Eric Breindel Award and the Return to Normalcy with Ilan Wurman

Elise Viebeck '10 has just won the Eric Breindel Award. The award, endowed by News Corp. and named for the famous New York Post editor, carries with it a $10,000 stipend and is widely considered the most prestigious prize in collegiate conservative journalism.

This award was won last year by none other than The Claremont Independent's former editor-in-chief, John Wilson. As his friend and Claremont Independent writer, Kevin Vance describes the genesis of Wilson's September 2006 CI article, "Finding Burke Among the Street Sleepers," Wilson did hard-hitting report.

He traversed London with a homeless man and observed the horrendous effects of the welfare state on London's poor. Wilson spent the summer before his senior year working with immigrants at an inner-city church in London.

The Claremont Independent has much to celebrate, having now won the prize twice. Claremont McKenna College has much to celebrate, too. One cannot help but wonder if the college will issue a new press release, rightly praising Ms. Viebeck, as it did for Mr. Wilson. They ought to, if only to recognize a 5-month long undertaking.

At The Claremont Conservative, we applaud Viebeck for her numerous pieces on Professor Petropoulos and for her summer internship with National Review. We have already commented on both, extensively.

Still, while those articles were important, they weren't earth shattering and we wonder if too high a price was paid at The Claremont Independent, the erstwhile conservative publication of this campus.

Under Ms. Viebeck's tenure, The Claremont Independent has lost its editorial stance and has printed weak issues. To put it bluntly, the paper founded with the maxim, "Free Thought is Back!" is scarcely recognizable. Meetings were nonexistent, deadlines were seldom given and writers left.

She has even gone so far as to criticize me publicly and privately for being a self-promoter. (Is she the pot or the kettle?)

Ms. Viebeck will be studying abroad next semester in Amsterdam and the publication will pass over to Ilan Wurman. Mr. Wurman will be returning from the Washington semester program where he worked for the White House serving his party and his country.

We look forward to helping Mr. Wurman implement his vision for The Claremont Independent.

Monster Mash at Pitzer College?

Pitzer College has invited Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, to be its commencement speaker.

Many of you may remember that Ms. Power worked for Barack Obama's campaign until she called Ms. Hillary Clinton a "monster" in an interview with The Scotsman. Ms. Power promptly resigned. You can read Ms. Power's comments for yourself.

"We f***** up in Ohio," she admitted. "In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win.

"She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything," Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.

Ms Power said of the Clinton campaign: "Here, it looks like desperation. I hope it looks like desperation there, too. "You just look at her and think, 'Ergh'. But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive."

I happen to share Ms. Power's view of Ms. Clinton (and I also happen to think Obama is a socialist, which in American terms, is worse than a monster for in California, at least, we elect "monsters" governors.)

And, where, oh where, is that tid bit in Ms. Power's Pitzer College biography?

So there you have it: a Harvey Mudd student calls Hillary Clinton a "foxy lesbian" in jest and it's a bias-related incident, but a leftist calls Clinton a "monster" in seriousness and gets an invitation to speak at Pitzer College.

Maybe we'll get a "monster mash" at Pitzer College?

More likely, we'll get a bunch of liberals patting themselves on the back and pontificating about genocide and how we're somehow all to blame.

Attorney Stephen P. Halbrook, in his article “Nazi Firearms Law and the Disarming of the German Jews,” puts it best.

…German firearm laws and hysteria created against Jewish firearm owners played a major role in laying the groundwork for the eradication of German Jewry in the Holocaust. Disarming political opponents was a categorical imperative of the Nazi regime. The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution declares: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” This right, which reflects a universal and historical power of the people in a republic to resisttyranny, was not recognized in the German Reich.

Of course Ms. Power's never mentions this history in her book. Instead, she focuses on all the Americans and how they worked to bring attention to the Holocaust in the international community. As if the brave people who fought the Wehrmacht with rifles and home-made explosives during the Warsaw Uprising needed a slip of paper from the bureaucrats in Washington for their fight to have any less worth.

Ms. Power draws the wrong lessons from genocide as even the most casual reading of her book makes clear. I had the displeasure of reading Ms. Power's book in my World Government -- err.. A.P. Comparative Government -- course in high school.

I have the opportunity to now send Ms. Power my thoughts.

Ms. Power, the way to stop genocide is not to send in the troops or pass laws banning genocide -- that'll sure work!-- but to safeguard the natural rights of man.

Turning back to Ms. Power's monster comments, it's transparent that she's every bit as much of an elitist as we'd expect.

Ms. Power tells us that the only reason poor people vote for Clinton is because of some scare tactics and not their conscientious objections to Obama's policies. She assumes that she knows what's best for poor people: Her charismatic, untested, former boss, Barack Obama.

Gosh golly, now where have I heard someone say they know what's best for the poor before? Ah, that's right. It's right here. Come to think of it, he preached "change," too, didn't he?