Testifying before the House Budget Committee today, U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told Chairman Paul Ryan the following: “We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution to that long-term problem. What we do know is we don’t like yours.”
Actually, President Obama sort of did have a definitive solution. He created a debt commission, which devised a long-term debt reduction plan. Which the president rejected. And instead, we get this new budget proposal, which makes no effort to deal with Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—the long-term drivers of U.S. federal debt. The debt curve never gets bent, as the above White House (!) chart shows. (Yes,the chart comes from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.) It just goes up and up and up—until the heat death of the universe or the economy is struck by a Greek-style debt crisis.
Read the rest, as James Pethokoukis basically slaughters the argument that this administration has any inkling or desire to reign in spending.
Turbo Tax Timmy is a funny dude. The guy who couldn't figure out how to pay his own taxes is annoyed by Paul Ryan's long term debt reduction plan. Meanwhile, somewhere Dane Cook is seething over Daniel Tosh's latest comedy routine.
As hilarious as Geithner can be, he's just a reflection of his feckless incompetent boss. Back in 2008, Obama promised to cut the deficit in half. See, Barry can make with the yuks too.
Question: Could Romney, Santorum or Gingrich be any worse on the federal budget than Obama?
That's what this election is really about. Not Mitt Romney's feelings about his tax rate. Not Rick Santorum's position on jimmy hats. Not Newt Gingrich's expansive views on serial divorce.
None of that stuff is vitally important to continued existence of this Republic.
Don't get it twisted. All of those other debates--and all the secondary discussions that spring from them--have a great deal of merit in certain contexts. Free societies should have many ongoing discussions about numerous topics if they are to survive in a complex and ever-changing world.
I'll even grant that if it was twenty or thirty years ago, those kinds of issues would've been featured more prominently in an election season. Relatively good times give folks the luxury to drill down on a lot of stuff. When the entire lawn is perfectly mowed down to putting green length, the single blade of two foot tall crabgrass looks far bigger than it really is.
The problem is that the US can no longer afford to look solely on ancillary issues and make political decisions. Why? Because, as the chart suggests, pretty soon America won't be able to afford shit.
Baldi is right: America is at a crossroads and there is no back tracking out of it. Naturally, Barack Obama doesn't want you to recognize this reality. He is the smiling ignorant face of a man running at full speed directly into the blades of a corn combine. His budget represents the bankrupting hope and the backbreaking change inherent in the assumptions of the statist status quo.
Obama desperately wants you to focus on the flaws of the GOP candidates. His record cannot withstand a cursory glance, much less a thoughtful critique. So yeah, lets all really pick through the records of Romney, Gingrich and Santorum.
With a fine-toothed comb.
For the 80th time.
This week.
Yeah, that'll be awesome.
Or lets not do that. We know what the GOP guys are all about. Their various quirks and personality traits have been thoroughly examined. More importantly, their positions are all very much known quantities. If Republican voters don't know what the candidates stand for by now, they're not really paying attention.
No, the focus has to shift back to the Arrogant Incompetent Affirmative Action Hire-In-Chief. Obama's budget should be all the impetus any conservative needs to put their eyes back on Barack Obama. His spending plan is practically designed to get right-wingers furious at the President all over again.
I say we give Obamster what he wants. Our president deserves to be the center of Republican attention. Lets make him and his leadership the only important issue in this campaign.
It's only February, and it feels like a lot of the wind has gone out of the sails of the conservative base. The culprit? With just four states checked off the 2012 primary season, the results simply aren't very encouraging. Ron Paul continues to fight the good fight against fiat currency, the last 50 years of American foreign policy and chemtrails. Rick Santorum cannot seem to gain any traction as a viable center-right alternative candidate. Meanwhile, Captain Ahab Gingrich and the Romneytron 2012 Self-Guided Political Action Figure have turned each state into a clash of personalities rather than a fight over ideas.
Why did it come to this? RightHandMan has some harsh--but fair--words.
In 1976, the Republicans watched Reagan lose to Ford and then saw the repercussions of that loss in Carter’s four years. Thing is, Reagan didn’t want to run for President – but did. Know why? Because the people demanded it.
In 1976, the American Conservative Union pushed Reagan to run against the establishment supported and Presidential incumbent Gerald Ford. The establishment supported the wrong guy (the moderate), told us that a conservative like Reagan could never win in the general election, and went on to fail in the race against Carter anyway. The establishment strikes again in 2012 but…No Reagans.
Shame on the conservatives who sat on the sidelines instead of running. Shame on the citizens for not demanding better.
It's our own damn fault. This whole godforsaken clusterf--k of a Republican primary dogpile is our fault.
I understand when people talk about how the Establishment 'wants' Romney to win. I get how they can feel cheated by a process that seems designed to hand Mittens the nomination. At the end of the day though, it still comes down to people supporting, or withdrawing their support from, certain candidates. The conservatives and Republicans who did not want Mitt Romney to be the party's nominee simply didn't do enough to make sure that didn't happen.
But it isn't just the vast right-wing conspiracy that dropped the ball. While we're in the spirit of circular firing squads, let me take aim right back at myself. I jumped on the Herman Cain train with my heart, but I should've given it a little more thought than I did. While I had my doubts about the man being completely ready for prime time, I truly believed that he was a star that would shine brighter as time went on. That simply was not the case.
I still think Herman Cain is an impressive guy. He has a deft grasp of economics, he's a successful businessman who has beaten the odds to rise to the top of profession and he is a forceful public speaker who can connect to audiences. These are all tremendous assets that should not be discounted simply because he didn't do well during the course of a presidential campaign. There is a future for Herman Cain somewhere in the political world, even if we can't quite see it yet.
At the same time, Herman Cain and all his wonderful qualities were not able to get the job done. Presidential politics requires an absurdly varied skill-set. Just having visionary ideas isn't enough. Simply being a good orator won't cut it. Merely carrying around a huge warchest won't work either.
Very few people in the world possess the vast talents necessary to play at Commander-in-Chief Level Boss status; even fewer have the desire or stomach for it. Ever wonder why the GOP cannot seem to create another Ronald Reagan? It's not just that the Republican Party tends to dislike movement conservative candidates, although that's certainly part of the problem. It's because Reagan's combination of temperament, knowledge, endurance and skills are so exceedingly rare that finding another giant world-changing figure like him is damn near impossible.
Conservatives--myself included--should recognize that fact. They should also recognize the limitations of the candidates in the field. Most politicians are not going to be awesome right out of the box. Reagan's iconic status is in part a product of the passage of time. In the 1980's, most of the Left and more than a few on the Right thought Ultra Ronaldus Magnus was a bird-brained failed actor who was intent on nuking the world. Even those in the conservative movement who voted for and agreed with the President still criticized him. It's only been relatively recently that Reagan has become respected--if not loved--across the political spectrum.
As time has passed, I think I saw more in Herman Cain than was actually there. I thought that he had the potential to be a transformational politician. It turns out that Mr. Cain is merely an incredibly impressive man. For what its worth, I'm sorry I didn't recognize his limitations as a candidate. Had I been a bit more skeptical a little sooner, I probably would've moved faster to find a more viable Not-Romney.
2012 has been full of lessons. Sometimes those learning moments have been delivered with a bit of a sting attached. Rather than cry over it, it's best to learn the lesson quickly, move forward and be wiser in the future.
Did anybody watch last night’s GOP presidential candidate debate on NBC? Apparently, 7.5 million people sat through it. One wonders how many people managed to keep their eyes open past the first hour.
To be fair, I was catching up on the zany antics of everyone’s favorite misanthrope doctor on "House” (Spoiler Alert: Crotchety title character says rude things to people) so I missed the first hour of the debate. Once I got around to Brian Williams & Co.’s turgid after-school detention session cleverly masquerading itself as a debate, within a minute it was clear something was up. Turns out that NBC made applause verboten within the auditorium. What should’ve been ‘Newt v. Mitt-Thunderdome’ morphed into a Lunesta-enhanced quaalude-soaked Ambien-fortified paint-drying observation session. With socialists as the hosts. By the time Mitt or Newt or Santorum or whoever started talking about self-deportation–I was starting to get drowsy, so the memory is hazy–I was wishing I could self-deport myself to a time when I didn’t know NBC was holding their shitty debate.
I saw no questions about Solyndra, Fast-n-Furious or the looming collapse of the Eurozone. So of course the candidates had to answer a question about Terri Schiavo. Apparently America has so few pressing problems that we have to go back seven years to find trouble.
Naturally, I did a fair amount of pissing and moaning about this on Twitter. Because whining about stuff always helps, right? Leave it up to the professionals at Hot Air to actually try to do something about it.
Last night, my friend Peter Ingemi expressed his dissatisfaction with the NBC debate — and the presidential debates in general — by proposing that Hot Air run a Republican primary debate, moderated by yours truly. Peter says he’s “dead serious” about this:
Just watched yet another GOP debate and was totally unamazed by the lack of questions on fast and furious and BS questions such as: “Why did the Bush Tax Cuts fail?”. I think political types are sick of questions from people who want the GOP to fail.
I have a solution:I suggest Hotair send an invitation to each candidate for a 2 hour debate moderated by Ed Morrissey.
This got quite a response on Twitter last night and this morning. It even has its own hashtag, #hotairdebate, and it’s been endorsed by the Boss Emeritus, Senate primary candidate Jamie Radtke, and a number of bloggers. It even got an Instapundit endorsement, who said the proposal “sounds like a winner.”
Sounds like a winner to me too.
For those of you who have teh Twitterz, I say we all tweet Mitt, Newt, Santorum and Paul’s Twitter accounts asking them–politely–if they could take part in a Hot Air debate. Hashtag the message with #hotairdebate. Lather, rinse, repeat for a good long while until somebody responds.
If they say yes, fine. If they say no, ask for an explanation. I mean, why would the GOP nominees allow themselves to be hammered by the raft of CNN/ABC/CBS/NBC lefty hack reporters, yet not take part in a debate at Hot Air?
Every single one of these candidates professes his fidelity to American conservatism. They seek the nomination of a party that advertises itself as a right-leaning caucus. All four of these men should jump at the chance to defend their records, define their ideas and make the case for their campaigns in front of a Hot Air audience.
Conservatives are rightfully annoyed by the debates. They’ve been run by liberals and for liberals. A Hot Air debate would do much to rectify the MSM bias in this primary season.
Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22 and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor.
“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.
“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly.
I was reading Ace’s remembrance of Hitch. Like Andrew Breitbart, I peruse Ace’s comments section almost as much as I read the posts themselves. Most commenters were respectful and more than a few were quite mournful of the loss of Mr. Hitchens. As the comments piled up, another train of thought developed, which could be characterized as the ‘Hooray, The Mouthy Atheist Gets His Comeuppance Sack Dance’. Several commenters, who identified themselves as Christians, seemed to revel in the fact that Hitchens would be damned for his atheism.
Tacky? Definitely.
An un-Christian response to the death of a human being? Surely.
But then again, what was the grand project of Christopher Hitchens’ life over the last decade? For many people–especially those not familiar with his stance on Islamic radicalism, his disgust for President Bill Clinton or his slow drift away from the political left–Hitch was best known as the public face of atheism. And it’s not like he was particularly gentle about his dislike for religious faith. No, he was a loud-n-proud attack dog for the anti-God side.
It isn’t all that shocking to find that many Christians grew tired of Hitchens’ snarling barely contained disdain for them. Believers are instructed to turn the other cheek and pray for their enemies, but believers are still human after all. Even the most patient Christian will chafe at having his beliefs trampled on over and over again. This is especially true when the trampler in question never bothers to wipe off his boots before stepping on his intended target. Hitchens’ brand of atheism was pointed, angry and more often than not insulting. When he railed against the Church or other religious institutions, it seemed as if his aim was not to change minds but to injure people he perceived as enemies.
In America and the West, Christians have endured decades of writers, entertainers, artists, intellectuals and other taste-makers who attempted to shame believers out of their faith. For many, Hitchens was simply the latest in a long line of pompous know-it-alls trying to make them feel stupid for taking the words of the Bible to heart. Seen in that light, it’s more surprising just how few Christians have piled on in the wake of Hitchens’ passing.
Beyond the question of religion, Christopher Hitchens was a writer that reveled in the act of making ideological allies uncomfortable. Since the time of Clinton’s impeachment, Hitchens was seen by many on the Left as a traitor to the cause. For the audacity of going against American liberalism’s champion, Hitch was vilified by the kind of people who had spent decades using him as an ideological buttress to hold up their arguments.
For many progressives, the final straw was Hitchens’ continuous defense of the Iraq War. The idea of Hitch making friends with the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush was simply too much for many committed leftists to tolerate. The excommunication of Hitchens from the socialist project was all but complete by 2004.
Even as the intellectual Left was ejecting a former comrade from their midst, Hitchens simply wouldn’t or couldn’t play nice in the sandbox with the Right either. Besides his utter hatred for organized religion he made sure to slam other facets of the broad traditionalist caucus. Sarah Palin got no love from Hitch. Neither did the Tea Party; Hitch accused the movement of racial bigotry whenever asked about it. Ronald Reagan, one of conservatism’s great political heroes, was worse than useless in the writer’s judgment.
How much of Hitchens’ argumentative rhetoric came from honest disagreement? How much of it was mere posturing? Sometimes it was hard to tell. The joy Hitchens seemed to take in making people squirm suggests that a good deal of his personality was a well-rehearsed form of contrarianism. This isn’t always so bad; there are far worse sins for a writer than being against the prevailing attitudes of his time.
Still, watch the clip and note how Hitchens goes after Reagan. From our vantage point in the Age of Trillion Dollar Obama, 90’s-era lefty critiques of Reagan’s budget deficits seem ridiculously quaint. More absurd is the sight of a man who at the time still considered himself a member of the socialist movement using national debt as a focus for his attack on the 40th president. For a polemicist who launched into countless tirades denouncing the hypocrisy of his various hate-figures, the grasping for this particular club to bash this particular target is just the sort of cynical opportunism Hitchens made a career out of railing against.
But what a career. To say Christopher Hitchens had a gift for writing is like saying that Lady Gaga has a passing interest in publicity. Even whenyoufoundyourselfdisagreeingwithhim, he was still far more interesting than most political writers are on their best days. Hitchens was a master of fusing his thunderous moralism to a seemingly effortless ability to create provocative imagery. For this alone, he will be missed by writers and readers across the globe.
But it wasn’t just his writing that made him great. His public persona, an improbable amalgamation of a priapic boozed-up British university student and a joyfully overfed bookworm, made him a joy to watch in a public debate. It was also that improbable mixture that was so surprising. A nicotine-fueled drunk nattering on in a cartoonish plummy Oxbridge accent about Cold War-era Eastern European leftists or some other historical obscurity should not be compelling, yet somehow Hitchens made it work. It’s possible that only he could’ve done pulled off that feat.
For this conservative, it was most enjoyable seeing Hitchens crack on his former leftist pals. Watch and laugh as Hitch eviscerates knee-jerk liberal Eric Alterman’s anti-Iraq War arguments. What comes across most clearly from the clip is the sense that Alterman could not—even at such a late hour--relinquish his lingering hurt over Hitchens’ defection from the liberal sphere. Even as Hitchens piles injury upon injury, Alterman still pines for Hitch to come back to liberal side of the aisle. The barely concealed passive aggression from Alterman gives the game away.
Sometimes a man is defined by his enemies. In many ways, Hitchens was defined by the old comrades he had pissed off over the course of his meandering exit from the progressive movement. The resentment still remains, even after a decade. Repellent lefty shrew Katha Pollitt took the occasion of Hitch’s passing to settle some bitter old scores with her former colleague. Kevin Drum damned himself by damning Hitchens with faint insult. Dave Zirin spun a chance barroom dust-up with Hitch into a comically melodramatic confrontation, complete with a bizarre slapdash amateur psychoanalysis of Hitchens to boot.
Again and again, one is faced with a rather startling revelation: The Left needed Christopher Hitchens far more than he ever needed them. They craved his stylish prose, his combativeness and his intellectual curiosity. More importantly, liberals desperately wanted to be able to claim Hitchens as theirs alone. When Hitch started palling around with liberalism’s enemies, it devastated the socialists--as it does still today.
