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Damian Thompson is right, of course, but for our purposes his quote is incidental to the larger reality that a Tennessee public figure has made the Telegraph two days in a row with less-than-flattering press. The Telegraph practices something akin to real journalism, which is absent in most of our newspapers in this country. In addition, their website has one of the best collections of bloggers on the internet, from the Mayor of London Boris Johnson, to Thompson quoted above, to former British Conservative Party Chairman Norman (now Lord) Tebitt, as well as the now-famous controversial Tory MEP Daniel Hannan. Telegraph economics bloggers are so influential that there are members of the Tennessee General Assembly who regularly check the newspaper's website.
The question for Ron Ramsey at this point is whether this kind of trans-Atlantic attention may help him going into Primary Day, as it might with a certain segment of voters, or whether it will backfire as having sullied Tennessee's international image. Did Ramsey harm that image, or is he simply guilty of telling us how he (and probably many voters in this State) really feels about the unease of a small but growing Muslim population when our country is at war with terrorists who happen to be radical Muslims.
This week I've discussed some of the machinations of the formation of the new British coalition Government, and warned of the dangers of the Prime Minister giving away the historic right of Parliament not only to declare no-confidence on a simple majority vote, but to dissolve on a majority as well. The situation exists whereby the present coalition could falter and the Government lose the confidence of the House, yet there would be no way to dissolve Parliament and resolve the question. Now, today's Daily Mail says and Members of Parliament-both Conservative and Labour-are fighting back against a serious threat to both the parliamentary system and Britain's "unwritten constitution:"
The Prime Minister sought to head off his first rebellion from backbenchers by insisting the controversial new rules were up for debate.
Mr Cameron has been warned that his attempts to increase the number of MPs required to force a General Election would lead to a 'zombie Government' that would stagger on even if it was dead on its feet.
The new Prime Minister wants to bring in legislation allowing him to govern for five years. Under the change, he could be removed only if 55 per cent of MPs voted for the dissolution of Parliament.
At the moment, MPs can kick out a government in a no-confidence vote with a majority of just one.
Senior Labour MPs have publicly opposed the 'stitch-up'. But Conservative MPs also began breaking ranks for the first time yesterday to criticise the plans.
In an embarrassing retreat, Downing Street suggested the Commons vote on the controversial reforms might not even be whipped - as previously expected.
There was also speculation that Mr Cameron could start the Bill off in the House of Lords, where it is almost certain to be defeated by peers.
This would provide him with a face-saving opportunity to ditch or amend the plans.
Senior Tory backbencher Christopher Chope told Radio 4's The World At One that the plans were 'unsustainable'.
He said: 'If the present Government was to lose its majority in Parliament and wasn't able to operate as a minority government because it didn't enjoy the confidence of a sufficient number of MPs, then what is being suggested is that it would be able to carry on. That would be, basically, a recipe for anarchy.'
Fellow Tory MP Philip Davies added: 'The Government can only continue as long as it has the confidence of a majority of MPs.
'You cannot have a situation where a government changes the percentage to suit its own end.
'If a Labour government was doing this, I would be wholly opposed to it and I am now. It is totally unacceptable to change the rules of the game like this.'
It is good to see that there is some unity among political parties in an area where it really matters-threats to a country's basic governmental structure. However, Prime Minister David Cameron is quickly losing the trust of many of his backbench MPs because we now learn that he gave in to his coalition partners and sacrificed many areas of Conservative Party policy not out of necessity, but because he didn't like many Conservative policies and was looking for an excuse to have them scrapped anyway:
The disclosure of just how easily – and willingly – the Conservatives surrendered key commitments to Mr Clegg threatens to spark a backlash against the shotgun wedding between the Tories and the Lib Dems.
The Lib Dems seized the chance to scrap some of the policies most cherished by the Tory grassroots – including abandoning their promise to grab back powers from Brussels and not to increase capital gains tax.
‘Our negotiating team said the Conservatives told them, “There is something in your manifesto we would like to concede, can you add it to your list?” and “There are some things in our manifesto that are daft which we would be delighted if you would veto”.
