Someone's excited about Scott Brown

G. K. Chesterton once said, “the need here is a need of complete freedom for restoration, as well as revolution.” Restoration and revolution—America has need for both.

“We the people” must restore the sacrosanct status of the Constitution; God’s place of honor in our Government and culture, and respect for the sanctity of life. There is much that has been lost; there is much to be restored.

There is also a revolution to be tended, stoked, and guided. Thomas Jefferson, author of The Declaration of Independence, was of the opinion that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” America clearly has its tyrants, and now that the patriots have awakened, perhaps it is time to refresh that “tree of liberty.”

Read the whole article here.

Palin advised to use Chesterton as a role model

"I wish she would articulate the Paradoxes more. There are many, she has done some, but not specifically addressed. Case in point, ‘a Death Panel is part of Government Healthcare’ is a simple paradox that cuts to the core of one of the problems of Socialism and Medicine. The paradox is a simple and complex rhetorical tool, it encompasses “common sense conservatism” and requires the reader or listener to start thinking, something that the liberals really fear. It also drives the inteligentsia nuts, that Palin can master the paradox, and use it in a normal way, without using cocktail party nuances that are not paradoxes. To point out that there is a paradox, is the last part of the issue that is missing. or maybe that is deliberate?

GK Chesterton wrote a book related to the issue “Eugenics and Other Evils” that articulates the same sort of problems that England faced in 1922. it is a worthy read, and is free to download/view on Project Gutenburg, as per the link. Chesterton is considered the master of the Paradox, and would serve as a role model for how to clarify and discuss the common sense, almost so simple that it sounds like a child asking questions with simple wonder, but with the wisdom of a grandfather."

Interesting article. I've just read Palin's interesting and compelling autobiography over last weekend, and I liked it, and will talk more about it.

H/T: Dave Z. Thanks.

Social Justice and the Family

This writer sounds positively Chestertonian:

The bottom line is that big government solutions have failed those they purport to help. "What has happened over the years, I think, is the failure of successive governments to recognize that poverty isn’t just the absence of money," says Mr. Duncan Smith. "You need to look at what causes people to fall into poverty."

As a bonus, measures like the ones implemented in the UK also make sense financially. One recent UK study estimates the financial cost of family breakdown there is about 66 billion dollars annually. Helping the poor and less privileged while saving precious public dollars ought to appeal to most Canadians.

The vision presented by Mr. Duncan Smith and his fellow UK Conservatives is one for a better community. There’s an opportunity here for North America’s conservatives—understanding that strong families are the way toward a smaller government—and greater freedom. Who knew social issues (properly understood) were the way toward fiscal responsibility?

Thoughts on the Inaugural?

I didn't watch. Heard about her dress, his dancing, his speech (serious) and the word stumbling (not his fault) and Beyonce.

Thoughts? Impressions? Chestertonian insights?

Some Word of Wisdom from Chesterton on this Present Age

What's Right With the World, ala GKC.

Via Kevin--H/T!

Well, there you have it.

After eighteen months (or more) of dogfighting, mudslinging, verbal punching and sparring, we have a new president.

I think we should all begin to pray for our President-Elect. He's going to need a lot of help to do what's right for this country.

God bless America!

How Politics Brings out the Worst in Us

First, it was my homeschool group. Then it was a southern friend's homeschool group. Then it was a northern friend's homeschool group. What is it about homeschoolers that makes us particularly ferocious about politics? I don't know. I guess because our legal right to homeschool always feels like it's on the line.

Then another group I belong to succumbed to vicious attacks and political arguments. Then another.

Why is it that everyone assumes that if you belong to the same group, you all think the same way? And even though they assume we all think they same way, they continuously preach to the choir anyway (as if their "same way" is better than your "same way"?) And why is it no one knows how to have a decent argument anymore?

One thread resorted to name calling, people criticizing other people's spelling and grammatical mistakes (I guess they lost the thread of the argument there), questioning people's religious orthodoxy, questioning people's sanity and finally, their ability to think at all.

Another thread threatened to split, with one kind of thinker forming one group, and the so-called dark side of the force (those who did not want to split but fell on the wrong side of someone's Orthodoxy-o-meter) calmly remaining to clean up the spilt milk.

I know that the election will not cause all of this to go away. It will just go back down to a level where we all sort of pretend we don't have these kinds of disagreements.