Was Christopher Hitchens a right-winger, as his many progressive critics accused him of being? Surely not. William F. Buckley once said that an atheist could be a conservative, but a God-hater could not. Hitchens’ disgust for organized religion alone will probably always deny him entry into the conservative caucus. His various other heterodoxies from traditionalism make considering him a man of the Right impossible.
However, measuring Hitchens by this yardstick is unfair. The man loved his eccentricities more than being a rigid partisan. It was his sort of scattered unpredictable politics, the kind that infuriated both friends and enemies alike, that made him interesting. To complain about Hitchens’ lack of ideological ‘correctness’ misses the point. Hitch forced everyone who read him to question their own assumptions, even for just a moment. During a career that spanned several periods of ideological inflexibility, Hitchens' ability to break through convention is the greatest gift he could give to his readers.
Hitch would agree with the sentiment that the world is a far better place with people like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden dead. Conversely, the world is a far better place for having Christopher Hitchens live in it for sixty-two years.
So, what exactly is the debt ceiling? Put simply, it's an arbitrary limit set by Congress on the amount of money the U.S. government can borrow. The theory behind the debt ceiling, which was enacted during WWI, was that it would limit government borrowing and keep it from growing out of control.
CALLER: I was wondering, Mr. Limbaugh, what do you think if Washington and the government doesn't come up with a budget, is there a good chance that I will not be getting my Social Security check next month?
RUSH: Totally up to Obama.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: I'm gonna give you some numbers on this. Your Social Security check should be made with ease. There is money. In fact, one of the ways that it happens is that Treasury bonds, by law, will be sold and redeemed and the money used to fund Social Security payments.
CALLER: Hmm.
RUSH: That is a matter of law. It's certainly a matter of choice. It has nothing to do with running out of money.
Politicians will argue that when the US Treasury loses this ability then the US will default. This is however, technically incorrect. The US Treasury will be able to pay all of its $30 billion dollars in bondholding due the month of August at the expense of other programs from direct funds received from taxation. This would stop the US from going into a technical default and buy the Congress time to get its act together.
"The fact is we will pay our debts if it’s the last dollar we have. There are enough assets in Social Security and Medicare to pay the benefits of those programs for several years. Other programs can be funded from tax revenue. There certainly will be disruption...But this is not a deadline we should rush and make a bad deal and do something that cuts benefits from seniors without giving them better choices."
You know why the markets aren’t in complete panic over Obama’s reckless debt-ceiling brinksmanship? Because they don’t take it any more seriously than I do. It’s so transparently a phony political kabuki dance — a show-bizzy publicity stunt whereby Obama depicts himself as the Only Adult in the Room — that investors simply can’t believe anyone could be that stupid.
But “political reality” operates to different rules from humdrum real reality. Thus, the “debt ceiling” debate is regarded by most Democrats and a fair few Republicans as some sort of ghastly social faux pas by boorish conservatives: Why, everyone knows ye olde debt-limit vote is merely a bit of traditional ceremonial, like the Lord Chancellor walking backwards with the Cap of Maintenance and Black Rod shouting “Hats off, strangers!” at Britain’s Opening of Parliament. You hit the debt ceiling, you jack it up a couple trillion, and life goes on — or so it did until these GOP yahoos came along and decided to treat the vote as if it actually meant something.
And that's it, kids.
We are officially in a Democrat-managed fantasy land. Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi had a grand plan in the aftermath of the 2008 presidential election. The scheme entailed giving our money, our kids' money, our grandkids' money and our great-grandkid's money to a narrow collection of favored union hacks, crony capitalist suck-ups, racial grievance specialists and the bureaucrat class. When in the 2010 midterm elections the American public expressed it's deep-seated nervousness with the Donkey-Puncher Party's Mark McGwire on steroids spending, St. Barry of the Sacred Pantscrease decided he would simply ignore the public and continue as if the GOP House majority didn't exist.
That's why this is occurring. The President can yakkety-yak about protecting seniors or getting corporate jet owners to pay their fair share. Dude can go on prime time TV and make his lame-ass campaign sloganeering disguised as an actual policy speech. None of that matters.
The President has caused this fake as hell media-driven crisis. He wanted this to occur. Most of all, he wants enough Americans in full-on panic mode over this so he can paint the Republicans as wild-eyed maniacs and beat them in 2012.
It's always been about politics for Barack Obama. It's never been about making the nation stronger, getting the economy moving, putting people back into the workforce or even just keeping Social Security as is. With this man, the modus operandi is always getting as many people as possible to be dependent on government so he can than use those folks as a bought and paid for voting bloc for his reelection. Spending, deficits and debt don't even kinda enter into Obama's calculations.
Meanwhile, America is quickly coming to the point where her debt is going to be 100% of our GDP. That spells doom for...well...everything.
But whatever. Let's keep pissing our pants over Obama's manufactured crisis. That doesn't totally play into his hands and help his flagging political fortunes or anything.
Bob Belvedere, a blogger you need to read, takes this view of the modern liberal mindset.
Leftism is incompatible with American Values. It despises custom, morality,and Right Reason. It rejects the importance of tradition and, in fact, scorns and spits on it. Leftists seek not to learn from the wisdom of those who have come before them. They disdain the hard-won knowledge that politics is the art of the possible. They seek to remake the world in their image, to be as gods.
How can you deal with such people?
You can’t because they believe they have found The Answer — that secret knowledge that the man of the Right believes can only be known to God. The Left believes mankind can be perfected, whereas those on the Right know that Human Beings are, well, human, in the purest sense of the that word — they err and will always err, they are flawed and will always fail.
Thus, the Right seeks to craft governments and institutions that put checks on the damage erring men can do. The Left, on the other hand, believing that people can be perfected, sees no reason for such restraints. Their faith in the idea that the Eschaton can be Immanentized, leads them to brook no opposition because, well, how can you oppose the Illuminated Wisdom they have discovered unless you’re an idiot or a fool? It is a torturous logic they follow and it leads, inevitably, given the frustrations they will experience imposing it on their flawed fellow Human Beings, to them torturing their fellow Human Beings. And it has in every single place it has been tried.
Read the whole thing. It's that good. I'll be here when you come back.
People have been saying this for a while, but Mr. Belvedere's post is a strong reminder of a fundamental truth: The progressive movement has engaged in a slow-motion just-slightly-under-the-radar civil war on traditional America for at least the last 50 years. The roots of this conflict lie in several places. Early utopian dreamers like Hebert Croly and John Dewey, frustrated by 18th century classical liberalism, laid the intellectual framework for several generations of liberal activists. Woodrow Wilson's Constitution-bashing administration is a key component. FDR's 'let no crisis go to waste' opportunism enshrined many unconstitutional assumptions into the fabric of American politics. All of these factors and more led to the rise of the 60's-era New Left radicals such as Bernadine Dohrn, Tom Hayden and Noam Chomsky. This driving force in US politics has scored many victories in the last five decades.
A skeptical reader might ask how the last fifty years in American political life can be seen a 'war.' After all, it can be argued that the Constitution creates the conditions for gridlock, narrow-issue voting blocs and partisan rancor. One could make the case that the modern wrangling we see over the national debt, abortion and our various wars is nothing more than business as usual. To some extent, the people who take this position are not completely wrong.
However, consider the following scenario: a state supreme court threatens to create a right to gay marriage if the state legislature doesn't do it on their own. The earliest American thinkers--even Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall himself--couldn't have imagined a scenario where the legislature would be told by the judiciary to make a law. It goes against what most citizens in the modern era think of when they consider the roles of elected officials and the courts.
Think the situation laid out above is crazy? If you do, well, you're wrong. That's just the kind of insanity New York just went through in the push to legalize gay marriage.
The strategy used by the American Left, in which they use their ideological companions in the courts to force a result that progressives demand, is 'democratic' in roughly the same way that Josef Stalin's show trials were 'legal'. They both have the patina of the rule of law, but, in reality, they're both shams. In both instances, a large force bullies another party in order to come to a pre-determined outcome. Most importantly for our purposes, by going so far outside the bounds of constitutional law and tradition, progressives have all but abandoned previous understandings of how America governs itself. This amounts to nothing less than an act of war by the Left against groups of citizens it regards as not just political opponents, but as outright enemies.
It helps if one thinks about American politics like a football game. Imagine that the Washington Redskins are playing the New England Patriots. For three quarters, both sides play by the standard rules of the league. There are lead changes and penalties and back-and-forth action, but the teams play within the framework of NFL regulations; i.e. a touchdown is six points, pass interference is illegal, etc. Then, at the start of the fourth quarter, Washington announces that it will play the rest of the game with 12 players on offense and defense, as opposed to the customary 11. A few minutes later, the 'Skins proclaim that their team will play with a round soccer ball (as opposed to the regulation football) and that they can merely kick it anywhere into the end zone to score a touchdown. Moments later, Washington announces that it will arm its players with hockey sticks which their team can use in any way they please. Finally, the Redskins bribe the officials to allow the Washington club to do whatever the hell it wants.
In this admittedly fanciful situation, it should be clear that while the New England Patriots were busy following the previously understood rules of the NFL game, the Washington Redskins had abandoned playing football altogether. The Washington squad was playing an entirely different game in order to beat New England. They didn't just cheat in order to get a blatantly unfair advantage over their opponent. By going so far outside the regulations, they had in effect declared war on the Patriots.
The same is true of American liberals over the last several decades. They have used anonymous bureaucrats, the judicial branch, moronic Republicans, the mainstream media and any other useful club to expand the size of government and ravage the old Constitutional order. Rarely do liberals score major victories through legislation alone. When they do, it is usually done over the strenuous objections of the citizenry.
This is war. It's not a war fought with bullets or bombs (except when Bill Ayers is really worked up). Instead, it's a war fought with statist regulations, legislation from the bench, Arlen Specter and Learjet liberal Hollywood propaganda. But just because there aren't battlefields and graveyards doesn't mean there isn't a serious conflict going on in America between liberals and conservatives. Whoever wins that fight will determine not just the fate of America, but the world economic and political order created by the US's influence.
The Crack Emcee brings us a CNN anchor dude getting emo.
You’ve got to love this. They went after her – again – and they got nothing! All they’ve exposed is the media’s craven nature and it’s willingness to act as the go-to guy for the Democratic Party. Watch the clip. At one point the reporter looks *stunned* because he’s got to admit the person he’s “investigating” is somebody good who he clearly admires. It’s like he was given the job of killing a kid and he,..just,..can’t,…do it.
Da Emcee nails it...again.
How about we call the former governor by her rightful title. Sarah Palin: The Most Vetted Non-Presidential Candidate Ever.
Did anybody go through Barack Obama's e-mails as US Senator when he announced his run for the Presidency? If the media did, you never heard about it. Ya gotta think that if the lamestreamers did find anything in an Obama email nit-pick expedition, some producer or editor at one of the big media dogs would dutifully toss it down the memory hole. Wouldn't want the general public to get an unfoavorable impression of the Left's Chocolate Jesus sacred worship figure.
Numerous news outlets have decided to crowdsource the Palin e-mails. Did these same media organs go with this tactic when ObamaCare was being debated? How about Cap-n-Trade? What about the Porkulus? Nope. None of that got our Fourth Estate a-rolling like Palin's e-mails.
Amazing.
I'm a Herman Cain supporter. I hope he is the GOP nominee in 2012 because I think he's got the best shot at beating Obama. Having said that, here's an argument for a Sarah Palin presidential run: Nobody can touch the chick. They can't lay a glove on her. Her detractors couldn't hit her with an RPG if she was the broad side of a barn and they were standing ten feet away.
The Left throws everything at her. They have fired every salvo they possibly can. They've had squirrelly weirdo reporters move next door to her house. They engage in bizarre conspiracy theories about the 'true' mother of Trig Palin. They blow her verbal 'gaffes' into week-long exposes, then get cranky when it turns out that she was right.
The progressives almost always come out looking worse than she does whenever they get into a food fight with Palin. She makes them look ridiculous. Better still, because the left cannot stand to get humiliated, they forget the first rule of holes: when you've put yourself at the bottom of one, the first thing you should do is stop digging. Instead, they continue to take shots at her, hoping that just once they'll get lucky and put an end to her career in public life.
Chances are that the media has found every possible trouble spot Sarah Palin might have in her background. Barring something completely out of the blue, there are no scandals lurking in Palin's history. If there was, you can be sure the MSM would've reported it by now.
You can argue against Palin on stylistic grounds. You might think her snowbillyisms and folksy demeanor won't translate into a winning formula in a national election. You can even question some of her policy emphases.
The one big advantage Sarah Palin has over everyone else in the 2012 presidential field is that there will be no surprises. Every rock has been turned over. If she runs for the White House, you can be sure the media will keep digging into her past. You can also be sure that Palin will beat them more often than not. In a race that is certainly going to be a media-driven death march against whoever the GOP nominates, being a proven MSM slayer is no small thing.
I believe both parties, and most people in the public eye, would agree, if they could make an agreement which could be enforced and relied upon, that "We shall not beat up each other over this stuff."
That would accrue to everyone's interest in the political/media class. Note I speak only of this class. I am not saying that this agreement would serve anyone else's interests. But it would serve politicians' and media-types' interests.
You don't screw with me, I don't screw with you. For this class, such an agreement would be mostly upside.
But the problem is, of course, the same one as is the whole point of the Prisoner's Dilemma: You can't trust your opponents to go soft on you.
So what do you do? Concede the field, in which case only your own allies get pummeled like this, but you sweetly avoid pummeling their guys in the hopes that they will honor their side of the bargain?
They won't. They never do.
Read the entire piece. It's full of win.
Both American political parties, from the show horses on down to the foot soldiers, simply cannot maintain the kind of reciprocal understanding Ace describes. He's absolutely correct when he says that the political class would benefit enormously from a mutual agreement to shut the hell up about it's sex scandals. For a lot of reasons, politicos can't resist the attack dog urge. Interestingly, it wasn't always this way.
In the 60's, when John Kennedy had hot and cold running girls installed at the White House, the Republicans knew about JFK's peccadilloes and decided to keep their powder dry. Whether it was out of a desire to keep their own shenanigans private or just out of a sense of deference to the presidency, the GOP were tight-lipped about President Kennedy's numerous extramarital excursions. Congressman Weiner's misadventures in web-based hook-ups make it clear that the old early sixties circumspect attitude is not just gone, but probably can't come back.
This inability on the part of the Democrats and Republicans to hold their fire is a big reason why Mitch Daniels' idea of a truce on social issues is so monumentally wrong-headed. Who polices that agreement? Nobody could; even if every Washington DC politician said yes to it, no single person or organization would be trusted by either side to act as a fair mediator/enforcer.
Another problem with Daniel's truce is that even if the politicians went along with the deal, the mainstream media most certainly would not. The most knee-jerk attack dog partisans in American politics are the editors, producers and reporters that make up the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC and the rest of the lamestream Democrat Party rah-rah chorus. If they have access to information that helps Democrats or damages Republicans, they will run it. This will force Breitbart and his allies to do the same thing when they get information damaging to the Dems. The truce would be over almost before it started.
In fact, given how cuddly the MSM is with the Democrat party, a truce on social issues could only hurt Republicans. With the exception of Fox News and several big-name rightish blogs/websites, the conservative argument against abortion, gay rights and other lifestyle debates is almost never given a fair treatment by the big news outfits. Under the Daniels scenario, Democrats could truthfully say they weren't scoring points while their allies in the press and Hollywood kept pushing the progressive agenda. Republicans would have few options. They couldn't expect the MSM to help them out. Worse, the Republican's sorta allies on the Right blogs--the ones that might be able to pump up a conservative social agenda--just don't yet have the same kind of reach that the lamestreamers have in the media universe.
Finally, just how far down the political totem pole would the truce go? Would it only affect the Beltway folks? If that's the case, the social issues gag order would unravel as soon as a state legislature votes to approve gay marriage, put limits on abortion, allow prayer in school or mandate that teachers instruct students on condom use. Just because DC pols swear off social issues legislation doesn't mean the states have to. As soon as a controversial social issue flared up at the state level, national Republicans and Democrats would almost have to weigh in. That would put enormous pressure on the truce's architecture; once one politician says something, others are going to want to discuss it too.