Lord Greaves said Tory Right-wingers would be horrified when they discovered how easily their team surrendered key policies – and how keen they were to dump them for Lib Dem policies.
Former Tory Cabinet Minister Norman Tebbit warned last night: ‘David Cameron may regard the Election result as a blessing in disguise since it allows him to take the Tory Party to the Left.
‘That may please the bright young things around him who include former Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters, but not our traditional supporters. Many will stop canvassing, stop raising money and go back to running their own lives.’
This kind of duplicity is quite familiar to American "small-c" conservatives, who must deal with it all the time from our so-called "conservative" politicians. It also makes one wonder about David Cameron's authenticity as a person. If these stories have any truth to them, they show a Leader who simply doesn't care what the grassroots of his own political party actually thinks or believes.
For David Cameron's sake, I hope they aren't true, because if he loses the confidence of his own backbenchers and party faithful as Leader, his Government will quickly falter.
A coalition government between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats is now a reality in Britain. One of the concessions that now-Prime Minister David Cameron agreed to in entering into government with the usually Left-of-Center Liberal Democrats was that the term of Parliament would be fixed to five years. In other words, Cameron has essentially agreed to give up his historic right to ask the Queen for a dissolution of Parliament and a fresh election. As former Conservative Party Chairman Norman Tebbit writes, a fixed-term Parliament could create a real problem if this coalition should fall apart:
If we have legislated for a fixed term Parliament, what happens then? What if no one can command the confidence of the House of Commons and there cannot be a general election to resolve the issue?
As they say, marry in haste and repent at leisure.
It is one thing to allow for legislation to prevent a sitting Prime Minister from moving for an election merely because it is politically advantageous, but it is quite another to fix the term of Parliament so that it cannot be dissolved at all before a certain date and no election can be called. A fixed term doesn't seem like a big deal to us here in the U.S. because we are used to two critical differences-the first is the separation between the legislature and the executive, and the second is that our elections are frequent enough (every two years) to resolve questions of confidence and who has real governing control.
In a parliamentary system, however, a government that loses the confidence of the legislature becomes dysfunctional and unworkable almost immediately. If this coalition falls apart and Her Majesty's Government fails to keep the confidence of the House of Commons, the Prime Minister must have the freedom to go to the monarch and ask for a dissolution and a new election. If he cannot do that under such circumstances, it could paralyze government in Britain for months or even years, forget mention of what it might do to the economy.
It will be interesting to see how this "change" across the water plays out.
Some Humble Opinions On the British General Election and Aftermath
In the wake of a General Election result in Britain which has left the United Kingdom with a hung Parliament and plenty of political uncertainty, there is no small amount of discussion about what Conservative Leader David Cameron should do. Cameron has offered to make an arrangement for a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, a move that would have been unthinkable not 72 hours ago:
During one of the most extraordinary days in British political history, theConservative leader made an unprecedented “big, open and comprehensive offer” to theLiberal Democrats after the election ended in the first hung parliament for 36 years.
To the astonishment of many at Westminster and beyond, Mr Brown stubbornly refused to accept election defeat despite Labour losing almost 100 seats.
Instead, the Prime Minister attempted to woo the Liberal Democrat leader with a power-sharing offer of his own.
After a night in which the Tories had appeared confident of securing an overall majority, Mr Cameron looked shell-shocked as he addressed a press conference at which he outlined a ground-breaking and, until yesterday, unthinkable offer to the Liberal Democrats.
Mr Cameron, who had declared that Labour had lost its right to govern, outlined the areas of policy agreement between the Conservatives and Lib Dems, which offered “a strong basis for a strong government”.
The Tory leader made clear that while he was prepared to offer Mr Clegg concessions on tax, education, climate change and civil liberties he would not move on the crucial policy areas of immigration, Europe and the Trident missile system. He would also only offer the Lib Dems an all-party inquiry into electoral reform.
It has been established even by people within Gordon Brown's own Labour Party that the current Prime Minister is a selfish, arrogant, pompous jackass. He also has no real regard for the results of an election that, while not making the Conservatives the majority party, has clearly made them the largest one. It is as if the British electorate has said with a loud voice "we aren't yet sure if we want the Tories, but we are bloody sure that we don't want you, weasel."