But if I hear "Let's agree to disagree" one more time, I'm gonna scream. I do not agree to disagree. I want to duke it out in a real verbal argument. But, alas, there are very few able to do that. No one listens. Everybody talks. And talks. And talks.

People Going Nuts Over This Election

People are really losing perspective over this election. I've gotten urgent emails almost every hour letting me know, under no uncertain terms, that THIS is the most important election ever, that THIS is the critical election of all elections, the THIS election is more important than any other election, yada, yada, yada.

Sometimes I wonder if these folks have ever lived through an election before.

Every election, of course, is critical. Everyone should always vote, that's our American right. Of course, we have the freedom not to vote, too.

Maybe it's because I'm old enough to go back a few years, and remember a few past elections that I don't think this one is any more or less critical than any other election. I mean, it's not as if--if one candidate gets in we get heaven, and if the other gets in we get hell. I mean, with the economic mess, either one is going to be preoccupied for a long time on that.

I wish I could let those fear-mongers in on a little secret I've learned: neither one is going to keep their campaign promises. Neither one really can. Neither one can be a dictator, neither one can act alone. They do seem to believe that on the campaign trail, but we all know our country doesn't work that way.

I decided long ago who to vote for, and I'll bet you did too. So, we have one week to wait, and then, I hope, all these emails will stop, and we can get on with arguments about something other than how critical this election is. Wouldn't that be fun?

Chesterton on the Current Election

H/T: Peter F. Thanks.

ILN October 27, 1928
"The Innocent Conservatism of Youth"]

One of the old sayings repeated eternally by everybody, and rather especially by those who pride themselves on novelty and originality, is the statement that old people tend to be conservative, and that it is only the young who can really believe in change.

And yet this saying seems to me to be rather less than a half-truth - so much less as to be very nearly two-thirds of a lie. My own experience is this: that I was really much more conservative when I was a boy, though I admit that I was too conservative to be even conscious of how conservative I was. Click here for the rest.

I mean that I was conservative in this sense - that I did not really believe that the fashion of this world could pass away. I had certain ideals of reforming it, and to a great extent I have the same ideals still. In so far as they have changed, it is not in the direction of being any more content with the corruption and oppression of the world.

I was once what I called a Socialist; I am now what I call a Distributist. But the ideal of simplicity and small property is rather more unlike the existing condition than the ideal of Communism. It would change the world more to turn it into what I want than to turn it into what Mr. Philip Snowden [Philip Snowden (1864-1937) was an
English socialist statesman and advocate of free trade.] wants. There is less difference than many suppose between the ideal Socialist system, in which the big businesses are run by the State, and the present Capitalist system, in which the State is run by the big businesses.

They are much nearer to each other than either is to my own ideal - of breaking up the big businesses into a multitude of small businesses. That would be really a change; but I am still ready for that change, and I see no reason to doubt that, when I am tottering on crutches at the age of ninety, I shall still be ready for that change.

What I was not ready for, in my youth, was something quite real and entirely different. I did not know that the world itself changes, long before we can change it.

Take a commonplace example for convenience. I sympathised then, and I sympathise still, with various claims of Labour which arose especially in connection with the coal-mines and with the railways. I do not think I have weakened in this: if anything, I think I was more doubtful and groping when I was young. But there was one thing that
I never really doubted when I was young. And that was that coal would continue to support England and enrich the capitalists of England.

I thought of this unique wealth as one of the conditions of the case, which might be attacked in various ways, moderate, greedy, revolutionary, and so on. But I vaguely assumed that the coal would be there, as I assumed that the sea would be there. Yet these things also can change; and even the sea is not quite so significantly and
satisfactorily there since the alteration of the relations of ships and aeroplanes.

I was accustomed to the two sides of the old argument about whether coal-owners were too rich; I never really looked forward to the new argument that coal-owners are too poor. I was accustomed to the talk of heaping up riches or dividing riches or justly distributing riches; but I had forgotten the old Scriptural figure that the riches themselves take to themselves wings and fly.

In a word, I could not imagine change, the real fundamental changes of this earthly life, because I was too conservative, being a boy.

In the same way, I knew all about the grumbling of railway passengers against railway porters, and in the same way about the grumbling of railway porters against railway directors. I sympathised more with the latter than with the former, and I do still.