Weiner's train wreck is a reminder of just how impossible a voluntary censorship of any kind is in modern politics. Political figures cannot be bound by informal gag orders. Mutually assured partisan destruction won't hold anybody back from using damn near any club to beat their opponents over the head. The price is too low and the payoffs are too high.
Allahpundit over at HotAir.com makes an astute observation about the rising political fortunes of Herman Cain.
By the way, note his choice of hat here and the country/western soundtrack. Like I said after Frank Luntz’s focus group went nuts for him in South Carolina, he may very well emerge as the “southern candidate” in the field. How the media’s going to square that with their deathless assumptions about southern conservative racism, I have no idea — but it’ll be amazing to watch.
Read the rest, I’d say.
What does it mean to be from the South? If you listen to the scions of popular culture, all you have to do to find a racist sexist homophobe proto-fascist is talk to a denizen of old Dixie for five seconds. It’s such a lazy intellectually dishonest position, but many people have internalized that sentiment. For some, merely hearing a Southern accent means the speaker is thinly-disguiseduber bigot. The truth is far more nuanced, and much kinder to Southern folk, than tired shopworn stereotypes.
Does racism exist in the South? Of course it does. Flawed human beings, not choirs of angels, live in the South. The real issue is just how much race plays in electoral politics. The 2008 presidential election gives us an indication of the race factor. It seems like the answer is 'Not nearly as much as you might think'. Barack Obama beat up on John McCain in North Carolina and Virginia, two key members of the old Confederacy. Obama's victories would suggest that caucasian persuasion racial animus wasn't enough to stop voters in these states from pulling the Donkey Lever.
Since the South isn't a bastion of knee-jerk race hate, here's an interesting question--What happens when 60% of Southern whites vote for Herman Cain in the 2012 general election? How does pop culture, with all of its built-in lefty prejudices, react to that?
There are two probable outcomes to that hypothetical scenario. One is that Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment universe will pull an Officer Barbradyand act like that Cain's snagging the cracker vote is no big deal. The South is still racist, but those stupid hillbilly wingnuts are so thick that they can't help but vote Republican even though the GOP nominee is a black man. Lord knows the media loves to ignore things that mess with their preferred narratives. The old head-firmly-buried-in-ones-own-ass approach has served the entertainment biz quite well over the years, so this is quite likely to happen once again.
The other possibility is that pop culture figures acknowledge that southern whiteys voted for a black man, but will argue that Herman Cain doesn't count as a true brother because he's conservative. As strange as that sounds, it's well within the bounds of cultural Left's playbook. According to Jesse Jackson Jr., if you're black and you don't vote for health care reform, you're not really black. According to the weird feminist sisters, Sarah Palin's right-of-center leanings means she's not really a woman.
Both of the above predictions/probabilities make the Left look incredibly stupid. Which is all the more reason why Herman Cain should be the Republican nominee for President in 2012. Make Cain the GOP standard-bearer, then watch how Alec Baldwin, Tina Fey and Chris Rock struggle to explain that Herman Cain's victory doesn't count as racial tolerance. Failing that, put Cain at the top of the ticket, then get a good hearty laugh when doucherocket cultural critics like Michael Eric Dyson and Cornell West try to explain to average Americans that Herman Cain really is not black.
Summary: "I'm not apologizing for RomneyCare. I thought it was cool, so whatevs. Also, I'm not changing anything from my 2008 health care plan because that would look like I was flip-flopping and I sorta have an image problem about being a slippery political weasel."
No really, watch the clip. Then come back and tell me that's not pretty much what homeboy said.
Meanwhile, Allahpundit does his counter-intuitive reaction thing to Romney's speech.
No one would have believed him had he apologized so there was no sense in doing it. On the contrary, if I were advising him, I’d tell him to go on the attack and make his opponents be as specific as possible in what they’d do differently. The more he can discredit their plans as unworkable, the more he can reframe RomneyCare as the best choice from a very bad set of health-care policy options. In fact, if he’s feeling extra cheeky, he could use the public’s ruinous love affair with Medicare to his advantage. Under RomneyCare, the state forces you to buy a product from a third party; under Medicare, the state forces you to buy the same product from the state. It simply calls it a tax instead of a mandate, and instead of granting you coverage immediately, it shafts you until you’re 65. Do Pawlenty, Gingrich, et al. also oppose the “mandated” premiums known as FICA? I’m not sure Romney wants to go the Mediscare route since it’ll make fiscal cons even angrier at him than they are now, but if he gets desperate enough, look out.
If Mitt has any chance of getting the GOP nomination, Republican primary voters will first have to get over their lingering reservations about Romney's past social liberalism and his more recent changes of political heart. Importantly, the party rank-n-file will have to get over it's virulent hatred for ObamaCare. If the President's government medicine scheme is no longer seen as a huge threat, RomneyCare will not seem like such a big deal. That means that Mitt won't have to keep defending his Massachusetts health plan. Most of all, issues like foreign policy or terrorism, will have to come to the forefront of GOPers concerns.
The rub for Romney is that his doubling-down strategery can only be successful if a bunch of things break his way. The irony here is that super-achiever alpha dog Mitt finds himself in a position akin to a middling baseball team just before the regular season begins. What do the managers of these kind of clubs always say? 'If our ace starting pitcher stays healthy, we'll win a pile of games.' 'We can be successful if the third baseman can repeat his slugging stats from last year.' 'The team is gonna do real well if a few of our rookies pan out and live up to their potential.'
Ball clubs like that almost never succeed. Why? Because there are simply too many factors that have to go right. Let's say the stud hurler keeps himself from getting hurt for the entire year. That doesn't mean those year one noobs are going to pan out. The third baseman who hammered fifty home runs last season? He just tested positive for cattle steroids and will be lucky to plink out fifteen dingers after his fifty game suspension and his lack of chemically-enhanced power.
Romney is in the same position. Because of his problematic voting record and his insistence on defending his health care plan, Mitt has to rely on a heaping helping of good fortune. All politicians require a large infusion of luck to get elected. In Romney's case, his chances ride on a set of circumstances that isn't likely to fall into place. By making this speech, Romney has decided that he's most likely not going to be president.
I ask because that's the only reason I can figure why he pwns himself, then doubles down on stupid via his Twitter stream.
In a recent post at the Washington Post's site, juicebox mafia capo Klein thinks he's figured out who Barack Obama really is.
Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is — or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican from the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.
If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a health-care plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal coverage; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans staked out in the early ’90s — and often, well into the 2000s.
It's important to note just who is making this wack-job statement. As noted by my new blog homie Proof, Ezra Klein was the founder of the junior high mutual zit-squeezing club Journolist. The four hundred reporters, academics, professional liberals and assorted mouth breathers in the listserv were basically a wing of the Obama presidential campaign in 2008, with future Obambi Cabinet members to boot. Needless to say, Klein has a serious intellectual interest in rehabilitating his teeny bopper fan boi crush's political fortunes.
Now, let's look at the 90's era Republican's 'best ideas'. The individual mandate that some Republicans championed back in the day was...and more importantly, is...unconstitutional. I know Klein thinks the Constitution is just some old impossible to understand scrap of parchment, but when something is plainly unconstitutional that pretty much makes it a stupid idea, not a good one.
As for cap-n-trade, I don't know if paid Washington Post journalist Ezra Klein has been keeping up with current events, but anthropogenic climate change has been revealed to be a fraud. C&T was a policy cooked up in response to fears of global warming caused by man-made carbon dioxide emissions. Why would Republicans keep advocating a policy that supposedly solves a problem that does not in fact exist?
Finally, we get to Klein lauding President George HW Bush for raising taxes. Ezra pats Pappy on the back for 'getting the job done' on the 1990 budget deal in his original piece. Funny thing is that Klein never really specifies how these tax hikes were successful, either as policy or politics. He just sorta says they are and moves on.
When confronted about the shakiness of his 'Republican raises taxes = epic win' theory, Klein has a ready retort:
This is the part when you realize that debating Ezra Klein is like having a discussion with Barry Bonds about the dangers of performance enhancing drugs. No, it's even worse than that. It's like debating a pre-med student on specific techniques and methods involved in neurosurgery. The dude is simply in way over his head.
How did Bush the Elder get wacked for raising taxes? For one thing, Bill Clinton hammered him for it in campaign ads.
That ad was a staple of Clinton's 1992 campaign. What makes the spot so effective--and what Ezra Klein simply cannot grasp--is that HW Bush's raising taxes gave Clinton ammunition that didn't just wound the President, but also damaged the Republican brand on a critical everyday checkbook issue. Why does Klein think people vote for the GOP anyway if not because of tax policy? It must be for the Republican's famous snappy fashion sense and party-hearty attitude [sarc/].
The best part of Klein's journey into fail is when he is again confronted with his stunning lack of understanding, he resorts to the lamest of rhetorical evasions and promptly moves the goalposts. But hey, far be it from me to point out how badly his argument is falling apart. Let's let Klein's own source, that he dutifully pointed out, do it for us.
If politicians are not rewarded at the polls for the choices they make, don't expect other politicians to make similar choices.
What exactly are we dealing with here? Klein brings up a political period from the recent past. It's not like it's a hundred years ago, when the issues and characters involved are far removed from our current context. Nor are we talking about particularly deep or convoluted political theory. No, this stuff is pretty easy to understand.
Which makes me believe that Ezra Klein is not just another overpaid undersmart liberal. By producing such an elementary amateurish piece--and then digging further down into the proverbial hole--it's clear Klein is a masochist.
Blogger pal Chris Wysocki of the great Wyblog notes that we're entering a very special season.
Yes, it's that time of the year again. Time for the feminuts to whinge about Lilly Ledbetter and having to work for slave wages just because they don't have a penis.
Except it's not true. None of it. There is no male-female wage gap.
Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women's earnings are going up compared to men's.
I want a raise.
Haha, you and me both homie.
First of all, you should be reading Wyblog because he rules, so get to it.
The popping of the male/female pay differential myth is a needed reality check for the ultra orthodox feminist left. As necessary as this story is, it's just as important to recognize that the Feministing/GloriaSteinem cohort absolutely will not budge from their militantly wrong assertion that men get paid more then women. It's a foundational doctrine of feminism; going against that sacred text would be like asking David Brooks to stop writing hand-wringing mush-mouthed columns for the New York Times.
The thing is, the popular understanding of feminism (as opposed to the far-left campus version) got a few things right. Women should be paid the same as men for the same kind of work. That's just fair.
However, the further down the reading list you go on the Sisterhood of The Snarling Harridans' syllabus, the more incorrect stuff you find. From the role of men to the bizarre confused ideas about abortion, lefty feminists can't create paradigms that even sorta resemble reality.
The worst mistake that feminists have made in the last 40 years is their relentless denigration of motherhood. Remember when Academy Award-winning actress Natalie Portman described becoming a mother as "...the most important role of my life"? For many people, this was a charming sentiment. For at least a few feminists, this was simply not kosher. Check out Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams' reaction to Ms. Portman's announcement (quoted from The Other McCain):
Why, at the pinnacle of one’s professional career, would a person feel the need to undercut it by announcing that there’s something else even more important? Even if you feel that way, why downplay your achievement? Why compare the two, as if a grueling acting role and being a parent were somehow in competition? And remind me — when was the last time a male star gave an acceptance speech calling fatherhood his biggest role?
For now, forget the tin-eared insensitivity. That's a feature--not a bug--when it comes to feminist writing. More importantly, Ms. Williams' sentiment is a symptom of fundamental misreading of the importance of being a mother.
The Left in general, and feminism in particular, has spent a great deal of time, effort and money infiltrating the commanding heights of the culture. From the universities to the federal bureaucracy, feminists have carved out a sphere of influence from which they can push their ideas. In the course of a few decades, radicalized women (and not a few indoctrinated men) have become a sizable part of the national discussion on any number of issues.
The problem is that even with all the influence feminists currently wield, it pales in comparison to the power that mothers have in shaping the future. If feminists really wanted to create a society where, in the words of Gloria Steinem we raised girls like boys and boys like girls, feminists would be squeezing out children by the cart-load and raising the kids from the nanosecond they're born. Mothers have the kind of 24/7/365 access to a child's mind that a feminist ideologue can only dream about in her fevered fantasies.
Imagine if feminism hadn't drifted into BettyFriedan/BarbaraEhrenreich employment-centrism in the early 1970's, but instead had focused on actually changing American culture at its roots. The results would be stark. In fact, if that had occurred, the US would be hardly recognizable.
Conservatives and traditionalists often become angry when feminists demean the vital importance of motherhood. It's an understandable reaction; nurturing matriarchs are central to the emotional life of almost everyone and it's hard to hear it when some campus theorist makes it seem like mothers aren't important. Instead of being angry when feminists dismiss motherhood, we should just politely nod and move on, rather than give these leftist maniacs any bright ideas.
The great Jerome Corsi documents yet another shrapnel fragment flying off the continuing Obama train wreck.
Bill Ayers: One more, one more (question)
Question:Thank you sir, thank you, thank you. Time magazine columnist Joe Klein wrote that President Obama's book, "Dreams from My Father," quote: "may be the best written memoir ever produced by an American politician."
Ayers: I agree with that.
Question:What is your opinion of Barack Obama's style as a writer and uh …
Ayers: I think the book is very good, the second book ("The Audacity of Hope") is more of a political hack book, but uh, the first book is quite good.
Question: Also, you just mentioned the Pentagon and Tomahawk …
Ayers: Did you know that I wrote it, incidentally?
Question: What's that?
Ayers: I wrote that book.
Several audience members: Yeah, we know that.
Question: You wrote that?
Ayers: Yeah, yeah. And if you help me prove it, I’ll split the royalties with you. Thank you very much.
Oooooof.
WND contributor Jack Cashill seems to thinkthis is a shot across Barack Obama's bow. In his opinion, the very anti-war Bill Ayers is angry at Obama for the President's Libyan war kinetic military action. I think that's a pretty good assessment.
I don't believe that's the entire story here though. I think Bill Ayers is suffering from a classic case of 'Tire Tracks From Under Obama's Bus' Syndrome. Peace Prize Barry basically used Ayers like a kleenex. Instead of Ayers catching at least a little credit for penning Dreams--something like 'By Barack Obama and William Ayers'--homeboy got a whole lot of nothing.
It might have been easier on Ayers to get no props for Dreamswhen Obambi was a hack community rabble-rouser or a benchwarming Illinois state Senator. When the former Weatherman watched Obama become a Democrat Party show-horse and media-created President, without ever acknowledging Bill Ayers' full contribution to the St. Bambi mythos, that was probably incredibly grating. Obama's North African adventurism may have been simply the last straw.
More importantly than Bill Ayers needing to recover from his skinned knee and bruised ego, this episode is just one more nail in the coffin for the Barack Obama 2008 campaign narrative. Dreams From My Fatherwas a big piece of Obama's intellectual curriculum vitae. As opposed to the supposedly illiterate Dubya or the crusty old warrior John McCain, Candidate Lightbringer was a serious author who had written not one, but two books. Dreams and The Audacity of Hope were meant to display Barry's intellectual firepower. While the junior Senator from Illinois had almost no legislative accomplishments, his alleged mastery of the written word was supposed to assure nervous voters that they were supporting a true Renaissance man.
And now we see the myth of Obama's intellectualism crumbling. All it took was one of the key enablers in Bamster's web of lies to get pissed off at his former protegé. Barry's chickens are finally coming home to roost.
But really, one can't be completely shocked when a politician as weaselly as Barack Obama is found out to have inflated his resume. To paraphrase Winston Churchill's comments about Clement Atlee, Senator HopeyChangey's barely-there congressional record had much to be humble about. No empty-suit candidate with a similar doughnut hole in his history could do anything else. Obama is clearly no exception to this fibbing phenomenon.
