – first Nazis, then Communists – had made life there a hell on earth. Perhaps because, like the Pilgrims, they sought a peaceable society where they could worship as they saw fit without being “hunted and persecuted on every side.”

HKO Comments:

It is interesting that our two biggest holidays are our celebration of independence and a day to offer gratitude for the country we became.

Have a Great Thanksgiving.

Elizabeth Warren is running against Scott Brown in Massachusetts.  She has elicited praises from liberals for her comment that “no body got rich on their own.”  She added “part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that (your profits/ earnings)  and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Jeff Jacoby retorts in his Boston Globe article Professor Warren’s ire – 9/28/11

excerpts:

Warren’s words reflect the infatuation with government and condescension toward private initiative that have been such hallmarks of the Obama presidency. Her eagerness to minimize the entrepreneur’s achievement while exalting the role of the public sector may win cheers on the Left, but it puts her sharply at odds with mainstream voters.

By overwhelming margins, Americans think well of small businesses and those who create them – Gallup found last year that 84 percent of respondents had a positive image of “entrepreneurs,” and 95 percent felt positive toward “small business.” The public’s view of government, by contrast, could hardly be worse: In a poll out this week, 81 percent of Americans — a record high — express displeasure with their government. Last month, respondents ranked government dead last among 25 business and industry sectors.

Of course that doesn’t mean that some government isn’t necessary. Warren’s implication that Republicans or conservatives who decry “class warfare” are unwilling to pay for roads, schools, or police and fire protection is childish. Not even the most libertarian Tea Partier, never mind a moderate like Brown, wants to zero out basic public services. Warren doesn’t need to hector factory owners, imaginary or otherwise, into acknowledging that they benefit from highways and police departments, or that those benefits need to be paid for.

What’s a lot harder to explain is how they benefit from the kind of government incompetence that can turn a $2.8 billion Big Dig project into a $22 billion Big Dig scandal. Or from government loan guarantees thatsquander fortunes on Solyndra and other ventures in “green” crony capitalism. Or from vast government entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, with their trillions in unfunded obligations andunsustainable costs. Or from government subsidies for airports nobody uses and broadcasters that can support themselves.

And even a Harvard law professor — at least one who aspires to the US Senate — has to realize that most entrepreneurs get rich only when they create value for others.

Yes, there is an “underlying social contract” on which civilized society depends. But there are two sides to that contract — and more to its terms than just taxing away ever-bigger “hunks” of wealth from people who succeed. When 81 percent of Americans are fed up with their government, and when that government already spends far beyond its means, is it really the risk-takers of the private sector who deserve Professor Warren’s ire?

HKO comments:

One of the tricks played with the truth is a false choice.  The choice is not between no taxes and high taxes.  It is childish to propose otherwise. We all know taxes are necessary for property protection and infrastructure and some social services. But to assume that the government can spend whatever amount it desires as part of the social contract is intellectually false. To assume that half the people should pay no taxes is equally shallow.  To ignore the reality that higher taxes can reduce both economic growth and government revenues is economically ignorant.  And to assume that paying people money they did not earn for long periods of time will not disrupt our social fabric is morally blind.

Jeff Jacoby writes A Palestinian state? Don’t count on it for the Boston Globe, 9/21/11.

Excerpts:

…the Arabs of Palestine have consistently said no when presented with the chance to build a state of their own. They said no in 1937, when the British government, which then ruled Palestine, proposed to divide the land into separate Arab and Jewish states. Arab leaders said no again in 1947, choosing to go to war rather than accept the UN’s decision to partition Palestine between its Jewish and Arab populations. When Israel in 1967 offered to relinquish the land it had acquired in exchange for peace with its neighbors, the Arab world’s response, issued at a summit in Khartoum, was not one no, but three: “No peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel.”

At Camp David in 2000, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians a sovereign state with shared control of Jerusalem and billions of dollars in compensation for Palestinian refugees. Yasser Arafat refused the offer, and returned to launch the deadly terror war known as the Second Intifada.