But when I was a boy, which was just before the motorcar burst upon the world, I never dreamed of doubting that the railway-train dominated the whole future of the world. It was the latest great locomotive that man had invented. And that conservative spirit of childhood always makes the child think of the latest as the last.

To talk, as some people are now talking, of whether railways will become obsolete, of whether steam can be superseded, of whether railway stock will always be as safe as it was - all this would have been to me a prophecy as unintelligible as some of those Old Testament visions that seem a
medley of wheels and wings and clouds. Railways had been firmly established before I was born; I never dreamed of doubting that they would remain exactly the same after I died.

They seemed to me simply the iron framework of England, and almost of existence: as if
the embankments were built before the everlasting hills or the trains of "Bradshaw" followed their appointed circuit like the stars.

If there is any old gentleman still alive who remembers the time when there were no railways, he probably feels quite differently: he feels as I feel about motoring. I do not feel in this cosmic and conservative way about motoring, but I think it probable that the young who are younger than motoring really do. If you talk to them of a future without motoring, of a coming time when petrol will be scarcer than coal and men will walk about on their feet for want of wheels to carry them, it will seem like an unthinkable nightmare of negation. It will
seem what the amputation of all legs would seem to a population of pedestrians. But they also will learn in due course what they cannot conceive now, just as I have learnt in due course what I could not have conceived then: that it is the world that alters, even more than we who alter it.

Of course, it is a comparatively slow alteration, which to some muddle-headed evolutionists seems to make it more consoling, but in fact makes it much more dangerous. It may or may not be true that petrol will replace coal or cars replace railways. But nobody supposes that Waterloo Station fell in a heap of ruins when the first taxicab went across Waterloo Bridge, or that bats and owls nested in Clapham
Junction when the first petrol-pump was set up on the road to Clapham Common.

The point is not whether the changes are as rapid and revolutionary as the young are supposed generally to expect. The point is that they are not the changes they were
expecting. Above all, the point is that they are changes in the very material they propose to treat - not changes in the manner of treating it.

It is not a question of a younger generation wishing to carve the Phrygian cap or the Tree of Liberty [In Roman times, a Phrygian cap of red felt was given to a slave who had been freed; during the French Revolution, it became a powerful symbol for the revolutionaries. The Tree of Liberty was a similar symbol for the Americans.] on a stone that has been marked out for decoration with the Crown or the Cross.

It is a question of the stone crumbling away before it can be carved with anything, because they have forgotten the air they breathe, and the sky and the weather of the world.

We are always being told nowadays to allow for the natural impulses and instincts of youth. Let us be careful to allow for this most profound instinct of youth, its innocent conservatism. Let us always remember that to the very young the world they see really seems to be eternal; and that, however much they may talk a current cant about novelty and mutability, they do not really expect the externals of their world to be profoundly altered by time.

Notice, for instance, what is the very phrase used in defence of any novelty. Observe what is really said in praise of the electric toothpick or the petrol pea-shooter. We are always assured that the discovery "has come to stay." We, who have lived long enough to understand the real value of life, know perfectly well that nothing of that sort has ever come to stay. It may do all sorts of other things; but there is one thing that it cannot do, and that is to stay. We shall show no irritation, please God, on being repeatedly introduced to the Hat of the Future and the Umbrella of the New Age and the Goloshes of the Good Time Coming.

But the only thing we really have learnt from life is that the good time will be going as well as coming, and that, in the book of fashions, the Hat of the Future will be recorded as the Hat of the Past. It is now the custom to condemn youth as too frivolous. But youth is always too serious; and just now it is too serious about frivolity. The conservatism of youth is a good thing; and it is not even necessary to conserve it.

GKC on the election

I'm quite certain Chesterton would have something interesting to say about this election. Whether it be the historic changes about to occur (either a person with some African heritage becoming president or a woman becoming vice-president), or because either one of them should be begging to be removed from the ticket in fear of all the mess they have to clean up once elected.

However, I'm also certain that the conversations at the local pubs and in our own kitchens are far more interesting to us and to Chesterton than the stuff going on on tv, which is yawningly boring.

Another debate tonight. Ho-hum. Will they talk about real issues? Will they actually answer the questions posed? Will they give up the sound bites and actually think about their answers? One can always hope.