The blame for Obama being able to pull off this sham rests not with the president, but with the American mainstream press. The New York Times/MSNBC/Washington Post Axis of Fail constantly pats itself on the crotch for brave truth-telling. Instead of digging into Obama's shady past, they did everything they could to bury damaging details about their preferred candidate and attacked his opposition.
Better still, this MSM willful blindness also reveals just how badly they suck at the one job in which they're supposed to be experts. They're the ones who were supposed to figure out just how much Bill Ayers figured into Barack Obama's narrative. The lamestream press allowed the illusion of Barack Obama's superior intelligence--a major component of his appeal to voters--to flourish without a question. By doing that, they set themselves up to be punked by bloggers who have shown more initiative in the last two years than Big Media has shown in the last two decades.
UPDATE: Now a big ole' Memeorandum thread too. Time to pile on while the piling on is good, I say.
Via the American Thinker. I think John Hawkins is spot on in detecting the sarcasm here, but if you’re inclined to believe that Ayers is The One’s ghostwriter, you’re bound to detect a “deeper truth” in his tone.
... I think he enjoys mocking people who push this idea and enjoys it doubly when they can’t detect the mockery. In fact, I’d bet that this is his stock response anytime the book is mentioned in his presence — insisting that he wrote it to see if the listener laughs and then toying with them if they seem credulous. But as I say, your mileage may vary.
Yeah, this doesn't exactly work for me. AP's analysis blithely discounts Jack Cashill's work that pretty much proves that Bill Ayers wrote "Dreams". Cashill lays out the bones of his argument here.
To credit Dreamsto Obama alone, one has to posit any number of near miraculous variables: he somehow found the time; he somewhere mastered nautical jargon and postmodern jabberwocky; he in some sudden, inexplicable way developed the technique and the talent to transform himself from stumbling amateur to literary superstar without any stops in between.
If anything, the last few years should make Cashill's thesis even more believable. The Duffer-in-Chief is not exactly breaking his back as President. Dude works harder on his NCAA basketball brackets than on seemingly anything else. The guy requires a teleprompter for both formal and informal occasions. It seems highly unlikely that Barack Obama would put in the work necessary to become a strong writer.
Moreover, why can't two things be true at once? Why can't Bill Ayers be sarcastic and be telling the truth at the same time? I mean, it's sorta weird, but it's not such a strange thing. Ayers is a squirrelly lib hack. It makes weird sense that he'd do something so goofy and underhanded. Homeboy probably gets a little thrill thinking how clever he is laying out this secret in plain view.
Baldilocks wondered when President Obambya was gonna get around to asking Congress for authority to...you know...go to war.
I too have a question--Does SuperGenius Hussein McSmartyPants have a plan or is he just making it up as he goes along?
“Our military action is in support of an international mandate from the [United Nations]Security Council that specifically focuses on the humanitarian threat posed by Colonel Qadhafi to his people,” the American president said. “Not only was he carrying out murders of civilians, but he threatened more.”
Okee-dokee, St. Barry. So you're just doing your Euro-hip Nobel Prize winning humanitarian act. Right. Got it.
“I also have stated that it is U.S. policy that Qadhafi needs to go,” Obama said, noting that a United Nations resolution last week authorizing force against Libya is based on humanitarian concerns, not regime change. “When it comes to our military action…we are going to make sure that we stick to that mandate.”
Wait...what?
I hate to get pushy about this, but which one is it Bamster? Are we enforcing a no-fly zone, or are we trying to stick a fork into Mad Moammar?
Maybe we should ask newly butched-up warlord Nicholas Sarkozy what the hell is going on here. He might have a clue. Obama clearly does not. Even better than the President's feckless display of spectacular obliviousness is the fact that he's created a foreign policy scenario where a sawed-off twerpy French Prime Minister probably has the best handle on the situation.
Besides Obama delivering the change we can all be horrified by, it's important to consult history. Erwin Rommel famously remarked, "No plan survives contact with the enemy." Very true, but the Field Marshall never told us what would happen to the plan when we finally made contact with our allies. In case you've gotten confused, we're supposed to be protecting Libyan rebels from the predations of Colonel Qadaffi. Nobody really knows who the hell these people are, who they're friends with or what kind of government they want to create in the place of the current. Armed with that lack of information, of course we should throw our support behind the Libyan rebel forces.
Just to be clear: Obama has just gotten us into a war where we're not really calling the shots while we're somehow doing most of the fighting with no clear idea what victory would look like for people who probably despise us with a thousand year old Kaaba-sized chip on their shoulders and who will most likely plot against us once we're done doing the wet work for them.
...among the leftmost wing of the House Democrats. Good to see it.
Reps. Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.), Donna Edwards (Md.), Mike Capuano (Mass.), Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), Maxine Waters (Calif.), Rob Andrews (N.J.), Sheila Jackson Lee (Texas), Barbara Lee (Calif.) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C.) “all strongly raised objections to the constitutionality of the president’s actions [in Libya]” during that call, said two Democratic lawmakers who took part.
Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) even asked why President Obama's actions aren't impeachable. And from an unnamed Democrat lawmaker:
“They consulted the Arab League. They consulted the United Nations. They did not consult the United States Congress...They’re creating wreckage, and they can’t obviate that by saying there are no boots on the ground. … There aren’t boots on the ground; there are Tomahawks in the air.”
In my previous post, a guest tries to float (verb usage intentional) the idea that there was no congressional authorization for either of the Iraq Wars, among other actions in which the United States Military has been ordered to engage. Of course the assertion about the two Iraq conflicts was easily disputed. I haven't bothered to look up the others, most of which were conducted by Democrat presidential administrations.
I do hope the Left wing of the congressional Democrats stands firm. We will see.
A great deal of commentary and comments has been generated which compares the horrendous situation in Japan to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Observers note that while New Orleans residents—and even police officers—took disaster’s opportunity to loot businesses and homes, the Japanese survivors of the 9.0 earthquake and the resultant tsunami have absolutely abstained from such behavior. People who know far more about Japan than I have concluded that the absence of such behavior is due to Japan’s singular, nearly undiluted culture—a thousand-year long tradition in which honor is the only thing one has and the loss of which is the greatest loss imaginable.
This makes sense. After all, most material things that are lost can be accrued again relatively quickly while one is still living. Lost honor, however, is very tough to regain and is, sometimes, gone forever.
Some of the comments have bordered on the racialist—that the Japanese don’t loot because it’s not in their racial make-up and that others—namely blacks—do so because it is part of our racial make-up. Leaving aside the insult, I think the difference goes deeper than that, even deeper than the concept of lost honor. There’s something that the Japanese understand which all too many black and other Americans used to understand but now do not: that what one does in public and how one treats his/her neighbor(s) affects not only the individuals involved but also the entire community. This concept applies to local communities and to the larger community; the nation. Not understanding that is the downside of individualism. (Of course, honor-shame cultures have their downsides as well; Japan has a very high rate of suicide.)
I submit that Katrina’s New Orleans was a manifestation of a people—namely black people—who have voluntarily given up their honor and their sense of shame. They have abandoned themselves.
Black Americans—specifically, the descendants of American slavery--are the most American of Americans; I said this before and I’m certainly not the first to make this observation. Unlike all other immigrants to America, our ancestors were forcibly cut off from all of the totems of their various West African tribes: names, languages, family structures, belief systems. These things have buoyed all other ethnic groups—including recent African immigrants—in their sojourn to this country and all of them had the choice to hold onto the elements of their cultures that fit into the American ideal and discard those which were incompatible. American slaves were granted no such luxury. Our ancestors were emptied of their identities and re-created in the image of what America had for them. And, up until roughly fifty years ago, much of that image was molded by oppression and scorn.
However, most black Americans held on tightly to the universal totems of personal and communal honor: love of God, family, love of community, industriousness, self-reliance--all of which also flow and follow from America’s founding document. (That America strayed away from those principles with respect to black Americans isn’t the point, that those principles even existed is. And, with those concrete principles in hand, black Americans were able to point to them and say to other Americans, “live up to your—to our-- principles.”)
We may stem from Africa, but we are not of Africa—not even me. Our character and (sub)culture are wholly American and, largely, our American ancestors fashioned these for themselves--appropriating most of the good things which America had to offer and which largely insulated them from the bad. That is the inheritance which all too many of us have repudiated.
What we saw in New Orleans after Katrina was a microcosm of the character disintegration of this most American of Americans. It wasn’t born of DNA nor of the historical effects of slavery; it was born of the wholesale abandonment of a character tried and refined by fire and of the principles which held black Americans together in prior times of adversity.
If mother and father don’t love child enough to at least try to create the most tried and true environment for the nurturing of that child, it follows that neither mother, nor father, nor child will love and respect neighbors or community. We declined en masse the prescriptions and proscriptions of God regarding the family and allowed government to usurp the place of the head of the family--the husband/father/leader/protector. We abandoned the identity which our forebears shaped for us and put chaos in its place. And when disaster strikes, it’s every man and woman for self. Multiply that times a few million.
In short, the average Japanese person loves his (Japanese) neighbor and does not covet that which belongs to that neighbor. It’s part of their culture—their belief system. And they’ve held to that system without Judaism or Christianity being a significant part of their society. They know who they are and from whence they’ve come.
Matt over at the Conservative Hideout has some thoughts on the so-called 'Worst Generation'.
My parent’s generation spent the wealth that was so painfully earned by their parents. Then, they created failed program after failed program, all paid for with trillions of borrowed dollars. And when the programs were clearly failures, and, in fact, made things worse, they plodded on. The kept following the leftist narrative, and never-ever cut their own benefits, no matter how unsustainable they were. They also rejected the spirit of their parents, who had endured the great depression, and survived WW II. Their parents had sacrificed, but the boomers wanted what they wanted, and they wanted it immediately.
Read the whole piece, ya'all.
While I agree with much of Matt's sentiments, I think the Baby Boomers sometimes get a bad rap. After all, they didn't come up with Social Security. That was second-gen progressive Franklin Roosevelt's idea. The Great Society programs--Medicare, Aid To Families With Dependent Children--were dreamed up by Lyndon Johnson.
No, the Boomers didn't create a lot of the now-crumbling social spending architecture that threatens to destroy America. What many folks in the post WWII generation did was assume that the nationalized Ponzi schemes and subsidization of personal failure they inherited from older generations were going to continue without consequence. With that monumentally absurd analysis in place, the New Left movements that arose in the Baby Boom generation set about creating ideologies and rationalizations that reinforced their flawed assumptions.
Look at one example. Conservatives assert that welfare is destroying the American family. Baby Boom feminists (and their intellectual progeny) argue that the traditional family is outdated and sexist. The nuclear familial arrangement, with its coercion and fundamental unfairness towards women, is not worth being concerned about. The dissolution of that unfair institution is not only necessary, it should be welcomed. Welfare might be hurting marriage and the old family arrangements, but it's just doing the needed work to get society to the post-traditonal family that feminists crave.
While some elements of the Boomer left were busy cementing themselves into soft socialism and cultural Marxism, many others entered into the media. Take a gander at who sets the agenda in much of the MSM. Arthur 'Pinch' Sulzberger, the head of the New York Times, was born in 1951. Steve Capus, president of NBC News, was born in 1963. The editor of the Washington Post is Marcus Brauchli, who was born in 1961.
These folks--and many others in the legacy media--are all part of the post-war Baby Boom. How many times have you watched some gauzy nostalgia-laden montage of 60's and 70's era protests/concerts/hippie love-ins/Timothy Leary yammerings? The reason why these dreadful creations are so ubiquitous is because the Boomers who look back at that time so fondly are the ones who make up the majority of American news organizations. Further, most of the contemporary coverage of the baby boom social movements are almost always positive. The excesses of dudes like Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman or Bill Ayers are generally airbrushed away. Even better? The self-congratulation to actual accomplishment ratio is usually quite skewed. "Hooray for us, we stopped the Vietnam War and stuff. Also, we listened to the Velvet Underground, so yeah..." Yikes.
Because Baby Boomers--especially lefty boomers--dominate the media, they paint a distorted picture of 60's/70's youth. If you just watched CNN or read Time Magazine, you'd think every teenager in America from 1966 to 1978 was an idealistic acid-gobbling Vietnam War protester who lived on commune in Southern California with her Native American spirit guide, seven sex partners and five children named after various wildflowers while David Crosby constructed ever more elaborate water bongs and Gloria Steinem ritualistically burned her bra. The reality is that boomers during their formative years inhabited a broad continuum, from stern straight-laced traditionalists to wild-eyed liberal doucherockets, and that many of these neat categorizations we're fed just don't add up.
What is the worst sin of the Baby Boomers? The knee-jerk leftism to which some of them continue to bitterly cling is annoying as hell. The unreal self-descriptions and constant back-patting is tiresome. The thing is that none of them would be particularly fatal. They'd just be aggravating.
The most egregious error committed by the Boomers isn't any of that crap. According to Stanley Kurtz, via the great Pundette, the issue for the 'Worst Generation' is the fact that they didn't make babies.
In 2005, I reviewed some of the first books on the subject and concluded that a demographically induced economic crisis could spark a revival of religious traditionalism, a far more radical decomposition of the family, or both.
At the time, it looked as if a possible demographically-induced economic crisis was at least a couple of decades away. We seem to be running ahead of schedule. To a large extent, the economic troubles here and in Europe already factor in the unsustainable entitlements of the future.
Although an economic crisis is imminent, and the underlying cause demographic, I haven’t noticed many calls for increased child-bearing. That is in striking contrast to the world-wide movement in response to the less proximate and more theoretical global warming crisis. It’s a measure of how unthinkable changes in our post-sixties life-styles still are. Yet it doesn’t mean change won’t happen, if and when a demographic-economic crisis truly strikes.
It probably doesn't matter all that much that a lot of Boomer peeps smoked a gazillion pounds of OG Kush looking for a cheap buzz or a spiritual experience or whatever. The tendency for elf-esteem boosting hagiography of 60's and 70's accomplishments doesn't explain our present difficulties. The leftist leaning of many in that generation by itself doesn't damn the post-war generation.
The fact that they couldn't be bothered to squeeze out a few more kids here and there is the lasting destructive legacy of the baby boom demographic. In many cases, it wasn't purposeful. Their intentions were often noble, or at least not totally self-serving anyway. Often there were perfectly rational rationalizations for their reproductive decisions. Career moves, financial choices, a concern for the environment, bad relationships, high divorce rates; all those things tend to slow down the baby-making. More, all of these factors could've happened to any generation.
I really don't think baby boomers sat down as an entire generational cohort and decided to stop making kids as much as their parents did. I also don't think they all planned a demographic collapse that would threaten the entire economic future of the America. There were definitely more than a few Boomers who were worried about overpopulation, but for the most part it was a host of decisions and life events that slowed the Boomer breeding.
The problem here is, like so many other good (or at least not-evil) intentions, America has managed to pave a road right into the abyss with miles of supposedly good plans and allegedly smart ideas. The Boom generation didn't mean for this to happen. Nonetheless, we find ourselves in dire circumstances due to some very misguided decisions.
This is the test of our democracy. Ms Piven must be delighted.
'Delighted?' That repellent old socialist windbag is panting for more of the same as we speak.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, where all but the most blinkered left-wing ideologues actually live, Herman Cain throws down a marker.
Big ups to RS McCain for posting this vid. Read the rest of his piece as he makes some good points and includes a smidge of Breitbart magic as well.
As for Herman Cain, he declares, "Wisconsin in ground zero for the rest of America"
Listen to this man. He speaks the God's honest truth here.
As I said in an earlier post, Obama has sent his troops into this fight. Organizing For America pretty much sat on its hands during the 2010 election season. Unlike in November, the President has decided to enter this battle with both barrels blazing. He is gambling that with OFA assistance, rent-a-goon union tactics and good old fashioned media bias, he can get Wisconsin Republicans to back down.
Obama must not be allowed to win this fight.
Ponder this scenario: The GOP in Wisconsin is broken. They give in to Democrat demands and business as usual reconvenes. The consequences from that loss would be dramatic and immediate. First, this will embolden the Obama political hack groups to pull this kind of stuff anytime a fiscally conservative statehouse gets too uppity. If the Cloward/Piven/Alinsky tactic works in CheeseHeadLand, the Left will naturally seek to use these same political moves everywhere else. Obama will send out OFA to infiltrate, disrupt and disarm any state's attempts to slow the growth of government.