Amidst the discussion of what the Conservatives are to do comes a rather frightening suggestion from former Conservative (defeated) cabinet minister Michael Portillo:
The prospect of ditching the Tory party Right wing is hardly dismaying. A new centre Right grouping (New Conservatives?) would probably find it easier to win under any system than the old Conservatives did on Thursday night. The British people have voted for new politics, and Cameron is poised to deliver it.
Portillo's idea of simply ditching the Conservative Party's actual small-c "conservatives" is workable only if the Conservative Party, which would then not have terribly many conservatives in it, is poised to accept that it may never have a workable majority again. Instead, David Cameron needs to ask himself why it is that his party did not win an outright majority:
Dave had to fight a widely despised Prime Minister leading a Government incompetent and destructive on a scale unseen in living memory. Seldom has there been a softer target; but seldom has one been missed so unnecessarily. With just 36 per cent of the vote, the Tories stood almost still since 2005. They are now on their knees to their other enemy, the Lib Dems.
It should not have come to this. As I rang round Tory MPs some were incandescent at the conduct not just of the campaign, but of the whole anti-core vote strategy that has alienated many natural Tory voters.
But let us not forget that the roots of this problem go back to 2005. The party has chosen to mimic and validate the policies of its opponents, with the result that the public found little to choose between the main parties. This was exemplified in the television debates, in which the leaders fell over themselves to agree not only with any contention put to them by the public, but even with each other.
The party spoke with a clear voice: the voice of neo-Blairism, of flannel, and not a voice of conservative principle. This should not have surprised any reader of this column, for I have long maintained that Mr Cameron is not a conservative. His slogans of social democracy – "hope, not fear" and, of course, "change" – simply presented a warm bath of sentiment to a people who wanted specific details of what would be done to rescue our country from the economic knackers' yard. No wonder it was so straightforward for him to hold out the hand of friendship to the Lib Dems: he almost is one.
The Tory Party needs to articulate not only policy differences with their Labour and Liberal Democrat opponents-something that they do seem to have done effectively when observed from this side of the pond-but real, clear, and sustainable philosophical differences. Some who are familiar with my personal political views and writing may say "now Oatney, it sounds like you are just saying all of this because you are a right-winger yourself." It is a fair point, but I'm saying it because it has a much larger and, in a sense, universal political application. If I have learned anything from my own interaction with politics and my personal political experiences it is that a political party needs both wings to fly. I have real differences with the moderates in my own Republican Party, but I am not so politically naive as to believe that life will become easier for us politically if we just throw the moderates out. You put far more pressure on your right leg when you cut off your left leg. Similarly, if Britain's Conservative Party makes the deadly mistake of cutting off it's "strong Right arm," it will be left with a weakened Left arm that won't look terribly much different to voters than Labour, or even the Liberal Democrats. Power means little to decent people without real principles behind it.
The well-exposed Conservative Member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan thinks that a deal for a coalition government with the liberal Democrats is a real possibility under the circumstances:
Is it possible to reach an accommodation with the Lib Dems based on fiscal tightening? I think so. The two parties are divided over timing, not principle. On the campaign trail, Nick Clegg claimed that deferring the cuts was a whizz-bang piece of Keynesian pump-priming. But he is privately aware that postponement will make the cuts more painful when they come – as the Greeks are now discovering. With polling day out of the way, Cleggie no longer has any reason to deny the truth.
Both parties, meanwhile, want to scrap ID cards and reverse some of the more statist legislation passed by Labour in the guise of anti-terrorism measures. Both agree that our political system needs renewal. Both want recall mechanisms, popular initiative procedures, reform of the Upper House, fewer MPs, a shift in power from Whips to backbenchers and from executive to legislature. These things would have a far more tangible and benign impact on our political system than proportional representation.
