Random Thoughts

Just a few random thoughts…
Many conservatives like Christopher Hitchens, and I am among them. He is ridiculously anti-religion (is there anyone else in the world who would refer to Mother Teresa as the “ghoul of Calcutta?),” but he is never boring and at least attempts intellectual honesty (unlike, say, Bill Maher). I try to read all his stuff, and was surprised to learn that he blogs at the Daily Mirror’s (Britain) website. It’s worth checking out.

Also worth checking out is Jeremy Clarkson. He’s not wholly conservative, but he is about as politically incorrect as Rush Limbaugh. That’s not remarkable, lots of people are, but he has a popular television show about cars called Top Gear. I can’t imagine any television personality in America who would dare to write what he writes—they are all uniformly liberal. And is there entertainer in the U.S. who will challenge the idea global warming? Granted, Clarkson’s show consists of driving cars, so maybe he is a little biased, but then, Al Gore’s mega-mansion hasn’t stopped him from preaching global warming.

I was pretty critical of Atlas Shrugged, so I thought I’d recommend some books I do like. Cormac McCarthy is hard to read because of his strange grammar (no apostrophes or quotation marks, long sentences, and some missing verbs), but his books are really, really good. I just finished The Road, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and deserved it. No Country for Old Men is one of the best books—with one of the most conservative viewpoints—that I’ve ever read. Many books written today don’t like the idea of evil, so they just make their villains obnoxious jerks (think of John Grisham’s villains). McCarthy doesn’t have any trouble with that concept. My only criticism of No Country for Old Men is the fact that McCarthy portrays the world as having so much evil that good always loses.

Almost no popular books written today are willing to condemn abortion, but McCarthy will. He has the narrator say:

“I got set next to this woman...and she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that.... Finally told me, said: I don't like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I dont think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she'll be able to have an abortion. I'm goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she'll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation."

Brilliant.

Some thought that Mike Huckabee might make a good running mate for John McCain. Not anymore. While making a speech to the NRA, he responded to an offstage noise by “joking” “that was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he's getting ready to speak. Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor." Well, what would you do, if someone aimed a gun at you? Huckabee is supposed to be funny, and he sometimes is, but remember that he once actually said that the U.S. needs to employee “weapons of mass instruction” in our schools, a line that stopped being funny the second time it was repeated.

And Michael Moore is planning on a sequel Fahrenheit 9/11. That promises to be…interesting.