Governors from states that are in similarly dire budgetary straits--like all 50 of them--will look at this hypothetical conservative failure in Wisconsin with great interest. They will learn that there is no political gain to be had from trying to evade the budgetary dilemmas they face. Runaway entitlements, public-sector union issues, basic fiscal discipline...all those concerns will go by the wayside. Politicians will instead recalibrate their messages to voters; the big fight in the next election cycle will be which party can best deliver the gubmint cheeeeeeeez to state-dependent voters.
Just a reminder: Even after the compassionate conservatism of the Bush years, Republicans will never--EVER--win that argument. If faced with the prospect of Republicans offering an efficient well-organized welfare state or Democrats promising a generous fluffy relaxing social safety hammock, voters will choose the Donkey Punchers every time. When a little kid cries for a Snickers bar, he really doesn't care how much money Mommy saved when she bought the thing. No, the child only cares that the chocolate goody gets to him as soon as possible and that there is more where that came from. Same thing with is true with the electorate if faced with that kind of 'choice.'
What Obama and the Dems are trying to do is nothing less than the repeal of the 2010 midterms.
Wisconsin might not be America's political Ragnarok. Perhaps I'm misreading just how big this thing is. However, the fact that Barack Obama has decided to expend such effort and has unleashed his rabble-rousers tells me that this is a massive deal.
Daniel Pipes ponders the notion of an Islam compatible with democracy.
Just as Christianity became part of the democratic process, so can Islam. This transformation will surely be wrenching and require time. The evolution of the Catholic Church from a reactionary force in the medieval period into a democratic one today, an evolution not entirely over, has been taking place for 700 years. When an institution based in Rome took so long, why should a religion from Mecca, replete with its uniquely problematic scriptures, move faster or with less contention?
Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. Pipes breaks down some of the massive hurdles Islam has to leap over in order to embrace democratic ideals.
A point Pipes doesn't touch on is how the modern Western world has treated the various Islamist movements it has run into over the last 50 years. Since Sayyid Qutb gave birth to the modern jihadist movement, elements of the West have been bombarded by various facets of Islamic violence. Whether it has come in the form of stateless entities like al-Qaeda, belligerent theocratic governments or a combination of the two is beside the point.
So how have the elites in America reacted to the decades-long aggression of expansionist Islam? Accomodation, moral equivalence and feckless dhimmitude. Among other pathetic reactions. Then we wonder why Islam continues to pick on us.
Non-Muslims can't do much to reform to Islam. As Pipes notes, that kind of wrenching cultural shift takes a long time. Democratization is not something the West will be capable of accelerating very much.
But that doesn't mean the West has to lay down and accept terrorist Islam's deranged premises about the separation of church and state, the role of women, property rights or religious pluralism. Nor does it have to tolerate the violent acts of murder and mayhem the Qutbist keep throwing at us. Instead of that, the West could decide to tell Islam--through words and deeds--that certain things won't be tolerated. Like honor killings, imposition of sharia, the crushing of religious minorities or female circumsicion.
Would that turn Islam into a religion that welcomes democratic reform? Probably not. But it would probably be better than the subtle message of approval some in the West insist on sending to Islam.
By now, most people have heard about the shooting in Tuscon, Arizona that left six people dead and wounded eighteen others, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords. This pointless act of violence by a deranged young man should be denounced by every right-thinking person. Unfortunately, some of our allegedly right-thinking media commentators are trying way too hard to make their ridiculous political points.
First up, here's Howard Fineman, calling on Obama to use the Tuscon shooting for his own purposes.
Now comes Tucson. The deaths there are not about politics, ideology or party. From what we know, Jared Loughman's acts were those of a madman divorced from reality, let alone from public debate.
But that doesn't make Tucson politically meaningless. The president need not, and should not, speak of ideas or programs or parties. What he can speak about, and what perhaps he will speak about, is civility.
Arizona has become a ferociously divided and dangerous place, in which our indispensable need to argue--arguing is, after all, who we are as a people--seems at times to veer into an abyss.
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords--"centrist" Democrat, survivor in a district with more Republicans than Democrats and more independent voters than either--has prospered in Congress by crossing lines and doing so with a sense of earnestness and good will.
Like her, the president has been attacked harshly of late from both sides: by progressives who regard him as a sellout, by Tea Partiers who regard him as a power-mad socialist usurper.
He and Giffords think of themselves as fellow travelers on a middle path of civility and compromise in a dangerous world. The president will likely argue that, implicitly if not explicitly.
Fate works in strange ways. This event is the first on the watch of Obama's new chief of staff, and a deal-making, turn-the-heat-down approach to politics is what Bill Daley is all about.
As was the case with Clinton, Obama may be able to remind voters of what they like best about him: his sensible demeanor. Amid the din and ferocity of our political culture, he respectfully keeps his voice down, his emotions in check and his mind open.
That is the pitch, at least. The trick is to make it without seeming to be trying to make it. He will, after all, be speaking at a funeral.
Jeeeeeeeebus.
There is so much fail here, it almost overwhelms reason.
First, Fineman strains mightily against observable reality to draw a connection between Giffords, an actual moderate, and Barack 'I Won'Obama, a hard left statist who has to be dragged kicking and screaming to split the difference with Republicans. In fact, there is no comparison between the Representative and the President besides the fact that they're both Democrats. Quick tip for Fineman: When you call your partisan opponents hostage-takers, you're reaching across the aisle with a sharp left hook to the jaw. If there is a mood of partisan rancor in Arizona--or America--Obama hasn't done anything to alleviate it and done much to perpetuate it.
Even worse is Fineman's fetishization of 'civility'. Note that liberals only care about civility when they're the one's catching a good old-fashioned passionate ass-whooping at the ballot box. The 2010 midterm elections are still a giant source of pain for Democrats and their media enablers. Now that conservatives have a tiny chance to enact some small-government ideas, the professional Left wants Republicans to 'tone down' all this 'hot rhetoric'. In Fineman's five brain cell math, the GOP's insistence on dismantling Obama's health care reform bill = Tucson shooting.
Here's another problem. Homeboy wants America to have more 'civil' political debates. Forget for a moment that for Fineman, a well-mannered conversation means the Democrat Party gets it's way on every issue forever. The bigger issue here is that Fineman wants Barack Obama to score political points at what sort of event? Oh yeah, a funeral. You'd be hard-pressed to come up with a scenario more impolite than somebody throwing partisan bon mots over the body of a nine year old child.
Wait, did I say 'impolite'? What I meant to say is 'vulgar and nauseating'.
But hey, maybe Howard Fineman is right. After all, the Paul Wellstone funeral was a rousing success.
Next up, here's Paul Krugman. He's a New York Times columnist and a massive douchetool, but I repeat myself. Watch as this Nobel Prize winner completely beclowns himself.
We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was. She’s been the target of violence before. And for those wondering why a Blue Dog Democrat, the kind Republicans might be able to work with, might be a target, the answer is that she’s a Democrat who survived what was otherwise a GOP sweep in Arizona, precisely because the Republicans nominated a Tea Party activist. (Her father says that “the whole Tea Party” was her enemy.) And yes, she was on Sarah Palin’s infamous “crosshairs” list.
...You know that Republicans will yell about the evils of partisanship whenever anyone tries to make a connection between the rhetoric of Beck, Limbaugh, etc. and the violence I fear we’re going to see in the months and years ahead. But violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate. And it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers.
This is what it sounds like when liberals wet the bed.
Let's break this down. Krugman wants us to believe that elements of the conservative movement created a climate of hate that led to this shooting. A cursory glance at the artifacts left behind by the shooter proves Krugman wrong. Take a look the alleged murderer's Youtube page. Here are his favorite books.
Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of OZ, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Pulp,Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver's Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno.
Funny. I don't see Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh mentioned in there. Try as I might, I can't find any Tea Party pamphlets or conservative manifestos either. Why, it's almost as if Paul Krugman is using his own political template for what he thinks the American conservative movement is and projecting that distorted image onto the Tucson shooter.
Again, Krugman is arguing that his right-wing bogeymen pushed the attacker to violence. If that were the case, there should be something, even a minute scrap of evidence that suggests that the shooter was influenced by conservatives. In fact, the shooter's most beloved tomes seem far less like a Tea Partier's book club assignment and far more like a slightly off-kilter high school sophomore's summer reading list.
If we want to really pick through the books and find a pattern, you'd be hard-pressed to find any real partisan trend. "Animal Farm", "Fahrenheit 451" and "Brave New World" are well-regarded works of fiction loved by members of the Right, Left and apolitical. If "The Odyssey", "Gulliver's Travels" or "The Old Man and The Sea" are right-wing calls to arms, they're the most well-disguised revolutionary tracts ever. "We The Living" was written by Ayn Rand, so in some bizarre left-wing fever dream, this could be evidence of the shooter's right-wingery. But then what are we supposed to make of "The Communist Manifesto" and "Mein Kampf"? These are the holy texts of international and national socialism and not exactly beloved political tracts within the conservative movement.
Contrary to Paul Krugman's bullshit on stilts masquerading as sober analysis, there is no coherent political philosophy to be found in the shooter's favorite books. But surely for Krugman to tar the Palin/Beck/Limbaugh axis as inciting violence, there must be something going on in the shooter's intellectual life. Perhaps the attacker's Youtube videos showed Krugman the indications he needed to make his accusations.
Nope. Nothing here.
Maybe this video?
Once more, we find nothing in the attacker's personal statements that indicate that he had any intellectual connection to the Tea Party, conservatives or Sarah Palin. That begs the question: From what part of the political spectrum did the shooter come from? If you answered "Insane Street In The Nutbar Development Right Smack Dab In the Middle of Crazyville", give yourself a gold star. You just did better at examining the motivations of the Tucson gunman than an overpaid undersmart New York Times hack.
Howard Fineman and Paul Krugman: Kindly go to the back of the short bus, sit down and shut the hell up. Your services are no longer required. For anything. Ever.
UPDATE: RE-Violent political rhetoric.
Paul Krugman had a pathetic crying jag over Sarah Palin's 'infamous' targeting of vulnerable Democrat representatives for the 2010 midterms. If that picture...which I had never seen until today...is so inflammatory, what about the DailyKos? Jim Treacher finds this little gem.
"[Gabrielle Giffords] is dead to me."
BoyBlue posted this diary on January 6th, 2011. By Paul Krugman's dainty standards, this is eliminationist rhetoric that contributes to a climate of violence. But since this angry missive came from the a left-wing site, I guess this doesn't count. It's just sober political talk, right Paul?
What's even cooler is that Markos Moulitsas took down the post. Yup. It's gone down the memory hole. If it was done out of a sense of class or fear of political blowback is anybody's guess.
The Giffords shooting has already turned into a left-wing cluster bang. The problem is that it's only going to get worse.
UPDATE II: Of course, more elements of the progressive movement have chimed in blaming conservatives for the shooting. One problem: It's not right-wingers publicly calling for violence.
Hey Eugene Robinson, Joshua Marshall, and Keith Olbermann: Your propaganda cartoonist, your socialist-apologizing little pissant artist, your tantrum-throwing scribbler is the one that is saying that America needs violent revolution to fix it. It's not the Right that's saying this stuff. It's Ted Rall, respected member of the statist movement, that's proposing a violent overthrow. Then you have the nerve to use some maniac with no political motivation beyond his own insanity as a tool to try to make your patent lies about conservatives stick.
The fact that this leftist narrative coalesced so quickly tells us a few things about liberals. They're liars. Ironically, for a political movement that breaks it's arm patting themselves on the back for being geniuses, the left revels in group-think. Worse, there is absolutely no tactic too low for them. The only thing they care about is if the strategy works to wound their enemies.
UPDATE III: Eugene Robinson says that the Right has a monopoly on violent political rhetoric. Check out this link [WARNING: Not Safe For Work] and you tell me-Is Eugene Robinson senile or is he just conveniently lying about the eight years of liberal demonstrations during the Bush presidency when Robinson talks about the Right's supposed lead-pipe lock on inflamatory partisan rhetoric?
Face facts. Many elements of the Left spent the Dubya years using the most vile, disgusting, hate-filled language against America, Israel, the American conservative movement and others that progressives deemed as enemies of their movement. MSNBC, The New York Times and many other left-of-center media organs did nothing to condemn this broiling leftist rage. In fact, many of them stoked the fires of partisan hate while pretending to be sane comentators. Eugene Robinson and others in the 'respectable' liberal camp want us to forget all that vitriol--again, emanating solely from the Left--and focus on a single political graphic used by Sarah Palin as evidence that the Right is the only part of US political life that employs violent rhetoric.
First, Glenn Reynolds on what the GOP should do in 2011:
...ignore the press. The establishment media still have their power, but they've never been weaker, and they're perceived by an ever-greater percentage of Americans as simply an arm of the political-class Democratic Party. If you pay attention, they have power over you. If you do what you think is right, they don't.
Historically speaking, this seems to be the hardest thing for many Republicans inside the Beltway to do.
The social scene in Washington DC is chock full of soft (and hard) statists. If it was up to the swells at the Washington Post, the federal government would always grow. And really, why should any of the smart set in the media-government complex want conservative governance? Getting back to a limited constitutionally based federal apparatus would mean the end of the taxpayer funded gravy train.
The other thing that the incoming Republicans must realize is that the media hates them. Not 'dislikes'. Not even 'disagrees with'. Hates. A freshman GOP congressman might get a few invitations to DC cocktail parties if he votes against some piece of conservative legislation. Attending those soirees comes at a cost. The very necessary reform of our government will be stymied, of course. More importantly for the Republican gadfly, hanging with the Washington kool kid set means being a slave to their whims. The media only loves GOPers when they take a crap on Righties. Once the apostate Representative votes for right-of-center programs, the big media folks will turn off their Strange New Respect.
Next, Jay Cost has some sic transit gloria mundi-style words:
...what's most memorable about the 1946 election is that it wasn't a harbinger of a post-New Deal realignment. Two years later, the Republicans were swept out of power as thoroughly as they had been swept in, and apart from a brief and bare majority at the beginning of the Eisenhower administration, they wouldn't recapture a House majority until they were led by a guy named Newt. What happened?
One major reason for the GOP's failure to retain the majority was the response of the Democratic party to the results of 1946, wherein the party moved quickly to outflank the GOP on the Communist issue. It's no coincidence that Americans for Democratic Action -- a liberal interest group that was resolutely anti-Communist -- was founded in January 1947 just as the 80th Congress convened. President Truman fought the Republicans tooth and nail on domestic politics over the next two years, but on foreign affairs he and the Republicans, led by Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, hammered out a bipartisan policy that would remain in place more or less for the next quarter century. What's more, under the advice of his political counselors, he also went after Henry Wallace, the former cabinet secretary and vice president whom Truman had fired after he publicly promoted a soft stance on the Soviets. Wallace's third party candidacy in 1948 was just what Truman needed to push most of the Soviet sympathizers out of the Democratic coalition, thus undermining one of the major Republican arguments from 1946.
The GOP's big pick ups during the 2010 midterm elections happened--in part--because voters are nervous about galloping Obama style liberalism. There is a deep concern amongst the citizenry about runaway spending, crippling debt, long term unemployment and the perception that government is incompetent when dealing with real world problems. In early January, it seems impossible that Obama and the Democrats could outmaneuver the GOP on the small-government/entitlement reform/jobs front. But it is very possible. The Republicans aren't known as 'The Stupid Party' for nothing.
If the GOP lets Democrats retake the high ground, they will forfeit a massive opportunity. They will throw away the nation's best--and possibly last--chance to get America back to a Constitutional framework. Worse for the GOP, they'll irreparably damage their small government brand. There are already more than a few conservatives who don't trust the Republicans as it is. Let the GOP go back to their Hastert-era big stupid spendaholic ways and you can almost garauntee the formation of a right-wing third party.
The Republicans can take bold solid steps to reform the federal government. Or they can devolve and die. The choice is in their hands.