It is no mystery, however. The raison d’être of the Palestinian movement has never been the establishment and building-up of a sovereign Palestinian homeland. It has always been the negation of a sovereign Jewish homeland. That is why well-intended proposals for a “two-state solution” have never come to fruition, no matter how earnestly proposed by US presidents or UN secretaries-general. That is why the basic charter not just of Hamas but even of Abbas’s supposedly moderate Fatah vows to continue the “armed struggle” until “the Zionist state is demolished.” And that is why Abbas and other Palestinian leaders insist that a Palestinian state would be explicitly Arab and Muslim, but adamantly refuse to acknowledge that Israel is legitimately the Jewish state.

“Palestinian nationalism,” Edward Said told an interviewer in 1999, “was based on driving all Israelis out.” Sadly, it still is.

It is this grotesque and bloody culture that Palestinian leaders want the UN to affirm as worthy of statehood. The wonder is not they make the request, but that anyone thinks it should be granted.

HKO Comment:

Could we have conceived of a state like Israel, or any other,  asking for admittance to the UN, WHILE denying the right of an member  state to exist?  It is not unusual for a new state to come about in the midst of blood shed, but it is unheard of to deny another of their right to exist as the major mission of their sovereign existence.  The Palestinians have inculcated a program of anti-Semitism that would have made the Hitler youth blush.  Israel is the only state in the UN facing a continuous existential crisis.  Any serious consideration of a Palestinian state at this juncture will prove that the current UN is as effective at preserving world peace as the League of Nations was at preventing WW II.

Jeff Jacoby writes a great and insightful summary of The Triumph of Chanukah

excerpt

But Chanukah isn’t about political power. It isn’t about military victory. It isn’t even about freedom of worship, notwithstanding the fact that the revolt of the Maccabees marks the first time in history that a people rose up to fight religious persecution.

What Chanukah commemorates at heart is the Jewish yearning for God, for the concentrated holiness of the Temple and its service. The defeat of the Syrian-Greeks was a wonder, but the spiritual climax of the Maccabees’ rebellion occurred when the menorah was rekindled and God’s presence among His people could be felt once again.

Chanukah is the only Jewish holiday not found in the Hebrew Bible and the only one rooted in a military campaign. And yet its focus is almost entirely spiritual, not physical. For example, there is no feast associated with Chanukah, the way there is with Passover and Purim, the two other Jewish festivals of deliverance. Its religious observance is concentrated on flame, nothing more. And the menorah’s lights may only be gazed at; it is forbidden to use them for any physical purpose — not even to read by.

Richard Cohen writes in the Washington Post “From John Edwards, lessons on celebrity and politics”

“- the lesson to be learned from the John Edwards affair. “We have substituted the camera — fame, celebrity — for both achievement and the studied judgment of colleagues.”

David Brooks warns of the “The Populist Addiction” in The New York Times.  ”

“voters aren’t as stupid as the populists imagine. Voters are capable of holding two ideas in their heads at one time: First, that the rich and the powerful do rig the game in their own favor; and second, that simply bashing the rich and the powerful will still not solve the country’s problems.”

The Supreme Court decision reversing McCain Feingold leaves a lot to consider. Many on the left are as outraged as the right was on Roe vs Wade. Jeff Jacoby tries to calm the storm in “Candidates, campaigns, and New Coke“ in The Boston Globe.

“But even those that do choose to advertise during an election cycle will not make the mistake so many of the court’s detractors are making. They know that Americans are not sheep, easily herded by means of clever commercials. If corporate advertising was irresistible, after all, we’d all be drinking New Coke.”

Finally I have an article at American Thinker:  “Why Elitists Fail.”

“Even the brightest minds cannot escape emotional impediments to a rational conclusion. Combining such emotional rationalism with a focus on theories detached from the verification of practical experience can be downright dangerous. This is why it concerns so many that Obama’s administration has the lowest number of appointees from the private sector in his cabinet of any president in history.”

And yesterday also at American Thinker : “Why Obama’s tax incentives for small business will backfire“

“Such micromanagement of the economy is not surprising from the moral supremacists who are more interested in  imposing their view of social justice than truly enabling the economy to allocate capital and create jobs.”

I greatly appreciate the numerous comments at American Thinker. They are thoughtful and worthy of your reading.

Thanks to all the visitors at Rebelyid.