Alan Keyes
GOP Senate belies party platform before ink is dry
Expect manipulation of facts under new Library of Congress chief
By Alan Keyes
With the GOP convention in the offing comes a vote in the U.S. Senate that should put any and all sincere proponents of the continued existence of the American republic on notice. It is a startling reminder that the elitist faction GOP is liable to help its Democratic counterpart destroy our very existence as a free people, even when it ostensibly has the power to do otherwise.
I am referring to this week's vote in the U.S. Senate to approve Obama's nominee, Carla Hayden, to be the librarian of Congress. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., chairman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee "rushed Hayden's nomination to the floor," apparently to make sure she was confirmed before "Congress leaves town for the presidential nominating conventions." Like the man who nominated her, Carla Hayden is a well-known leftist radical. She is part of the cohort of librarians so deeply committed to the creative destruction of America society that, as head of the American Library Association, she "protested the Children's Internet Protection Act, a federal law requiring the use of pornography filters on public school computers and computers at public libraries benefiting from federal funding."
Despite Hayden's radical background, and comparatively sparse scholarly credentials, Sen. Blunt predicted that "The library's going to benefit from her leadership." Supporters like Chairman Blunt emphasize her commitment to bringing the Library of Congress into the digital age. Yet the actual preservation of written texts is critically important to making sure that digital editorializing doesn't fulfill the science fiction nightmare: a world in which the electronic versions of books become utterly disconnected from original texts. Isn't this already beginning, in response to ideological imperatives that dictate the exclusion of certain words, facts, or accounts of science and history?
This radicalism is already at work in the Obama faction's intent to penalize scientific critics of the tendentiously questionable reports, studies, and statistical analyses leftists deploy to support their claim that totalitarian government controls are needed to fight "man-made global climatological change." It is at work to alter or suppress works of literature that reflect historical realities leftist ideologues would rather erase from human memory. It's at work in the transformation of curricula and textbooks in our schools. They are more and more giving short shrift to the era from America's Founding to the Civil War and neglecting to prepare students to read the texts that convey, in words and logic, the understanding that informed that era's critical events.
Leftist ideologues like Obama and Hayden are comfortable with motives that put some ideologically conceived mission to shape history above simple respect for truth. Such respect demands that somewhere a strictly accurate account be kept intact, to inform and educate succeeding generations. We are already suffering the consequences of relying on electronic communications that are, in an almost literal sense, written in sand. They are therefore liable to amendment from day to day. The Library of Congress ought to be a reliable refuge for accessing information in its original form, so that people anxious to think for themselves will be able to ponder thoughts, accounts, and literary expressions that have not been reconfigured to suit the temper of the times, or the whims of likely tyrants.
How can it be that this substantively conservative thinking seemed to have had no bearing on the care with which the GOP Senate majority considered Carla Hayden's nomination? The Library of Congress ought to be and remain an institution dedicated to maintaining an accurate repository of the nation's experience and heritage. It should be a research and educational tool fit for a free people and their representatives. It ought never to be allowed to become an instrument of indoctrination, conveying the manipulated facts and outright fabrications dictated by tyrants, whether they are driven by ideology or the age-old curse of unbridled elitist ambition.
This week, I published an article rejecting "the assumption that the preparation of the GOP platform, and the document that results from it, are anything more than an exercise in manipulative propaganda." In it, I cite the contradiction between words and deeds that characterizes the prospective nominees of both the elitist faction's parties. I remind die-hard Republicans, in particular, of the blatant betrayals that have characterized the GOP leadership's abuse of their party's majorities in both Houses of Congress.
The GOP platform may include language decrying pornography as a particular threat to our children. But meanwhile, a leftist, ideologically driven opponent of efforts to thwart easy Internet access to pornography by children in our schools is put in charge of the institution that symbolizes the nation's commitment to preserving the knowledge and character they will require when they come of age, as responsible members of the sovereign body of the people. And only 18 of the 54 Republican senators vote against her appointment. What is said in the GOP platform is repudiated in the vote, betraying the party's words in fact even before, as they say, the ink is dry.