Ever wonder why there doesn't seem to be a lot of genuine stars in pop culture anymore?
Well, John Nolte comes up with a pretty sharp zinger of an explanation.
Any actor who chooses to make something — anything, including their sexuality – a part of their identity, limits how the public will perceive them up on the screen. This is true for straight actors as well, especially those who have made their sexuality a big part of who they are. Beneath all that Barbie doll there might be a genuine actress, but Pam Anderson’s very public sex kitten persona limits her roles. And just to be fair and non-partisan… In his later years, it simply wouldn’t have been possible for Charlton Heston to play an anti-gun ACLU type without harming the audience’s ability to suspend their disbelief. The whole idea would’ve come off as some kind of in-joke, and if that joke wasn’t meant to be part of the overall story you have something of a disaster on your hands.
Read the whole thing. Nolte takes a few whiney gay actors down a peg or two in his piece. Heads up, Richard Chamberlain. "The Thorn Birds" really wasn't all that great.
Nolte touches on something very basic, but something that a lot of entertainers forget nowadays. It's the mystery that keeps people interested in media personalities long after the person has reached their creative zenith. Nothing sustains a career in pop culture more than some strategic obfuscation to keep the audience guessing.
For instance, the private lives of the members of Led Zeppelin were anything but common knowledge back in the 70's. Beyond the fact that three members were married and that they all lived in England, the public didn't have much access to Zep. The band consciously cultivated a nearly impenetrable mystique, which kept people wondering about them. This aura of mystery--along with the undeniable songwriting talent--helped to make Led Zeppelin a massively successful band.
Consider this little nugget about Zep: In 1975 the band released Physical Graffiti, their sixth studio album. Members of the band gave very few interviews to support the release of their album. There were no cameras following Jimmy Page around to document his every move. Robert Plant didn't discuss his political affiliation or his partisan ideology. John Paul Jones and John Bonham were likely to jokingly sneer or angrily snarl at any reporter who asked them who they voted for in the last election. The group didn't mention the causes or charities they support. Led Zeppelin simply let the music speak for themselves.
The results? Physical Grafitti immediately became a massive seller. Not only that, the group's entire back catalogue re-entered the Top 200 as well. The tour that supported the album was incredibly lucrative as well. Led Zeppelin had become the biggest band of the 1970's.
Distance between the musicians and their audience was critical to Led Zeppelin's success. For actors, that sense of mystery is even more important. A rock vocalist is basically playing himself...or at least some facet of his personality...when he writes, records or performs music. An actor is playing a different person everytime he takes on a new role. That means that the actor's real personality can't be so well-known that it smothers the part he's trying to play.
This is not to say that successful actors don't create personas. However, there's a big difference between a 'type' and 'My actual self and my movie self are pretty much the same'. Sean Penn may have been a talented actor back in the Yuri Andropov era, but any role he takes nowadays is overpowered by his off-screen leftwing douchebaggery. The only movie persona Penn has left is the one he plays in the real world--Thumbsucking Liberal Hack/Commie Dictator Apologist/Smug Peace Creep.
To see how a real star should operate, look at Kurt Russell. Russell is a member of the Libertarian Party, but he doesn't make a huge deal about it. Surely the man has causes that he champions, but you don't hear him talk about them all that much. It's common knowledge that he's in a long term relationship with Goldie Hawn, but Russell hasn't put the intimate details of his sexual history into the public record. Consequently, there is no outsized real-world Kurt Russell that fights against the roles he takes.
Look at Russell's performance in the flawed sci-fi action flick "Soldier". Compare that to his work in the more successful comedy "Overboard". Both movies call for very different kinds of acting, but because Russell doesn't have a lot of off-camera drama going on, he's entirely believable as both a near mute futuristic warrior or as a charming modern day rogue. Viewers might not connect with everything Russell does--homeboy is just as prone to the occasional cinematic dud as anybody else in show biz--but his private life never interferes with movie goers' suspension of disbelief.
The modern entertainment business can't seem to grasp the absolutely vital necessity for mystery. Instead, the stars blab about their politics, their personal lives and their STD's at the drop of a hat. As a result, the lack of separation between the performer and the audience has made the art small and the artists even smaller.
The political composition of U.S. adults held fairly steady in 2010 compared with 2009. Conservatives remained the largest group, followed by moderates and then liberals. At 35%, the percentage of moderates has declined to a new low, highlighting the increased political polarization that has occurred over the past decade.
...While the political pendulum in Washington can swing widely, Americans' political ideology, like their party identification, tends to shift more gradually. Such a shift has been underway in recent years. While the changes are not large, they are unmistakable. Moderates are growing fewer in number while the percentages of conservatives and liberals have expanded. Conservatism has gained ground among Republicans and independents, while the growth in liberalism is strictly among Democrats.
Liberals will look at the Gallup poll and have an immediate response: "What about 2008? Liberalism won in that year."
Sure about all that, Nancy? Obama ran as a sane, cool-headed moderate. Conservatives warned that St. Barry was a flaming lefty, but most voters either couldn't be bothered to dig too deeply into Obama's troubling ideological pedigree or just didn't think it was that big a deal considering the Bamster's GOP opponent. In 2008, Republican George Bush was presiding over a crumbling economy and two foreign wars, one of which was fairly unpopular. John McCain ran a weak-willed feckless campaign that did much to alienate and demoralize his very necessary conservative base. When he did do something right--like pick Sarah Palin for VP--the campaign promptly misused that most valuable asset when it couldn't afford even the slightest mistake. If the Democrats couldn't win big in that electoral year, they were never going to score a major victory.
Again, how did the Donkey-Punchers get their wins in '08 and '06? (I throw 2006 in because it set the table for the unified Democrat government of the last two years.) They ran guys such as Bob Casey, Jon Tester and James Webb, men who could pull off a fake-o-la centrist political stance when needed. Look at the Democrat campaign messages in those years. 'Open, honest, transparent government'. 'Most ethical congress ever.' '95% of Americans will see a tax cut.' The self-description we got from the Democrats in 2006-2008 could be summed up as: "We're in the middle of the road and we're not Bush. Pretty please vote for us and we'll be your BFF's."
By the fall of 2008, Dubya was seen as ideologically brittle and only slightly more popular than raw sewage, shin splints and homelessness. Running in the middle while opposing Bush was smart strategy for the Democrats. However, while it may have been the politically intelligent move, it was not--and is not--what anybody would consider openly left-wing.
Liberalism did not win in 2006. It did not win in 2008. Instead, it cloaked itself in moderation, a reasonable tone and...in the case of Barack Obama... a pretty princess visage. While the Left bided it's time, George Bush, Denny Hastert and most of the elected GOPers busied themselves with soiling the party's small government brand.
Once the Left ascended in 2008, with it's big congressional majorities and an ideologically copacetic presidency, how did it govern? Like progressive statists, of course. Now, if liberalism were truly on the rise, why did America's left-of center party get creamed in the off-year elections of 2009 and subsequently pummelled in the 2010 midterms?
The Gallup poll gives us some very important lessons about American politics. First, it shows just how aberrational the 2008 election was in relation to the ideology of the America electorate. More importantly, the Gallup data indicates that US voters will be potentially quite receptive to conservative policy initiatives if these ideas are articulated and fought for with vigor.
Cross-Posted at Blog De KingShamus. Big ups to the rad Baldilocks for letting me hang out and post here.
How many times have we said that to ourselves or to others? Dozens? Scores? Hundreds?
For conservatives, the freedom-crushing size and liberty-lessening scope of the federal government is an ironclad fact, as true as water being wet or Lady Gaga being a first order publicity whore. Liberals have a ready retort when right-wingers complain about the growth of the DC leviathan. "What would you cut?"
I think it’s time for all Americans to step-up to the plate and help take some pressure off the President, the Senators, the Congressmen, all the Czars and Agency Heads, and etc. I think that We The People have just plain been asking too much from our leaders and the strain is beginning to tell on them.
Here’s the problem. Our leaders in Washington just have too much on their plate and it’s all our fault for demanding so much from them.
...So here is what I think we should do. Let’s institute what I call Government Light. I think We The People need to dramatically reduce the work load on our poor public servants. I’ve got some ideas on how we could do that. Instead of al these zillions of things we’ve been asking government to do for us I have a much shorter lists of what we should be willing to settle for:
Provide for the common defense. You know. A military to protect us from our enemies and to protect our borders from invasion.
To create a body of objective laws to protect the God-given rights of all citizens.
Develop a judicial system to capture those that break the laws and try them and to punish the guilty.
Establish a stable monetary system.
Develop and maintain a national infrastructure in order that commerce can freely occur between state and with other nations.
I think if our government only had to focus on these five things, the mental health of our public servants would improve dramatically and We The People could take care of the rest of our needs instead of burdening government for everything.
Jim from the always-interesting Conservatives On Fire has come up with a nice working framework.
There's just one problem with it. It's not the drastic withdrawl of the central government from citizens' lives. It's not the austerity measures that would result from these new directives. In fact, none of those things are terrible in and of themselves.
No, the issue is that CoF's plan assumes that liberals have created the mega-state in order to actually solve problems. In fact, that's only a very small part of the left's reasoning vis-a-vis the ever-growing federal gubmint beast. The major snag with Jim's program is that it won't allow hacks to rob from the taxpayers.
Ponder the omnibus spending bill that just took a dump in Harry Reid's mattress. The thing was designed to be massive and impenetrable. The Senate Democrats tried to get it passed in December, after the Donkey-Punchers got their heads handed to them in the midterm elections. It was also brought to the Senate during a time when the American voter is most inattentive. The bill was loaded with pork in the hopes that Senators and those constituents who were paying attantion could be bought off.
Limited government is great. But if you're really looking to redistribute wealth and pad you're own fiefdom, there's nothing like the crazy unlimited variety of government to do the trick.
Further thoughts: I realize that the latest omnibus spending toothache was smashed. But over the years, this type of gargantuan budget bill--packed to the rafters with ridiculous earmarks, porktastic programs and barely concealed graft--have passed through Republican and Democrat congresses with relative ease. Conservatives won a victory of sorts by killing Senator Reid's fantasy budget, but it's one win in a sea of defeats.
Let's look at a random year...2003...and see what fiscal idiocy we can find.
$44,239,000for projects in the state of Senate Agriculture Appropriations subcommittee member Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and House Agriculture Appropriations subcommittee member Tom Latham (R-Iowa), including: $33,000,000 for the National Animal Disease Center in Ames; $700,000 for the Midwest Poultry Consortium; $280,000 for the Iowa Vitality Center; $235,000 for dairy education; $210,000 for hoop barns; and $100,000 for the Trees Forever Program.
We can draw a few conclusions from this wee nugget of fail. Maybe there was a need for a National Animal Disease Center in Iowa. The Hawkeye State, like many parts of the Midwest, is deeply invested in agriculture. Perhaps there such an institution had to be started by federal dollars.
This begs the question: What about the private sector? Did nobody ever think to create a company to deal with animal diseases before Tom Harkin...one of the dimmer bulbs in a dimbulb-centric US Senate...came along? Furthermore, what about state governments? Had nobody without DC cash been able to study or treat ailments that afflict our four-legged friends before 2003?
Beyond the dubious need for the National Animal Disease Center comes another realization: We're still paying for it. The NADC is part of the United States Department of Agriculture, thus federal dollars are used to hireand retain workers. What about building maintenance or cafeteria staffing? That's on us as well. Much like the Corporation For Public Broadcasting or Ben Affleck, the NADC is the government-friendly hole that keeps on sucking.
Bear in mind that this is just one relatively small portion of the 2003 federal budget turd sandwich. Buried within that bill was an army of ridiculous spending. Taken individually, these more or less tiny chunks of pork look like the cheesy punchline to a lame joke. Put together, they amount to nothing less than the biggest heist in history, making the most lucrative bank robberies, Ponzi schemes or Soros currency shenanigans seem minute in comparison.
More depressing than that? The 2003 appropriations bill represents just one year's worth of porky goodness. This spending is not an abberation. It was, and pretty much still is, business as usual.
And that's the problem. People do not want to be bothered paging through a gazillion pages of legalese and congress-talk to separate the worthy wheat from the wasteful chaff. More, folks have heard so many stories about $50 hammers and $100 toilet seats that they've become numb to it. Inertia and inattention have conspired to make the federal budget very hard to shrink. The budget creation process was designed to keep people in the dark about just how much they've been getting robbed.
The last omnibus bill was defeated, which is a good thing. With any luck, it's the start of a movement to reign in federal spending and--more importantly--scale back the influence Washington DC has in our daily lives.
Here before us is another reason we, the outsiders, the TEA Party folks in action and spirit, must show no quarter towards the GOP Establishment. Besides living in a collegial and congenial past that no longer is [call it what you will, the Gerald Ford or Bob Michael Era], the GOP and conservative Elites have a track record that is strewn with utter and abysmal failures. In fact, historians not yet born will label them as the Useful Idiots of the Left who, by their weaknesses and naiveté, help bring about the lamentable situation we now find ourselves in.
Bingo. Read the rest of his post; Bob's got some good stuff in there.
This is what kills me when people talk about the Republican establishment and their fetishization of electability. It's one thing to acknowledge that RINOs and moderates can often get elected easier (in certain states/districts/campaigns) than a rock-ribbed across-the-board rightwinger. This is a fact that we shouldn't simply dismiss out of hand. For instance: looking back on the particular circumstances of the race, Mike Castle probably had a better chance of winning the Senate election in Delaware than Christine O'Donnell.
However, what would we--actual factual conservatives--have gained by getting Castle into the Senate? He would've voted for Cap-n-Tax in a potential dead-duck congressional session. He was still going to be pro-choice and anti-Second Amendment. Knowing his record, his first term in the US Senate would've been marked by ArlenSpecterian hands-across-the-aisle moments of capitulation to various facets of the liberal nanny-state agenda. A hug for Obama would not have been completely out of the question.
Would a guy like Mike Castle, a classic go-along-to-get-along DC establishmentarian, have the stomach for repealing ObamaCare? What makes anybody think Castle would be capable of defunding the utterly wretched NPR or abolishing the utterly useless Department of Energy? In what possible scenario would a guy like Mike Castle vote against illegal immigration amnesty? Could Mike Castle, famous for his chummy, clubby attitude towards Democrats, actually go along with his own party on something substantive like real free-market entitlement reforms? Many signs point to an emphatic 'no.'
Not only would a potential Senator Mike Castle be a thorn in the side of conservatives, he'd be doing everything he can to damage the already-tarnished Republican brand. While he was busy building a media-backed Fiefdom of Royal RINOLand, he'd also happily throw monkey wrenches into GOP-backed fiscal discipline measures.
So conservatives would get lots of drawbacks and almost no benefits from a Senator Mike Castle. But the Tea Party and it's allies were supposed to forget all that because Mike Castle happened to have a weak 'R' behind his name? Really?
If you really think about it, the United States has been granted an embarrassment of riches. Within our borders are vast quantities of natural resources. We have abundant fertile land that feeds not only ourselves, but much of the world. America is vast in size, buffeted by oceans that grant her a measure of separation from the potential unrest that has marked the history of the Old World. In short, Americans should spend every Thanksgiving expressing undying gratitude to their Creator for giving the country so many wonderful advantages.
As much as resources, climate and size matter, America has been granted something even greater than all those things. As the writer Julian Simon noted, people are the greatest natural resource. If that's the case--and it is--the US armed forces are a sterling example of Simon's fundamental truth. For Thanksgiving, I decided to take a look at one particular great American.
In his Silver Star citation, Marine 2nd Lt. Brian M. Stann is praised for his "zealous initiative, courageous actions and exceptional presence of mind" during seven days of fighting in Iraq.
But Stann, now a captain, is not into fame or self aggrandizement.
"It’s not about awards, especially when you’re out there," said Stann, 27. "It’s about defeating the enemy and getting your boys out alive."
From May 8 to May 14, 2005, Stann was part of Operation Matador with 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines.
