Conservative Donnybrook

Brady’s been drawing comparisons to Bradshaw and Montana for awhile now, and if he leads the undefeated Pats to victory tonight, he will join their ranks as the only QBs to possess four Super Bowl rings.

If you were judging the greatest quarterback of all time based on Super Bowl rings alone, then, Brady would have a 1/3 shot at taking the title. But actual stats always eclipse Super Bowl rings. Otherwise, Dan Marino wouldn’t even be in the conversation. But clearly he has to be: In 242 regular season games he completed an astonishing 4,967 passes for 61,361 yeards and 420 touchdown passes. He won the MVP in 1984 and made the trip to Honolulu 9 times. Compare that with Brady’s (thus far) 112, 2,294, 26,370, 197 career line, and one quickly sees that Brady needs a few more snaps from under center before the “greatest ever” talk begins.

And if one considers Super Bowl wins to be the most reliable adjudicator of QB greatness, what Super Bowl win was greater than Joseph William Namath’s guarantee in Super Bowl III: “We’ll win the game. I guarantee you.” Not only did he and the Jets take down a Colts team that was touted as “the greatest football team in history,” but his performance solidified the AFL’s legitimacy. Namath took home the MVP, and the win made him the only QB to start and win a national championship in college and start and win the Super Bowl.

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Taking a break from the political wisdom that is continuously spewing from the contributor’s and commentor’s keyboards, I thought I’d take a minute to stump for the great game of hockey. For those of you who missed it the NHL staged the first regular season game to be played outside in the United States yesterday. It pitted the Buffalo Sabres against the Pittsburgh Penguins, complete with the young star Sidney Crosby, at Ralph Wilson Stadium in Buffalo. More than 74,000 people turned out to see the game and it drew the highest TV ratings of any NHL game in ten years. The game combined exciting play with light snowfalls that reminded me of playing hockey on ponds when I was a kid and the northern Wisconsin lakes I was playing on last week.

In an era where sports have turned into big business, drug scandals are ruining the national pasttime and gambling scandals are calling the integrity of the NBA into question I urge all of you sports fans to take a look at the NHL. Players make, by far, less than any other of the four major leagues and are well known for their humility and focus on team as opposed to on individual. Plus, fighting is legal. What’s not to love?

Oh, one more thing. If you need a little more convincing that hockey is a great sport go out and buy Slap Shot. The best sports movie ever made.

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It seems that, no matter who wins, we will probably be stuck with another bad president for four more years.  I would like to offer the following as my candidate in 2012:

Tom McClintock in ‘12!

(I may even have Mr. Newland’s support here!)

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President Bush signed a free-trade agreement with Peru.  Might this be a step towards my suggested policy?  Is ol’ Georgie stealing my thunder? Probably not, but this was a great excuse to revive my “Americas the Beautiful” piece!

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I have just come across an interview with columnist and blogginghead James Pinkerton on Lawrence Auster’s blog regarding Pinkerton’s The American Conservative cover story The Once & Future Christendom, in which he elucidates his “Shire Strategy” for the defense of Western civilization.

The AmConMag piece and interview both appeared in September, so this is a terribly un-timely blog post. So sue me!

In the exchange with Auster, Pinkerton expands on the thinking behind his AmConMag article:

What really impelled me to write this piece was the vision of the Muslims dynamiting the Vatican, as I read about 30 plus years ago in Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints–and I’ve had plenty of occasion to think to myself that Raspail was not wrong about where current trends are headed. I am Protestant, not Catholic, but still. And once I thought about that, and prayed on that, it became clear to me that if the Muslims overran Europe, Christendom would never recover–at least not here on earth. To use a Tolkien analogy that I don’t think made it into the final draft, it would be as if all Christians were wounded by the Blade of Morgul. Frodo was so wounded, and never recovered–the books end happily, but that can’t really be said for Frodo himself. By contrast, if it’s merely the atheists and secularists who overrun Europe, then the Continent can be won back, or at least preserved, allowing the Remnant to exist, and Europe to find its way, hopefully, eventually, without being conquered from without.

Read the whole thing! And for those of you on Facebook, Pinkerton has begun a group called “Council of the West” as a followup to his AmConMag piece, and also two other Facebook groups–”Sovereignty Caucus” and “American Sovereignty Caucus” (why the need for both, I don’t know)–along with their respective blogs.

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Ross Douthat, one of my favorite blogger/journalists, reviews (pdf) “American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia,” my favorite encyclopedia of conservatism, in ISI’s The Intercollegiate Review:

It comes as no surprise, then, that American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia–an enormously impressive and occasionally frustrating volume that attempts to do for the America what the 1911 Britannica does for the rest of God’s creation–sometimes feels like a compendium of cranks, an almanac of oddballs …

These shades of conservatism past appear alongside better-remembered Right Minds such as L. Brent Bozell, William F. Buckley’s brother-in-law and the ghostwriter of Conscience of a Conservative, whose admiration for an impossibly romanticized Catholic Spain seemed at times to outstrip his devotion to America; Willmoore Kendall, whose turbulent Ivy League career ended when “he reached an agreement with Yale whereby he would be paid five times his salary” in return for resigning his tenure; Sam Francis himself, a brilliant writer who migrated to the racist fringe and died a self-identified “white nationalist”; and of course Ayn Rand, whose personal eccentricities need no introduction.