Proportional representation is the hue and cry of political formations the world over-both those on the Left and on the Right-that can't win a free and fair election if they tried to buy one. Britain's Liberal Democrats have proven that even with better political leadership, they still don't have anything remotely approaching the confidence of the electorate in that country, so proportional representation is their only hope to amount to anything. The Conservatives are right to resist the idea unless they want to be left trying to cobble together coalitions in future with the likes of the British National Party, which could win seats under a proportional representation scheme.
To govern as Prime Minister in the present, however, David Cameron will need a coalition with his other political rivals, the Liberal Democrats. The wise thing to do would not be to sell out on proportional representation, but to accomplish electoral reform in other ways, such as more even constituencies to give votes an equal weight. Oh, and a real referendum on membership in the European Union, one that Euro-skeptics may very well win, is something Cameron and the Conservatives should consider to make themselves truly distinguishable from Labour or the Lib Dems.
David Cameron has an excellent chance to use coalition government to show the British public why the Conservatives should again be given a chance to govern Britain outright-if he doesn't blow it.
Just a few humble thoughts from the other side of the water...
With an election in Britain forthcoming in Britain on May 6, I thought it was time for a bit of nostalgia for my favorite woman leader. I wish in our own country the men had as much in the way of fortitude as Margaret Thatcher did in her great last stand.
Queen Elizabeth II has dissolved Parliament and Britain will go to the polls to choose their next government on 6 May (in a twist of fate, that is just two days after much of Tennessee will vote in major local primaries) and for the first time in 13 years, the Conservative Party, now led by David Cameron, has a chance at a majority government as a result of that vote.
What remains uncertain is how accurately the current polls reflect how the General Election will turn out. The Times, which was once-along with The Telegraph and The Daily Mail-among the press bulwarks of British Conservative politics, has now become a sort of standard establishment news outlet, is saying that if the election were held today, the Conservatives would have a tiny majority of four seats. That would make Tory Leader David Cameron the Prime Minister, but his majority would be more tenuous than John Major's was during the years following the 1992 General Election-Major would eventually have to lead a minority government after a series of bi-election losses by 1996.
The Telegraph has published a poll which put the Conservatives at 38%, with 30% going for Labour and 21% for the Liberal Democrats. If that were the final result next month, it would make the Conservatives the largest party but give no one the majority-a hung Parliament. Hung Parliaments have become par for the course in Canada with both the Liberals (after 2004) and the Conservatives (since 2006) having to slog through hung Parliaments in recent years (because of the Bloc Quebecois), with the Liberal Government falling on a no confidence vote in November of 2005. The Conservatives in Canada have successfully managed to cobble together something of a stable government despite a hung Parliament. In Britain, however, hung Parliaments are much more rare and when they do happen are often a signal of governmental instability. Hence, that is why there seems to be so much discussion in the media about it.
If Britain's 2008 local elections were replicated on 5 May, the result would be a Conservative landslide on the scale of Labour's 1997 wipeout of the Tories.
Here is a glimpse of that 1997 history.
Here is the concession of defeat in 1997 from Britain's last Conservative Prime Minister, John Major. In it, he delivers what has become my favorite line to describe political life-a hard truth. "Politics is a rough old trade."
For one day a year, the minds of much of the world turns to Irish politics, and to all things Irish, especially to the Irish Question-namely, whether there should be one united Ireland free of any political connection with Great Britain, or whether the six counties of Northern Ireland partitioned in 1921 as a result of the Government of Ireland Act should continue to remain a part of the United Kingdom.
To those of us outside of the sphere of Irish political life, it appears to us to be a simple matter of whether someone favors a united Ireland or whether they do not. The religious stereotype, of course, is that Catholics support Irish unity while Protestants support unionism, and that the conflict is an entirely religious one. While it is statistically true that a super-majority of Catholics in the North of Ireland are nationalists, and the overwhelming majority of Protestants identify with Loyalism or Unionism, the notion that the conflict is only religious in tone ignores the critical reality that while the six-county state may have been a creation of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and even physically divided Ulster itself, four generations of people have grown up living in a society that went from repression, to unease, to war, and now to peace. Further, Northern Ireland has been its own entity, for better and (often) for worse since 1921, while the 26-county Irish Republic has developed separately since that time, and has slowly but methodically been able to move on from its conflict with both Britain and the Unionists in the North.