The action started when Stann’s platoon was given about 35 minutes’ notice that it needed to head to the Ramana Bridge, north of Karbala...Aother unit was supposed to provide a blocking position at the bridge, but when they couldn’t make it on time, Stann’s platoon was sent to fill the gap.
As it turned out, a lot of the enemy had settled in that area. Stann said his platoon was engaged in a "constant gunfight" until it was relieved, and then he and his Marines had to fight their way back to base.
The worst fighting was May 10, when his platoon was sent back to the bridge to stay and got ambushed on the way, he said.
The insurgents hit Stann’s platoon with roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and suicide car bombs, destroying a Humvee and a tank recovery vehicle that was hauling wounded, he said.
"We had a rough night."
Stann’s Silver Star citation briefly summarizes his actions during the ambush.
“Second Lieutenant Stann personally directed two casualty operations, three vehicle recovery operations and multiple close air support missions under enemy small arms, machine gun and mortar fire in his 360-degree fight," the citation reads.
Stann didn’t want to get into specifics about what he did during the fighting.
"Everyone has done some courageous things," he said. "It’s just part of our calling. It’s part of our job."
Instead, Stann preferred to talk about his Marines.
Despite the casualties and carnage, they did not panic, he said. They kept their heads, beat back the enemy and evacuated their wounded.
"Because of that, the casualties that we did take did survive," Stann said. "Guys that lost limbs lived. Guys that took shrapnel and things of that nature to the head lived, and they wouldn’t have lived if we hadn’t have done that."
Throughout their deployment, Stann’s Marines focused on their job, whether it meant sleeping in their Humvees on hot nights or manning a machine gun at 2 a.m., he said.
Stann, who was born at Yokota Air Base in Japan and then moved to Scranton, Pa., said his Silver Star represents what the Marines under his command accomplished.
"They executed flawlessly, and we’re talking 19- to 20-year-old kids, and these are tougher situations than 90 percent of Americans will face," he said.
In your time today, please say a prayer for our armed forces.
More importantly, we should thank God that America still produces men and women like Captain Brian Stann. We will chow down on our turkeys and potatoes and gravy in large part because of the efforts of incredibly brave folks. They are more courageous than most of us will ever have to be. For that, we should be eternally grateful.
A Vermont man shot his television set after watching as Bristol Palin, daughter of Former Governor and former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin (R-AK) lived to dance another day on the television program Dancing With the Stars.
[Sixty-seven year old Steve] Cowan “jumped up and swore, saying something to the effect of “the —-ing politics.”The complaint added, ”Steven was upset that a political figure’s daughter was dancing on this particular show when Steven did not think she was a good dancer.”
I keep saying that the unhinged hatred that Leftists have for Bristol and her mother is spiritually-induced, from the bad side-- which is why it's illogical--and here's what it's about: abortion.
The label "pro-choice" is pure BS; most of its proponents should properly be labeled 'pro-abortion.' And for those who have successful convinced all too many women that abortion isn't really murder; for those who have fooled women of the "wrong genetic sort" into believing that they aren't doing the elites' bidding when they cut off their succeeding generations, Sarah and Bristol Palin are two of the most dangerous women in America.
Both Palins chose to let their children live under two of the "adverse" circumstances which are usually used to justify abortion. By doing so, the two set examples for other women and may plant the idea in other women that they need not murder their own children under similar circumstances. This is why the Palins often cause a full-blown, foaming, freak-out in many of those who adhere to Leftist ideology or who have been brain-washed by it, even when something as inconsequential as winning favor on a reality show is the subject at hand. (Then there are the women who are still playing out their high school-engendered neuroses, but that's a separate issue.)
I bet this Cowan has marched in a pro-"choice" rally or two, probably because his wife nagged him into doing it.
A spiritual battle? Yes. The force of evil--Satan--wants us all destroyed and those who justify the murder of the unborn are merely his tools. This is why the pro-abortionists are so rabid about those who defend innocent life. "Noooo, don't take away my right to commit genocide again myself, you brute!!!!"
To Leftists, Sarah and Bristol Palin made the "wrong" choice--life--and for that, the morally bankrupt must demonize them, inverting wrong and right as such people--and their Father--are wont to do. That this genius only hurt his TV is something for which to be thankful.
UPDATE: Thanks to Booker Rising for the link to this post and for the many others. And it's always...erm...interesting when one of Shay's guests drops in for a visit. ;)
UPDATE: In the comments below, a un-medicated visitor freaks out as well:
Negress, what fornicating evidence do you have that Steven Cowan or anyone else who disagreed with the Dancing With the Stars, finals decision is a leftist?
Well, I did say that this murderer of TVs was either a Leftist or indoctrinated by lefist ideology (as almost all of us are). As it turns out, my first conclusion was correct.
Larry Ziemer, a fellow town supervisor, said he has known Cowan for about 20 years.
"I have nothing but good things to say about Steve," Ziemer said. "It was totally out of character for this to occur. He just does an excellent job on the town board and in his private working life."
Ziemer said Cowan is a talented carpenter and is well-respected in the area. Ziemer said he had never heard Cowan speak ill of Sarah Palin or her family before.
“He and I agree pretty much on politics,” Ziemer said. “We would probably lean both to the liberal side.”
The unhingement was a big clue--both with Cowan and my charming guest.
I dunno if I've mentioned this before, but FYI--a great blogger has become a great author. I just finished "Tale of The Tigers". It's a tremendous piece of writing.
Juliette Akinyi Ochieng, who writes great commentary under the nom de blog Baldilocks, recently took the plunge and published her debut novel. And what an interesting first swing of the bat Ms. Ochieng takes.
"Tale of The Tigers" is a story of two college kids who fall in love. It's about race and racism. It's a time capsule of the early 90's. It looks at the dynamics of family relationships. It examines sex and sexuality. It reassesses sacred cows of the cult of the politically correct. It makes important statements about friendship, loyalty and trust.
Like her blog writing, Ms. Ochieng's novel is chock full of subtleties. Her characters could've turned into cardboard cut-outs. Instead, the folks that inhabit "Tale" are flesh and blood people, full of admirable traits and painful weaknesses. The outline of the plot never devolves into a cliché romance. Thankfully, Baldilocks takes the story in unexpected directions. "Tale" studiously avoids telegraphing it's punches, which makes for an exciting read.
Beyond these great things, for me the best part of the book is the fact that the story stays with you long after you've finished it. You'll find yourself replaying sequences from the book in your mind. Moreover, you'll catch yourself pondering the book's themes long after you've put it down.
In short, "Tale of The Tigers" is a damn fine piece of work from a writer with a powerful voice. Get in on the ground floor, folks. Buy the book. You won't regret it.
The television show "Glee" gets the gas-face from the moral prudes over at GLAAD.
Gay rights campaigners have lashed out at the producers and writers of TV musical Glee for including a controversial line about transvestites in the show's pre-Halloween tribute to The Rocky Horror Show.
The cast took on characters from the spooky and camp 1970s musical in a themed episode, which scored huge ratings last week (ends29Oct10).
But Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) officials have taken issue with the use of the word 'tranny' to describe Rocky Horror's chief character Frank-n-Furter, who dresses in stockings, lingerie and high heels.
In the Glee tribute, actor Harry Shum Jr.'s character Mike is forced to pull out of his role as Frank-n-Furter because his conservative parents don't want him to look like a "tranny".
If you're at all familiar with the show, than you already know that this particular program is very gay-friendly. Homosexual themes run throughout several episodes. The show's creators have actively sought out the support of gay advocacy groups. Yet even with all that goodwill, the show still finds itself in hot water with a wing of the liefstyle Left.
Check out GLAAD's statement.
A statement from GLAAD reads, "The casual manner in which the word was used is jarring, even if he (Shum, Jr's character) may have been repeating what his parents said.
"This inclusion of this slur is particularly alarming given last season's powerful episode in which Kurt's father chastised Finn for using the word 'f*g'. That episode sent a powerful message to the show's young fanbase that words have power and they can hurt.
"Unfortunately the larger problem here is that the word 'tranny' has become an easy punchline in popular culture, and many still don't realise that using the term is hurtful, dehumanising and associated with violence, hatred and derision against transgender people - a community that is nearly invisible in media today."
Lesson: You can never win with these idiots.
Hell, you can't even break even with the gatekeepers of liberal morality. At some point, even if you've got a sterling record of leftist happy-talk and progressive do-goodery, you will run afoul of some obscure politically correct edict. When that occurs, expect a snippy finger-wagging retort, often from the very same groups you're trying to ingratiate yourself with.
There will come a time very soon when everybody to the right of the Noam Chomsky/Eric Holder/Andrew Sullivan Axis of Fail will be considered either a racist, a sexist or a homophobe. That seems to be the endgame for groups like GLAAD or the NAACP. Even better, look where GLAAD stands in the ideological universe. They've turned into the very same type of judgemental sour-faced Puritans they say they hate.
The left loves to pat itself on the back for being tolerant and open-minded. They even have studies proving just how great they are and how much conservatives supposedly suck. There's just one problem: the actions of the progressives negate their glorious self-image.
Look at the environmental movement. Global warming proponents urge people to forgo a plethora of pleasures, from gas-guzzling SUV's to beef to energy derived from coal-fired power plants. Why? Because these things are allegedly dirty and will cause anthropogenic climate change.
The science that backs up the Warmists has been forever soiled by ClimateGate, but it really doesn't matter. What is important is that the believers follow the 'correct' doctrines. More importantly than that, the faithful must stamp out heretics and sinners. Conversion to the religion is nice, but what the Climate Changers really enjoy is being morally indignant.
It's the same thing for the GLAAD crowd. They must strike out against what they perceive as sin. So the use of the word 'tranny' on a TV show; well, that simply cannot be tolerated. That sort of immorality must be punished. Loudly, publicly and with as much sneering haughty contempt as possible. Far from being open-minded, many facets of the American left are virulently dogmatic.
There are definitely closed-minded conservatives. There are certainly right-wingers that have a puritanical nature. What conservatives should always remember is that the other side is at least as judgmental as they are, and perhaps even more so.
On Saturday I went out to Tom's River NJ to do some get-out-the-vote work for the Jon Runyan. Runyan is running against Jon Adler, a typical douchey Democrat who wants to save the freakin' world with your money. In covering the race from afar, it seemed like I should get a glove and get in the game.
Ace of Spades organized the event. Tagging along were Mr. Bingley (who blogs at the terrifically titled Coalition of the Swilling), ThisHeavenlyHell (a frequent commenter at Ace's place)and several other members of the Moron-Sphere (who forgot to e-mail or text me back with their handles). We all met at Runyan's campaign headquarters. At first I thought I'd be doing phone work, but instead the campaign coordinator dude asked us to do some voter canvassing of the district. It was beautiful Indian summer day for walking around the neighborhood, so I was stoked to get out of the HQ and see what the area was all about.
Toms River is actually much bigger than I had previously thought. Socio-economically speaking, it seemed fairly diverse as well. In getting to the neighborhood I was going to canvass, I drove past million dollar McMansions and worse-for-wear 1950's ranch homes, often within a few blocks of each other. The area we were canvassing was a middle/working class neighborhood. Nice homes, but nothing particularly massive or gaudy.
Better still, the people we talked to were overwhelmingly friendly. Beyond the very occasional rude jerk, squirrelly weirdo or overscheduled dude on their way out the door, it was all good in the hood. Granted, the way our canvassing lists were compiled, we were dealing with 'soft' Republicans for the most part. Even with that ideological semi-advantage, I still thought almost everybody was fairly rad to chat with for a few minutes. Many of these supposedly weak GOPers were not at all weak about expressing their intense dislike for President Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Often times, all we'd have to say to a person was "Jon Runyan is against Obama" and that would be good enough for them.
Afterwards we all gathered back at a local watering hole, scarfed down some tasty grub and quaffed a few hearty adult beverages. Discussions were made, predictions of Republican congressional gains were bandied about, jokes at Michelle Obama's expense were tossed around and a good time was had by all. Ace and the Morons are a great bunch of conversationalists and it was nice to geek out to some in-depth political inside baseball type stuff with all-around cool folks.
As far as the actual GOTV work, I gotta say it was really easy to do. I'm a grade-A doofus and if I can do it, anybody can. I didn't get on the phones, but it seemed like it would be fairly simple to grasp. I'd say walking the neighborhood was probably easier than making calls. You get to talk to people, throw a quick candidate biography/political position list at them and then remind them to vote on Election Day. QED.
So now you really have no excuse not to do this. If you're any sort of interested in conservative politics, you're 9/10's of the way to mastering canvassing/phone calls. The other 1/10 involves you just showing up. The GOTV link is here again, but if you don't want to do that just find a candidate you like, call up his or her campaign HQ (it'll be on the candidate's webpage) and ask what they need you to do. They'll be stoked that you volunteered for the cause and you'll be amped up from playing a small but vital role in kicking back the statist menace that threatens to kill the closest thing to paradise the Earth has ever seen.
Hey, there are way worse things you could be doing with your spare time.
For all the liberals who were crying in the comments of the last post, here's some more delicious nugat-rich irony.
President Obama plans to appear on Comedy Central's "Daily Show" shortly before the midterm elections, a senior White House official tells CBS News, in what will be his first appearance on the show since becoming president.
The appearance will be on Wednesday October 27th. It comes shortly before both the November 2nd midterm elections as well as host Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" on the National Mall on October 30th.
The president has been trying to rally the sort of young voters who watch Stewart's show to come out to vote in the midterm elections amid signs that they are less enthusiastic than they were two years ago. Democrats are trying to hold the House and Senate amid predictions of a potential wave election for Republicans, and among his campaign stops in the midterm cycle have been appearances at college campuses.
Jeeeeeebus, Stewart's not even sorta hiding his pathetic shill-job at this point.
Question for the audience: Does anybody think Barry's appearance on The Obama Super Ass-Kiss Love-In The Daily Show is going to be the hard-hitting tough-minded interview that Jon Stewart demands from the 'real' media? The guy bangs his rattle on his high chair whenever some clown in the MSM doesn't ask the correct progressive-minded questions. I'm guessing Stewart tosses Obama a few softballs during the President's campaign stop appearance.
For liberals, it's high time to just admit that their media hero is just another statist operative. I mean, really now, if leftists were honest they should be stoked. Their media man-crush is getting to hang out with their political dream-boat. Best of all, there's absolutely no chance Stewie will trouble St. Bamster with any icky right-of-center criticism or ideas.
A few years back, some on the Right would refer to Candidate Barack's legion of fan-bois and sycophants as 'Obamatons' for their seemingly robotic mind-numbed attitude. Nowadays, I think that isn't particularly accurate. Members of Team Bambi are spreading out all over the place. The Obamatons have morphed into The Blob.
It turns out everybody's favorite chubby condescending press secretary, Robert Gibbs, is heading to--the DNC chairmanship?
Democratic insiders are taking the temperature of some top party donors about the possibility of naming White House press secretary Robert Gibbs as chairman of the Democratic National Committee heading into President Barack Obama's reelection campaign in 2012, senior officials tell POLITICO.
Under the scenario being tested, Tim Kaine, the current DNC chairman and former governor of Virginia, would be named to a top administration post, perhaps in the Cabinet, the officials said.
For the record, Gibbs’ experience consists almost entirely of serving on communication teams for politicians. After graduating from college in 1993, he worked on the staffs of a series of House and Senate members before joining John Kerry’s team in 2003 for his 2004 presidential bid as press secretary, and then resigning when Kerry fired Jim Jordan. He then took a position as a mouthpiece for an independent group that opposed Howard Dean’s bid, and later in 2004 began working for Barack Obama’s Senate campaign, moving to the presidential campaign after two years on Capitol Hill.
So he's a lippy hack who doesn't play nice in the sandbox with John Kerry and Howard Dean. Okay, he's got that going for him. But what about, you know, experience?
Note what his CVdoesn’t include. Gibbs has never run an organization, or worked as an executive at all. The most he’s ever done was manage a small communications staff at the White House. He has no experiencein fundraising, as his campaign experiences have all been on the communications side. He has never stood for election himself, which isn’t a complete disqualification for the job, but it certainly doesn’t help, either. In short, there is nothing at all in his background to recommend Gibbsfor a position which requires coordination, fundraising prowess, organization, and a political talent with experience and connections supporting it.