After a while, the reader becomes accustomed to the melancholy that works its way into so many entries—[he] began to suffer from bipolar disorder…he was predisposed to a sense of cosmic failure, a belief that the universe was running down…suffering from chronic depression, [he] committed suicide… he is now largely shunned by the literary establishment—and accustomed, as well, to the feuds and enmities that run throughout, like threads binding the book together: paleocons versus neocons; libertarians versus social conservatives; West Coast Straussians versus East Coast Straussians; Confederate sympathizers versus Lincolnophiles; Whittaker Chambers versus Ayn Rand; Norman Podhoretz versus Joe Sobran; Murray Rothbard versus, well, just about everybody.

(Links added by me.) I’ll have to ask Professor Frohnen who he’s going to enlist to write the entry for Conservative Donnybrook in the second edition.

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I am happy to see that C.S. Lewis’ classic The Screwtape Letters is in pre-production!  The book was fantastic, I eagerly await the movie.

Rumor also has it that The Great Divorce is also under consideration for production.

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I have added a new feature to the website: The Donnybrook Forum. I have set it up for the simple reason that we cannot post about every topic that everyone wants to discuss. This should allow for our readers to bring up discussions that haven’t yet been broached in a post. It is my intention to leave the forum unmoderated, but we will have to see how that works out. If we begin to get a bunch of SPAM®, I may have to revise that idea.

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In the words of the never-to-be-forgotten urban philosopher, Rodney King, “Can’t we all just get along?” I am willing to admit that I crossed a threshold in naming a few of you Anti-American. For that, I apologize.

I will simply ask that our commenters, please confine your comments to the topic of the post. I will give a very recent example of what I consider a transgression. SM offered a post about a recent court case concerning abstinence. One of our commenters responded with a post about “the law.” Was he referring to United States law? No. He was referring to St. Augustine’s understanding of God’s law. Now, I am every bit as much of a believing and practicing Catholic as the next guy. But, when we discuss court cases on this website, it would seem that we are commenting on contemporary United States (or State) law and the culture which creates/tolerates/precipitates it. We are not talking about moral law that was “promulgated” 1600 or more years ago. Such a comment is completely unresponsive to the original post and drags the whole discussion off-topic. You may personally hold the view that contemporary law is divorced from our foundations as a Christian country; I may hold that view; and I’m pretty sure SM holds that view. But, that is not the topic of the post.

Please make sure if you are going to comment that the comment is pertinent to the original post.

Relatedly, let us all try to take each others posts and comments in the most charitable possible light. I make that pledge to anyone who posts here or comments here. I hope that all of the readers and contributors can find it in their hearts to start over and do the same.

On a slightly different note, I must note that something is working. Daily we are breaking records for visits. Already today at 6:37 Eastern Time, we have logged more visits than on any other single day in the history of Conservative Donnybrook. I attribute that first to excellent content. But, also to some extent to the readers and commenters that we have attracted to this site. I’d like to publicly congratulate all of the contributors to this site. And, I would also like to thank our readers and commenters.

Let us all try to start again.

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If you’re increasingly annoyed and bored with the mindless screeds of conservative talk radio, and even more bored with the dull liberalism of NPR, might I suggest some excellent lectures and talks available online as MP3s?

For instance, lectures sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute are available on their Web site in both video and audio formats. Outstanding examples include George Nash on Russell Kirk, Rod Dreher on Crunchy Conservatism, Bill Kaufman on American Regionalism, Bruce Frohnen on Robert Nisbet and communitarianism, and Roger Scruton’s “England: an Elegy.” (These links go directly to the MP3 files. Right-click and “Save As…” to download them.)

Also noteworthy is the Ludwig Von Mises institute’s collection of lectures. Particularly, all of historian Thomas Woods Jr.’s lectures are excellent. Paul Gottfried also has a number of fascinating talks there.

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For most of you, this will probably register as good news. The good news is that I am now employed. That will be good news for me and my wife and those of you who find me unbearable. The bad news (or the good news for those of you who find me unbearable) is that I have taken a job with the State of Indiana. What that means is that I cannot post during the day (horrible conflicts of interest and ethics violations if I post about political issues on government time).

I have made a firm commitment to myself and the success of this site to try to continue blogging and I will do that. However, it will probably take me a few weeks to figure out the balance between work, home life, and argument. Please be assured that argument is among my more favorite things to do in life and therefore I will find a way to fit it in. It just might take me a couple days to realize where and how.

In the interim, if I do not respond to comments until hours later, please forgive me.

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Beat Army!

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Here is how Technorati describes us: “Conservative Donnybrook is a group of conservative bloggers who have banded together to give each other loads of crap. The Neocons hate the Paleocons and vice versa. A heated debate - a donnybrook, even - ensues.” (emphasis added). That was exactly as we drew it up. Nice execution boys.

Although, to be truthful, so far it seems like it has been more like “A team of paleocons and paleocon sympathizers (that’s me) ganging up on Bill (who should really go by the screen name of Saint Stephen, since he’s taking all the arrows). “

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Probably not.  Not yet, anyway.  But here is some classic PJB commentary courteousy of WorldNetDaily.  In this article he comments on the bifurcation of the Republican party (”We are big government and small government, traditionalist and libertarian, tax-cutter and budget hawk, free trader and economic nationalist”) and compares running Rudy to a Faustian bargain (”Rudy offers the right the ultimate Faustian bargain: retention of power at the price of one’s soul”).

Mr. Buchanan, if you’re reading this please feel free to e-mail your submissions to karl@conservativedonnybrook.com. 

Karl, get started on waiver forms!

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