Mother’s Day data dump

'Mother and Child'

For the better part of three days, I have been sitting on a series of articles that I really wanted to share with you.  Every time I thought I had a window of time to write about them, as Marcia Brady would say “Something suddenly came up,” and I had to abandon them.  To heck with that!  By now, everything else can wait, as I go through the list of good things I found and wanted to share.  Incidentally, several are from National Review, which periodically hits a lot of my sweet spots:

Sounding an optimistic note, Kevin Williamson seems to be saying that it will be a good thing if the government goes bankrupt, because it will finally get it out of the marketplace.  I have to read the book to see if I agree with him, but I like that silver lining attitude.

Kyle Smith beautifully takes apart the Leftist double-speak that has them promote censorship in pursuit of freedom of expression.

My favorite Sergeant Major has an homage to his mother.  It made me laugh — and made me wish I had lived in a time and place where a good swift . . . . anyway, where that kind of immediate punishment was available.

I am not usually a fan of Peggy Noonan, whom I find a mushy thinker.  Sometimes, though, she totally nails it, as she did in this column about the White House’s response to the Benghazi attack:

The Obama White House sees every event as a political event. Really, every event, even an attack on a consulate and the killing of an ambassador.

[snip]

If what happened in Benghazi was not a planned and prolonged terrorist assault, if it was merely a street demonstration gone bad, the administration could not take military action to protect Americans there. You take military action in response to a planned and coordinated attack by armed combatants. You don’t if it’s an essentially meaningless street demonstration that came and went.

It doesn’t relieve the administration of moral culpability; it just explains the immoral thought process.

Jonah Goldberg explains to Hillary (and everyone else) precisely why what happened in Benghazi and in the days after matters.

And while we’re taking about great NRO writing regarding the profound moral lapses that drove the whole Benghazi saga, we have to include Mark Steyn’s take on things, Deroy Murdock’s take on a monstrous cover-up, and Daniel Foster’s take — I think all three of these NRO writers did a stellar job tackling the subject.

Michael Barone points out that, economically speaking, a lot of degrees just aren’t worth the money people spend or the debt they acquire.  Heather MacDonald shows in depressing detail where that money is being spent — and, believe me, it’s not on education.

I adore Irving Berlin, and I love Lee Habeeb’s and Mike Leven’s writing, so I have to promote their article about Irving Berlin’s improbable — yet all-American — rise to preeminence in the Great American Songbook.

Benghazi might be the one that broke the media damn protecting the Obama administration.  I mean, it’s got to be significant when even The New Yorker admits that the administration did something very bad.

As my friend said to me, don’t you just hate it when you find yourself agreeing with the ACLU?  Or, when the ACLU stops thinking Leftist and starts thinking about true civil liberties, it’s actually capable of fighting good fights.

I haven’t written here about the IRS’s attack on Tea Party and Jewish organizations.  Kevin Williamson did, however, and he says what I would say.  (He doesn’t mention the Jewish groups, because I don’t think that story had broken yet, but the principle is the same.)

And finally, I’ll give Mona Charen the final word . . . about Stephen Hawking — a man who gets physics but has abandoned human decency.

Consider this an open thread if you have anything else you’d like to add.

Oh, and Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there!