But I'm sure the Thursday morning quarterbacking that we'll hear in at our breakfast table tomorrow morning will be more interesting than tonight's televised and well-rehearsed propaganda.

Gilbert Magazine update

Gilbert magazine is preparing for another issue, so watch your mailboxes. Meanwhile, we are going to do what we did last year, and double up the next issue, so that we can once again get back on schedule. Please be patient with us, as we are all just a huge group of very devoted people who love Chesterton and want to promote him and his writing in the world, but have very limited resources: and what we have is thanks to YOU (thank you!)

Autumn has officially arrived here, with the beautiful colors, and the start of colds and flu. Since at one point our country wanted to celebrate this day as Columbus Day (now out of political vogue), and since we have some illness going on here, we, too, are taking the day off. Happy Columbus Day!

For your political reading pleasure, I offer you Peggy Noonan.

A Riot! GKC for President!

Watch this video.

H/T/: Rob D.

If you want to start a huge controversy...

...just tell your homeschool group you think maybe your group shouldn't discuss politics.

Then sit back and watch the fireworks.

I know I worded it wrongly, because I didn't really mean let's not discuss politics, I really meant, let's not tell people they have to to vote for Mr. X, or they risk going to hell.

It's kind of like a church. If they want to maintain their tax-free status, churches can't make political endorsements. But they can tell people what the important issues are, and hope they are intelligent enough to use the minds God gave them and come to the right conclusion.

A homeschool group, even a Catholic homeschool group, which you would think would be as homogeneous as you can get, is actually quite a diverse group. Kind of like a family is diverse, despite the fact that the people all hang out under one roof.

Are You Still Thinking about Ron Paul?

I'm wondering what in the world will help our country turn itself around and become who it is, a group of united states. You know, we used to say, "The United States are..." because we each functioned individually, and then had some things in common in which sometimes involved national government. But State's Rights were a big thing at one time.

Big government. Chesterton had a name for it, was it Hudge? or Gudge? The other one is Big Business. Together, they make an ugly pair.

Big government seems to be pretty out of control, this latest economic situation is only the visible sign of a sick body.

But what can be done? Here we have a prefect chance, with an election coming up, and very poor choices. We can't vote for Chesterton, although there are some places where the dead still get voted into office. What happened to Ron Paul? And even with that thought, we still have to go back to McCain and Obama, because no matter what we think of Ron Paul, either McCain or Obama is going to be our next president.

So, since we can dismiss both of them, let's talk about our states again. What can we do to convince good people to run for public office? What can we do to help good people to run for public office? Why does it seem that when good people become public servants (don't hear that term much anymore, either), they become corrupt? And maybe that's the reason good people don't run for public office.

The system is broken, and yet, here we are, we must live here and try to fix it.

What ways are you fighting Hudge and Gudge?

Speaking of Economics and Politics...

Does anyone else feel like we're all in kindergarten, and some kids got out of line, and the teacher makes everyone stay in from recess; while the principal bails out the misbehaving kids, gets them out of trouble— but the rest of us still have to stay inside as a punishment for the bad kids?

We've worked really hard to live against the norm. We paid off our home mortgage. We don't buy cars until we can pay for them. We have credit cards but we limit them, and pay them off each month. In other words, contrary to the country, we aren't in debt, and we even save money. We gave our government "economic stimulus" check (doesn't that seem a farce now?--of course, it did then, as well) back to the government by paying our property taxes with it.

When we went to the bank, they wanted to give us a bigger home loan, but we refused. We had to be the mature adults and tell the bank where to go with their big loans and high interest rates. But apparently, there are quite a few Americans who fall for those big numbers, and think banks know what they're doing. Now we know they don't. But why should we all have to pay for their mistakes?

Chesterton on Politics

When Barack's berserkers lost the plot

Nick Cohen
07 September 2008

My colleagues in the American liberal press had little to fear at the
start of the week. Their charismatic candidate was ahead in virtually
every poll. George W Bush was so unpopular that conservatives were
scrambling around for reasons not to invite the Republican President to
the Republican convention. Democrats had only to maintain their
composure and the White House would be theirs. During the 1997 British
general election, the late Lord Jenkins said that Tony Blair was like a
man walking down a shiny corridor carrying a precious vase. He was the
favourite and held his fate in his hands. If he could just reach the end
of the hall without a slip, a Labour victory was assured. The same could
have been said of the American Democrats last week. But instead of
protecting their precious advantage, they succumbed to a spasm of hatred
and threw the vase, the crockery, the cutlery and the kitchen sink at an
obscure politician from Alaska.