I never believed that I would see a workable peace in Northern Ireland in my lifetime, some government there which all sides regard as acceptable and legitimate. I never believed that would see the IRA agree to lay its arms down and accept sitting in government with unrepentant Unionists, nor that I would see any of the Unionists agree to sit in a parliament with Sinn Fein as one of the two governing parties, which does contain within its ranks those who engaged in terrorist activities against not only the British or the Unionist authorities, but against everyday civilians. The Unionist parties and political groups have within their numbers those who aided and abetted discrimination, thuggery, and even terror against Catholics and nationalists.
Yet, both sides have agreed to sit in Government, and both sides now believe they have the upper hand. Unionists believe that they have won because as a concession for shared power, nationalists have had to accept the principle of consent, the idea that there can never be a united Ireland without the consent of the majority of people in the six counties of Northern Ireland. Republicans, they say, have indirectly accepted the Union. Conversely, Unionists have had to accept that nationalists have a right to full political representation and are forced to concede that a united Ireland could happen at some point in the future, and that if it were ratified in a free vote of the people of the North of Ireland, they would be obliged to accept that.
There is no easy answer to 500 years of strife and over 30 years of war. Perhaps the next generation can find the best way to solve the Irish Question.
The Tennessean wants us to feel terribly sorry that illegal immigrants in Davidson County who break the law run the risk of being deported:
When the Martinez family drives the half-hour from home into Nashville, wife Deanna is behind the wheel every time.
It's not because of some standing debate between husband and wife about who is the better driver. It's because Deanna Martinez's husband is one of the estimated 130,000 to 170,000 illegal immigrants living in Tennessee.
He can't renew his driver's license since Tennessee tightened the documentation requirements a few years ago. And Davidson County is the only place in the state where the sheriff's office participates in a federal program in which a traffic stop can lead to deportation.
"Imagine sitting at the breakfast table one day and your husband saying, 'I'm going to be deported because I forgot to use my blinker when I changed lanes the other day.' That's just not a risk we like to take," Martinez said.
As much as one can empathize with the Martinez's situation, somebody apparently forgot to remind The Tennessean that Mr. Martinez already broke the law by entering this country illegally. When I was growing up, we were told that those who did no wrong-those who did not break the law-have nothing to fear from a relatively minor police stop.
Despite what the paper says, the reality that illegals in places where the local authorities have the ability to enforce immigration law are afraid to gather in one place, or are afraid even of being pulled over on a minor traffic violation, is proof that these restrictions, laws, and programs are working quite well indeed. These rules and laws are meant to restrict the movements of illegal aliens in the hopes that they will choose to return home and come back legally rather than live in the fear of being departed and then having to really start over.
Those who come here legally should be welcomed-and would not have this problem.
Our current Democratic President says we are not a Christian nation, but would be one of the largest Muslim nations if there weren't so many Christians. We are a secular nation, the President says (but President B. Hussein Obama says we would be one of the largest Muslim nations).
There are no atheists and secularists in foxholes or in beach minefields, or in forests filled with enemy infantry.
There was no secularism 65 years ago today, least of all from the Democratic President who led our country on that day and in that hour.
It was during Franklin Roosevelt's first term that the first 100 days became the media standard for judging a President's early performance. Of course, in the days of FDR there was no CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. For that matter, the press as we know it didn't exist. The only thing resembling instantaneous news dissemination which the people made use of was by radio, and much of the radio news came by telegraph, teletype, and tape delay. News content printed in the paper at it related to federal or State politics often didn't get there without public officials knowing about it well beforehand, largely due to the lack of speed with which political happenings were able to be shared with the population.
As everyone knows, we now live in a different age of instant news. Options for obtaining information, news, and opinion are endless. News talk radio is a popular means to express opinion, but news can also be obtained by television not only from the three major networks, but from two cable news networks, and a third cable network which acts as a cable arm of one of the Big Three. Newspapers must compete with a myriad of internet news sources, and bloggers express opinion at the touch of a button.
