Woods On Prager: A Little Treat

I want to talk about fading political instincts and joining forces that should be properly allied. And part of that interest was represented on Dennis Prager’s Monday radio program. Thomas Woods was a guest on the program. These are two men whose words I take great interest in. I have followed Woods for the past few years for his careful study and clear rendering of the events and ideas in the founding and history of The United States. His Ph.D. is in History from Columbia and he is senior faculty at the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Austrian economics. I recently wrote of how Woods was correct on the history in a dispute with talk show host Mark Levin, who is a genuine and passionate man and patriot and a student of The Constitution, though he had a more conventional understanding of it in a world where convention is not quite accurate, as he knows.

I’ve been familiar with and a fan of Prager for 20 years because I approach questions much like he does. Unlike Levin who animatedly corrects liberal thinking, Prager often has liberals on his program and expresses his differences, but leaves what he believes is wrong to stand as wrong without getting sidetracked into motives. He’s right about this. We can’t know motives and in fact they are usually genuine. I strongly identify with two of his big maxims: “I prefer clarity to agreement” and “I judge people by their actions, not their opinions.” I’ve probably said before that Wittgenstein said 100 years ago that the primary task of a philosopher is to clarify the terms of a question. I know from studying in many fields that debating parties often disagree because in truth they are answering different questions. And, I also know that flawed presumptions can quite logically lead to what seem the most outrageous conclusions. Like Prager, I’m disposed to clarify disagreement more than to unconstructively make accusations about motives or character. I can be certain that ideas are wrong, but I can’t be certain about intentions, and it doesn’t help anything to impugn them, anyway.

My sentiments are more toward Prager’s while my thinking agrees with Woods, who is a libertarian academic version of Ron Paul, who is himself no slouch of a thinking Washington politician. Reason must pull on sentiment and sentimental concerns should check and qualify some rational conclusions.

Your Moral Leader: Dennis Prager's Radio Show Highlights

Prager H2: The author of the Goldstone Report, the UN report that denounced Israel for targeting civilians in its Gaza war with Hamas, now admits he might have been too hasty in drawing his conclusions. This fool now regrets trusting terrorists to tell the truth. His pathetic retraction won’t undo what he’s done… The dean of Western scholars of Islam, Bernard Lewis, offers a sober assessment of the state of the Middle East. Prager H3: Dennis has a speech in Sacramento tonight. Unfortunately, his Southwest Airlines flight was cancelled. Now he has to drive, necessitating an early departure from the show. Southwest had an incident with one of its planes over the weekend and has subsequently cancelled hundreds of flights. We replay the first hour from today’s show, an instant Best of Prager Hour.

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