For once, the postmodern theories so many of them were taught at
university are a help to the rest of us. As a Christian, conservative
anti-abortionist who proved her support for the Iraq War by sending her
son to fight in it, Sarah Palin was 'the other' - the threatening alien
presence they defined themselves against. They might have soberly
examined her reputation as an opponent of political corruption to see if
she was truly the reformer she claimed to be. They might have gently
mocked her idiotic creationism, while carefully avoiding all discussion
of the racist conspiracy theories of Barack Obama's church.

But instead of following a measured strategy, they went berserk. On the
one hand, the media treated her as a sex object. The New York Times led
the way in painting Palin as a glamour-puss in go-go boots you were more
likely to find in an Anchorage lap-dancing club than the Alaska
governor's office.

On the other, liberal journalists turned her family into an object of
sexual disgust: inbred rednecks who had stumbled out of Deliverance.
Palin was meant to be pretending that a handicapped baby girl was her
child when really it was her wanton teenage daughter's. When that turned
out to be a lie, the media replaced it with prurient coverage of her
teenage daughter, who was, after all, pregnant, even though her mother
was not going to do a quick handover at the maternity ward and act as if
the child was hers.

Hatred is the most powerful emotion in politics. At present, American
liberals are not fighting for an Obama presidency. I suspect that most
have only the haziest idea of what it would mean for their country. The
slogans that move their hearts and stir their souls are directed against
their enemies: Bush, the neo-cons, the religious right.

In this, American liberals are no different from the politically
committed the world over. David Cameron knew that he would never be
Prime Minister until he had killed the urgent hatred of the Conservative
party in liberal England. A measure of his success is that hardly anyone
now is caught up by the once ubiquitous feeling that no compromise is
too great if it stops the Tories regaining power. Hate can sell better
than hope.

When a hate campaign goes wrong, however, disaster follows. And
everything that could go wrong with the campaign against Palin did.
American liberals forgot that the public did not know her. By the time
she spoke at the Republican convention, journalists had so lowered
expectations that a run-of-the-mill speech would have been enough to win
the evening.

As it was, her family appeared on stage without a goitre or a club foot
between them, and Palin made a fighting speech that appealed over the
heads of reporters to the public we claim to represent. 'I'm not going
to Washington to seek their good opinion,' she said as she deftly
detached journalists from their readers and viewers. 'I'm going to
Washington to serve the people of this country.'

English leftists made the same mistake of allowing their hatred to
override their judgment after the Iraq war. If they had confined
themselves to charging Tony Blair with failing to find the weapons of
mass destruction he promised were in Iraq, and sending British troops
into a quagmire, they might have forced him out. They were so consumed
by loathing, however, they insisted that he had lied, which he clearly
had not. They set the bar too low and Blair jumped it with ease. 'When a
man believes that any stick will do, he at once picks up a boomerang,'
said GK Chesterton, and when the politically committed go on a berserker
you should listen for the sound of their own principles smacking them in
the face.

Journalists who believe in women's equality should not spread sexual
smears about a candidate, or snigger at her teenage daughter's
pregnancy, or declare that a mother with a young family cannot hold down
a responsible job for the pragmatic reason that they will look like
gross hypocrites if they do. Before Palin, we saw hypocrisy of the right
when shock jocks who had spent years denouncing feminism came over all
politically correct when Bill Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinsky.

In Britain, the most snobbish attacks on Margaret Thatcher did not come
from aristocrats but from the communist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who
opined that Thatcherism was the 'anarchism of the lower middle classes'
and the liberal Jonathan Miller, who deplored her 'odious suburban
gentility'. More recently, George Osborne, of the supposedly
compassionate Conservative party, revealed himself to be a playground
bully when he derided Gordon Brown for being 'faintly autistic'.

In an age when politics is choreographed, voters watch out for the
moments when the public-relations facade breaks down and venom pours
through the cracks. Their judgment is rarely favourable when it does.
Barack Obama knows it. All last week, he was warning American liberals
to stay away from the Palin family. He understands better than his
supporters that it is not a politician's enemies who lose elections, but
his friends.
H/T: Dale A.