Into this new media atmosphere the President and his staff last night attempted to stage a show for the cameras yesterday as a commemoration if Barack Obama's 100th day in office. In 100 days, his Administration has moved with alarming speed to spend States' rights into oblivion and destroy the republic by way of total dependence on Washington. Last night's news conference was an attempt at doublespeak and press manipulation by Obama. Much of the press allowed themselves to be manipulated, for the most part refusing to ask tough questions (except perhaps on the downward spiral in Pakistan), and fawning over the President as though he were somehow an angel of the Lord. For their part, the President, his Press Secretary, and the White House staff behave as though Amateur Night has taken over on Pennsylvania Avenue. The President does not merely dodge questions, but when he handles the press, he does so as though he expect them to do his bidding.
Barack Obama is used to a world of Chicago politics where he doesn't have much in the way of political opposition. The honeymoon is over, and the President is in for a very rude awakening indeed.
For those of us on the conservative side of the aisle, it seems like some sort of twisted April Fool's joke or the opposite sketches on You Can't Do That On Television for any of us to say this, but Hillary Clinton may be the only person in the entire Obama Administration with even half of a brain:
"I think that the Pakistani government is basically abdicating to the Taliban and to the extremists. But look at why this is happening," she told the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "If you talk to people in Pakistan, especially in the ungoverned territories, which are increasing in number, they don't believe the state has a judiciary system that works."
The comments came after Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari approved Islamic Sharia law in the northwestern Swat valley, which has been overtaken by Taliban forces.
The Secretary of State is compelled, of course, to tow the Administration's official line on nearly all foreign policy matters, so we won't hear her publicly criticize Obama. However, many of us warned that our enemies would see Barack Obama's attempts to placate them as a sign of weakness, largely because they only understand shows of strength. Failure to show strength will lead to those who pose a clear, present, and imminent danger to the United States being placed in a position of strength in which the United States and its chief ally in the region will be threatened.
If the Taliban take the city of Islamabad, they will likely gain effective control of the Pakistani state, and are liable to get their hands on Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. Dialogue, yeah, that's the ticket. While B. Hussein is busy taking books from Communists and proposing negotiations with holocaust deniers, the Taliban is threatening to gain effective control of the Muslim World's primary nuclear power. Iran and the Taliban both see our so-called leader as a weakling.
Meanwhile, Obama continues with the "Don't Blame Me" Doctrine. At some point, he must begin to shoulder blame. No one is President but Barack Obama, and it is his policy that his departments must enforce.
Prediction: Hillary Clinton will not be Secretary of State by the end of Obama's term.
It was an Easter miracle for the captain's family and the crew of his ship, and a successful test of mettle for the young Obama administration.
President Obama had said nothing publicly during the five-day standoff that began Wednesday, when four pirates tried to hijack the Maersk Alabama, which was carrying food for African refugees.
With Capt. Phillips safe and unharmed, White House aides offered details of Mr. Obama's actions during the crisis, which included at least 30 meetings, briefings and updates, during which the president issued two shoot-to-kill authorizations.
"Our authority came directly from the president," said Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command.
Yes, credit must go to the President for acting swiftly and decisively against those who committed this disgraceful act of piracy and terror on the high seas. If the President's people are going to make political hay of this (and rest assured, they will), then political tradition would seem to dictate that they are somewhat entitled to wallow in the glow of the positive outcome for a few days.
The test for Barack Obama, however, did not end with the successful rescue of Captain Phillips. The remaining test will be what his administration will do about the continuing presence of pirates in the Gulf of Aden and the Western Indian Ocean, most of them from Somalia. Just because Captain Phillips is now safe does not mean that the pirates and their leaders have gone away. They remain a serious and real threat to American and international shipping and must be purged from the scene. The pirates have vowed retaliation, and there is little reason to believe that they will not make such an attempt or continue to threaten Americans on the high seas. It took the United States two Mediterranean wars to rid ourselves of the last serious piracy threat to this country's interests.
Would Barack Obama be willing to fight a war at sea if need be in order to destroy these pirates and their ability to threaten our ships?