July 17, 2016
With the GOP convention in the offing comes a vote in the U.S. Senate that should put any and all sincere proponents of the continued existence of the American republic on notice. It is a startling reminder that the elitist faction GOP is liable to help its Democratic counterpart destroy our very existence as a free people, even when it ostensibly has the power to do otherwise.
I am referring to this week's vote in the U.S. Senate to approve Obama's nominee, Carla Hayden, to be the librarian of Congress. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., chairman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee "rushed Hayden's nomination to the floor," apparently to make sure she was confirmed before "Congress leaves town for the presidential nominating conventions." Like the man who nominated her, Carla Hayden is a well-known leftist radical. She is part of the cohort of librarians so deeply committed to the creative destruction of America society that, as head of the American Library Association, she "protested the Children's Internet Protection Act, a federal law requiring the use of pornography filters on public school computers and computers at public libraries benefiting from federal funding."
Despite Hayden's radical background, and comparatively sparse scholarly credentials, Sen. Blunt predicted that "The library's going to benefit from her leadership." Supporters like Chairman Blunt emphasize her commitment to bringing the Library of Congress into the digital age. Yet the actual preservation of written texts is critically important to making sure that digital editorializing doesn't fulfill the science fiction nightmare: a world in which the electronic versions of books become utterly disconnected from original texts. Isn't this already beginning, in response to ideological imperatives that dictate the exclusion of certain words, facts, or accounts of science and history?
This radicalism is already at work in the Obama faction's intent to penalize scientific critics of the tendentiously questionable reports, studies, and statistical analyses leftists deploy to support their claim that totalitarian government controls are needed to fight "man-made global climatological change." It is at work to alter or suppress works of literature that reflect historical realities leftist ideologues would rather erase from human memory. It's at work in the transformation of curricula and textbooks in our schools. They are more and more giving short shrift to the era from America's Founding to the Civil War and neglecting to prepare students to read the texts that convey, in words and logic, the understanding that informed that era's critical events.
Leftist ideologues like Obama and Hayden are comfortable with motives that put some ideologically conceived mission to shape history above simple respect for truth. Such respect demands that somewhere a strictly accurate account be kept intact, to inform and educate succeeding generations. We are already suffering the consequences of relying on electronic communications that are, in an almost literal sense, written in sand. They are therefore liable to amendment from day to day. The Library of Congress ought to be a reliable refuge for accessing information in its original form, so that people anxious to think for themselves will be able to ponder thoughts, accounts, and literary expressions that have not been reconfigured to suit the temper of the times, or the whims of likely tyrants.
How can it be that this substantively conservative thinking seemed to have had no bearing on the care with which the GOP Senate majority considered Carla Hayden's nomination? The Library of Congress ought to be and remain an institution dedicated to maintaining an accurate repository of the nation's experience and heritage. It should be a research and educational tool fit for a free people and their representatives. It ought never to be allowed to become an instrument of indoctrination, conveying the manipulated facts and outright fabrications dictated by tyrants, whether they are driven by ideology or the age-old curse of unbridled elitist ambition.
This week, I published an article rejecting "the assumption that the preparation of the GOP platform, and the document that results from it, are anything more than an exercise in manipulative propaganda." In it, I cite the contradiction between words and deeds that characterizes the prospective nominees of both the elitist faction's parties. I remind die-hard Republicans, in particular, of the blatant betrayals that have characterized the GOP leadership's abuse of their party's majorities in both Houses of Congress.
The GOP platform may include language decrying pornography as a particular threat to our children. But meanwhile, a leftist, ideologically driven opponent of efforts to thwart easy Internet access to pornography by children in our schools is put in charge of the institution that symbolizes the nation's commitment to preserving the knowledge and character they will require when they come of age, as responsible members of the sovereign body of the people. And only 18 of the 54 Republican senators vote against her appointment. What is said in the GOP platform is repudiated in the vote, betraying the party's words in fact even before, as they say, the ink is dry.
To see more articles by Dr. Keyes, visit his blog at LoyalToLiberty.com and his commentary at WND.com and BarbWire.com.
© Alan KeyesThe views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