Christian Right splintered? GKChesterton and the election

As Benjamin Dueholm states in this news article from The National,

If America, as GK Chesterton famously proposed, is a nation with the soul of a church, its churches have often appeared to have the soul of a political party. Christian churches and other religious societies have played partisan roles in almost every major controversy in American history. Slavery and abolition, western expansion, prohibition of alcohol, expanding the franchise to women and non-whites and war and peace abroad have all been argued out in American pulpits and revival tents.

Then he discusses the latest developments between the Obama and McCain campaigns, all of which is pretty interesting reading.

New Reprint to read before the elections

Cecil Chesterton was Gilbert's brother, Hilaire Belloc his best friend. Although Gilbert didn't help write the book, I can't help thinking he'd have discussed these ideas with his friend and his brother.

Pertinent to this year's election, The Party System looks like a good read for 2008.

The Party System (Paperback)
by Hilaire Belloc (Author), Cecil Chesterton (Author), Ron Paul (Foreword), Sforza Ruspoli (Preface) Find out more.


* Paperback: 160 pages
* Publisher: IHS Press (March 1, 2008)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 1932528113
* ISBN-13: 978-1932528114


Book Description
Pertinent to America, Britain, and other Western democracies, this book explains that what people believe happens in national assemblies and parliaments is radically different from the reality. Instead of being places where debate is intense, passionate, and aimed at the national interest, the fact is most members of these institutions act on behalf of powerful, unelected interests. They know, implicitly, who really runs the country—and their only real task is to decide if they want to try and rock the boat (thereby risking their salary, their reputation, their future), or stay silent for fear or favor. The book demonstrates beyond any doubt that the very nature of the system is hostile to democracy as laypeople understand it.

About the Author
Hilaire Belloc was twice elected to the British Parliament and is a prolific author on a wide range of political, economic, social and historical issues. Cecil Chesterton was and journalist and editor who was associated with the Fabian Society and later worked almost exclusively for The New Age, where he was an important contributor. In 1911, he became assistant editor on Hilaire Belloc's new weekly, The Eye-Witness, and when it folded in 1912, he bought the paper and renamed it The New Witness, which he edited until when he went off to war. His books include Gladstonian Ghosts, G. K. Chesterton: A Criticism, and A History of the United States. Congressman Ron Paul served in Congress during the late 1970s and early 1980s, where he served on the House Banking committee. He returned to Congress in 1997 where he serves on the Financial Services Committee as the vice-chairman of the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee. He is also the author of several books, including Challenge to Liberty; The Case for Gold and A Republic, If You Can Keep It. He lives in Lake Jackson, Texas. Prince Sforza Ruspoli is the prince of Cerveteri, Italy, the count of Vignanello, and the honorary vice president of the promotional committee of the Banca del Mezzogiorno at the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance. He served as ambassador of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta to the State of Malta, of which order he is currently a Knight, and is a member of the Executive Committee of the Bank of Rome and the founder of the Centers of Agrarian Action.

Mixed Media

In general, the media tows the PC line, so it wouldn't be surprising that they would be in favor of a Democratic candidate. This year they have a double chance to be even more PC because they have the chance to support both a minority and another minority. They should be in their glory.

And so I find it curious that the story they want is that Hillary cries or shows emotion. Do they find that so amazing, that she's a woman and a person to boot? I mean, headlines because her voice quavers? Give me a break! Would they do this to a man?

So, they want her, but they don't want her to show her feelings. They want her to act like a man because she's tough. Sure she's tough, but think of the pressure she's under. Most of us would crack. I would. Of course, I'd be running for the other side.

Dallas Optimistic about Mr. Huckabee and Iowa

Mr. Obama and Mr. Huckabee both have the potential to bring about a clean break with the hyper-partisan politics of the recent past. You could see this in their gracious, hopeful victory speeches. Quoting the English writer G.K. Chesterton, Mr. Huckabee said, "A true soldier fights not because he hates those who are in front of him, but because he loves those who are behind him." Mr. Obama's remarks were in the same generous spirit. It's thrilling to see two happy warriors prevail in such an important battle.

The presidential primary races are far from over, of course. But come what may, it's hard to shake the sense that a new era in American political history has begun. Dallas Morning News, 01/-5/08