An American sea captain is held hostage by pirates on the high seas, and Barack Hussein Obama does nothing. Meanwhile, Barack Hussein Obama continues to insult Christians during Holy Week-this time saying that America is not a Christian nation during a trip to Turkey.
Conservative Member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan lets British Prime Minister Gordon Brown have it:
Now replace "Gordon Brown" with Barack Obama, because in addition to being very accurate about what Brown's economic policies are doing to Britain, MEP Hannan is accurately describing what is slowly happening to our disintigrating economy under Mr. Obama. Most importantly, the flawed idea that one can spend a nation to prosperity and spend the way out of deficit is the very notion that presently prevails at the White House.
The only way to pay for the Obama Plan is to print more money. Welcome to economic disaster. The only positive outcome in all of this will likely be the 2010 General Election.
Today falls another Feast of St. Patrick, the patron of Ireland and of the Irish people. The modern version of this feast day, as an occasion for parades, revelry, 6:00am pub openings in some jurisdictions, and the display of green outfits that would look ridiculous on any other day of the year is a uniquely American custom brought here by Irish Americans as a display of ethnic-and sometimes religious-pride. This way of celebrating St. Patrick's Day has since been exported to Ireland and other parts of the world where the descendants of the Irish diaspora live and thrive.
There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with celebrating in this way. I freely admit that I will probably drink more today than any other day of the year, yet I am not predisposed to behave as a sot. It is fitting to celebrate the pride of being Irish on the feast day of the patron of the Irish nation. Many Irish in Ireland are keen to point out that Irish Americans may be a people of Irish heritage, but we are Americans, not Irish-not the way that they are Irish.
There is some sense of truth to this assertion, since many of our ancestors came from that part of Ireland which to this day remains in dispute whether it should be a part of a united Irish Republic, or whether it should remain-as all of Ireland once was-as part of a union with Britain. Though the present dispute dates from the passage of the Government of Ireland Act of 1922, its roots are centuries deep. The peace in the North of Ireland is making things vastly better in the land of our ancient forebears, but it is a fragile peace. As David McKittrick recently wrote in The Belfast Telegraph, "history and geography dictate that Northern Ireland is never going to be a tranquil, placid place." It is for that reason that so many of our forefathers, Protestant and Catholic alike, came to this country.
Some came here escaping the British-imposed penal codes which forbade both Catholic worship (the single-decade "penal rosary" is still popular among Catholics today, and was used to fool the English public officialdom into thinking that the user was not actually praying the rosary) as well as certain dissenting elements of Protestant belief, such as Presbyterianism or other Calvinist churches-which had at first supported Protestant British rule in Ireland. Others fled to America to escape the artificial "Great Famine" of the 1840's, coming from all parts of Ireland to build a new life and help fashion a new nation to replace the one that they had left which was being destroyed. A very legitimate argument is made by some Irish in Ireland that our ancestors long ago removed us from the day-to-day affairs and conflicts of Irish life, that Irish Americans have lost much of their Irishness.
It is difficult for Irish Americans to understand the complexities which plague the question of Northern Ireland because we have been generations removed from the conflict, and all of the discrimination that Irish people of all faith traditions have faced here is rather mild compared to the conflict in Northern Ireland. We collectively wonder agape at why Ireland has not been easily united or the Irish Question is not easily solved. As people in Belfast and Derry and Down and Antrim pray for the maintenance of peace in the midst of violence by dissidents condemned by all communities, we should remember to study the land of our ancestors with a more careful eye before we pass sweeping judgments about the political situation there.
Irish influence on our country is broad and unmistakable, from the founding until the present day. Irish Americans have done more than make their mark on America, they have built much of it with their own hands. Politics became the way for many Irish Americans to achieve upward mobility in this country, and in civil service and politics we collectively have succeeded, and then in so many other areas of life.
That is worth raising a pint in celebration today.
I thought our new Republican majority was hanging by a thread, and I have loudly complained about the outcome of intra-Caucus elections. At least in Tennessee, however, our new conservative order is not faced with an essentially leaderless party with barely a quarter of all elected seats threatening a coalition to bring it to an end.
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