Doesn't this seem sorta...familiar? I mean, Barack Obama was a dweeb junior Senator with a little over a hundred days spent in the upper chamber. Before that, he was a state senator, then a BFF with Bill Ayers and before that a community organizer. His lack of actual qualifications, real world experience or executive acumen didn't hold back St. Barry of the Sacred Pants-Crease from being President of the world's only superpower. Why should it matter for Gibbsy if wants to be the boss at the comparatively bush-leagues of the DNC?
You gotta wonder what Bob Gibbs has done that makes anybody think he's ready to shake down Democrat-leaning donors for big money donations. I had no idea making unfunny patronizing digs at members of the White House press corps could snag you an executive job at one of the two major US political parties. Unless looking and acting like your least favorite high school algebra teacher is somehow a prerequisite for the job, homeboy really doesn't have much going for him.
Besides all that, there is something more going on here. If Gibbs gets to be DNC chair, nobody could be terribly surprised. The Donkey-Puncher Party always fall in love with the latest shiny new object that falls into their view.
Think about it. There were probably more qualified candidates running for the Democrat Party presidential nomination of 1960. Somehow the Democrats managed to nominate a noob Senator named John Kennedy. Nearly any Democrat could've been CEO of America in the 1976 election. Who did the Dems pick? A relative unknown southern dude named Jimmy Carter. Before being the mack daddy of the Oval Office Intern Bang Competition, Bill Clinton was 'The Man From Hope', a charismatic Baby Boomer governor who hadn't made a name for himself outside of the parochial world of Arkansas politics.
Why are the Democrats so fixated on the coveted "New Guy"? Maybe because their actual policies are so damn old.
Ponder the nature of FDR's signature achievement, Social Security. It's a top-down, one-sized-fits-all program that you have to be a part of under the penalty of federal punishment. Now think about Barack Obama's most sweeping government reform, nationalized health care. It's a top-down, one-sized-fits-all program that you have to be a part of under the penalty of federal punishment.
Same Shitty Socialism, Different Damn Millennium.
In order to disguise the fact that their ideas haven't progressed much past 1938, Democrats almost always have to get the latest and greatest model of progressive politician to advance their agenda. Is it any wonder this obsession with the fresh-out-of-the-box liberal savior has now permeated nearly every facet of their party?
Maybe Gibbs gets passed over for the job of DNC chair. Who knows? By itself, it has very little bearing on anything. But the fact that he is even being considered for the post tells you a lot about the mind-set of the modern Democrat Party--none of it particularly healthy.
Notice something missing from Russ Feingold's campaign ad?
In case you didn't spot it, here it is.
Even so, this is a vivid illustration of just how epically the alleged Great Liberal Realignment of 2008 has failed. Obama destroyed McCain in Wisconsin, winning by almost 14 points, and yet this is what a three-term Democratic incumbent is reduced to less than two years later — chipping away at an eight-point deficit by reminding people that he fights for veterans and lives in the same house he’s always lived in and, well, that he’s a pretty darned pleasant guy.
Bango.
You don't run this kind of ad (innocuous, folksy to a fault, no mention of partisan affiliation) if the voters are super-stoked about the political positions you've represented for nearly 20 years in the US Senate. As AP notes, Russ Feingold has long been the golden boy of the hyper-left caucus in a traditionally Democratic state. And yet, here's Feingold running as fast as he can away from his party.
One gets the feeling that unless they're handed a bogey-man to rail against, it's very hard for a liberal to justify his or her existence. Why did the Donks do so well in 2006 and 2008? Because Dumbya BusHitler was always available, to be conjured up--like Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984--for a Two Minutes Hate rally. Now that G-Dub is gone and statist god-king Obama is in the White House, there's no way to generate sufficient rage to propel progrturd candidates to run progturd campaigns.
Besides, it really wasn't supposed to go down this way. Obama's election meant that liberals could finally be themselves. They could enact the whole raft of lefty fever-dreams and get away with it because the American public had finally come to love the Euro-dork nanny state. In the liberal mind, Barack Obama and a large Democrat legislative majority was a signal to shed the last scraps of moderation they'd been hiding behind.
The dream was that a Russ Feingold could make a 2010 campaign where he vociferously bragged about passing ObamaCare, repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and socializing vast swaths of the automotive industry. That...um...didn't exactly work out. Instead, Feingold and the rest of the Donkey-Punchers have once again had to don the imagery and tone of a mushy soft spoken moderate in the thin hope of retaining their congressional seats.
This has got to be a total left-wing buzzkill.
Contrast all that with the tone of Allen West in this clip. Yeah, this is a stump speech, not a campaign ad. But it still bears examination.
I'm not really noticing any hushed mincing cowardly talk out of West. He's hella stoked for a fight against Alcee Hastings, John Lewis and Barack Obama. This is a man who doesn't have to take cover behind moderation. He's a loud-n-proud conservative. Bear this in mind: West is running in a traditionally Democrat district that has voted the Donkey-Puncher candidate in the last three presidential elections, exactly the kind of district that was supposed to go full-on lip-lock with Obama-style liberalism. Instead, Allen West is running a surprisingly competitive race and could pull out a strong win.
...But they're not the rubes you might think they are.
In general, I shared many of the reservations about O’Donnell that were expressed around here, but I also understand that Mike Castle just wasn’t conservative enough for tea partiers in Delaware. It’s worth noting amidst all this craziness over O’Donnell that there seems to be a hard-to-define yet very real line separating the Republicans that tea partiers will back with reservations from those they won’t support at all. Castle and Scozzafava clearly fell on the wrong side of that line. Doheny, on the other hand, is not the most conservative candidate in the race for NY-23, but he is conservative enough, so his electability will most likely earn him the tea party’s endorsement. The point is that the tea party isn’t suicidal in every race, but it considers some Republicans simply beyond the pale, and it’s understandable why they do. The Democrats’ cap-and-trade bill was a monstrosity — it would be very hard to vote for a Republican who voted for that.
I don't think it's that hard to figure out what the Tea Party wants. They despise crazy spending, ridiculous taxes and idiotic government bureaucracy. All you have to do is look at Mike Castle's support on Cap and Trade to see where he went horribly wrong in the eyes of TPers. C & T would deliver everything the Tea Party hates in one handy-dandy enviro-statist package. Go figure they'd be against Castle.
Crap-n-Tax also has a chance of coming up for a vote in a lame-duck session of the US Senate. Castle would've made for a delightfully useful idiot that would further Harry Reid's lefty machinations:
As things stand now, Reid has demonstrated he has been able to break filibuster by peeling off a few votes for cloture, in particular Massachusetts's Scott Brown and Maine's Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. But with the departure of Sen. Ted Kaufmann, the current Delaware junior senator, the Democratic leadership will either have to find one more vote to get legislation through in this lame-duck session, or they have to find one less vote, particularly on cap-and-trade, if Castle wins the race.
The Tea Party folks in Delaware had to be aware of this depressing reality, which is why they made the perfectly understandable decision to dump him in favor of Christine O'Donnell.
I understand the arguments that Mike Castle would've been a more 'electable' candidate than O'Donnell in Delaware's general election. The question I have is: Why the hell should a conservative voter feel obliged to vote for Castle?
If you're on the right, you get no benefit from having this guy in the Senate. He's pro-choice. He supported McCain-Feingold. He's real good at dissing the Second Amendment. He doesn't like school vouchers. He doesn't want to drill in ANWR.
One of these positions would be grating, but not necessarily a deal-breaker for Delaware conservatives. Taken as a whole, Mike Castle's views appear like the resume of a cliche left-of-center douchenozzle. He's way past being just an aggravating RINO. He's a liberal who happens to caucus with Republicans. A cursory glance at his record reveals this.
But conservatives were supposed to ignore the mountains of statism in Castle's curriculum vitae and support him? Get a grip.
If Christine O'Donnell wins in November, it's a great success for the Tea Party and the Right. If she loses to Chris Coons, so be it. But to suggest that Castle would've done conservatives any good if we put him in the Senate is laughable. He would've been a constant irritant, the ever present grain of sand in the bikini bottom of Republican politics. For all intents and purposes, Castle = Coons. It's that simple. Looking at it that way, voting for O'Donnell was a no-brainer.
The Tea Party has shown itself to be adept at making nuanced political decisions. But there are some candidates in some races where they've had to put their foot down. Instead of blindly hammering the TPer's for making the calculations they've made, perhaps we should instead examine why they've chosen to support the issues and candidates that animate their movement.
If you haven't been following the story, Terry Jones, the pastor of the Dove World Outreach Center in Florida, has been on the fence about his plans to burn Korans on September 11th. It's been an on-again/off-again deal for the last several days. Jones has said that he will call off the book burning if the Ground Zero Mosque is moved to a different location, but so far there has been no real assurance that this will happen. Jones has not been terribly definitive here, so the Koran Kebab may or may not be on like Voltron.
I'll be honest. At first I thought Jones was just some kook with an axe to grind. He's probably not the most media-savvy dude. But what he has done is open up a conversation that many members of our Big Media-Big Government complex would rather us not talk about--ever.
From President Obama to Fareed Zakaria to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, most of the swells in America want to brush aside the question of Islam in our society. For a host of reasons, they just need this topic to go away. What Terry Jones has done is force our 'betters' to address something they really would rather avoid.
Here's the funny thing about America in the Age of Jihadi Terrorism: Since 9/11/01, we've gone from righteous anger and forceful military retribution against violent Islamic extremists to bowing before Muslim kings and scraping in deference to elements of the faith in order to keep them from committing violent acts against us or our allies.
How did we get to this utterly incoherent mindset? Ace points out something interesting here:
On that point -- this very good (as usual) essay by Christopher Hitchens. There he notes we have demanded that every other religion be "domesticated," which, dogged metaphor aside, means that we have demanded that other religions fall into compliance with civil law -- even where (as with Christian Science) the illegal aspect of the religion is a truly important part of the religion.
And yet we don't similarly insist on this with Islam. Islam is apparently a special religion in that it trumps civil law.
Again, another badge of Islam's supremacy over other religions -- and all governments -- which is precisely what they're killing for.
Bingo.
Why does Islam always get the kid glove treatment? What makes them so special that they can never-EVER-be offended? How is it that when the immature spoiled brat that is Islam gets a skinned knee, Western governments race to kiss the Muslim boo-boo in order to quell any possible terrorist temper-tantrums?
There are no other religions in American (or Western) society that receive this type of deference. None. Except the one that kills, rapes and tortures in order to meet its goals. No other faith gets this laissez-faire treatment--except the one that is determined to use our Constitution as a wedge against us and put sharia law into it's place. Truly amazing.
When Ace says that other religions in America have been domesticated, he's exactly right. Christianity doesn't demand much from the US government. It certainly doesn't scream for scriptural laws to be put into the federal code. Oh sure, there might be some churches that are down with some theocratic leanings, but these are few and far between. The same can be said for Jews, Hindus and Buddhists. The theocrats in all these faiths are pretty much isolated.
Moreover, we should be quite happy to have the non-Islamic creeds domesticated. The 'live and let live' attitude within American religious life has contributed to a basically quiet civil society. This relatively peaceful domestic order is threatened now, and it isn't because the followers of Jesus are barking for the Old Testament to be the sole source of our laws.
Islam stands alone in the religious fabric of the United States. Islam refuses to bend, even one iota, before the agreed-upon civil system of American life. It will not defer at all to the domestication that all other faiths in the US have gone through.
And...really...why should Islam have to come to heel? They've seen our weakness. At any moment of religious discomfort, there are useful idiot infidels ready to defend Islam from the sort of slights that other faiths go through on a daily basis. More importantly, the useful idiot infidels are always willing to go on offense for Islam, using slurs like 'unpatriotic', 'anti-American' or 'bigot' for those who are merely concerned that Islam is slowly but surely becoming the de facto state religion of America. If a group is against the spread of sharia, the useful idiot infidels will call that person a racist, thereby providing a layer of insulation for Islam against outside criticism.
Muslims intent on using the faith as a political tool can see the exact genus and species of spineless pathetic wimps we have for leaders. That means that until they are confronted and made to join the rest of the religions in America, they will continue to act like the pushy, snarling, overindulged, petulant teenage jerks that they are. It's that simple.
So Terry Jones and the Dove Outreach Center might have picked at a scab other folks would rather stay closed. Jones' flock might not be the nicest most caring people that ever walked the Earth, but they have forced the rest of us--even the hand-wringing worry-wart Left--to at least get a glimpse at reality. Pray that the rest of America chooses to stay focused on the real world.
Who is Ladd Ehlinger Jr, you ask? He's the guy behind the Dale Peterson campaign ad, viewed by all right-thinking people as the greatest political commercial ever. Check it out.
Anyhoo, AceofSpadesgets a great interview from Ehlinger. In a wide-ranging discussion, Ace and the filmmaker talk about everything from the nature of artists to the difference between TV ads and internet spots.
This exchange was really interesting.
Ace: Is there any danger you see of a ghettoization sort of effect, where conservative artists are doing expressly conservative art? And only that, and are engaged in a parallel media universe but not the main media universe?
Ehlinger: I don't think the main media universe has much longer to live. So it doesn't matter. Everything is fracturing and falling apart. The smart money realizes that and is doing what it can now to build a brand before it's impossible to do so any longer.
Ace: I've read a lot that tv's model is unsustainable but there aren't many good alternatives. you mean like that? magazines and newspapers first, then tv, then Hollywood?
Ehlinger: It'll devolve into national tribes. Online tribes. Like your website. And then no one will make any money anymore.
Ace: to some extent I think that's sort of the case now but one tribe -- the one that dominates the media -- won't concede it's tribal even after it consistently goes out of the way to insult the other tribes. You ever watch a movie with no political content at all, just about a human story, and then, pow, out of nowhere, some [conservative-baiting] insult? it's like -- what was doing there? Did they WANT 30% of the audience to walk out badmouthing it?
Ehlinger: Well, it's a case of the cool kids in high school... they eventually get fat, turn into drunks, and get DUI's when they get older. That is their collective media career destinies.
Ya gotta read the whole piece. It is truly elucidating stuff. Seriously. Go now.
Re: Conservative art-I'll be honest. This has troubled me for a while. Maybe not 'troubled', but it's an issue that has certainly puzzled me.
It's sorta obvious that the old media paradigm...a liberal monopoly that runs the big TV networks/large newspapers/national glossy magazines/La-La Land...is circling the drain. For instance, 2008 was probably (hopefully) the last election where MSNBC, The New York Times and a raft of music industry hacks could simply pick up a left-wing presidential candidate and carry his butt across the finish line.
I've basically viewed the crack-up of the old-skoolmedia environment as a good thing. But a part of me has been concerned about what Ace calls ghettoization. What happens when there is no national news/entertainment culture? Do we Balkanize?
First, there's pretty much nothing anybody can do about it, so there's really no point in fretting about it too much. It's almost like worrying about the Sun being hot. Best to get over it and deal with the consequences of any potential Balkanization when/if it occurs.
Now, if the breakdown of the media universe we inhabit is inevitable, then the idea of conservative art has to be entertained. The vast anti-statist/pro-free market tribe is going to need culture. It'll need cultural artifacts like songs, novels and dramatic works. As Ehlinger said, right-wing documentaries have their place, but they're not enough.
Conservatives should do what they can to support right-of-center art and artists. The creators are going to need money in order to...you know...eat. It's one thing to make a great short-length Obama satire that gets thrown onto DailyMotion and has a million views. It's another thing to actually get paid to do creative stuff.
In the long run, how is this all going to play out? I really don't know. The outlines of the new media paradigm are only just starting to form. But in a lot of ways, it'll be better for the Right than it has been in 50 years. Listening to guys like Ladd EhlingerJr., one gets a sense of the great possibilities that are available to conservative artists right now.
Before I brain-cramp: I sorta beefed on the whole Balkanization line I was toying with. As I was thinking about it some more I realized I hadn't really explained myself very well.
An interesting facet of the old media environment was that it had created a national culture of sorts. Remember that until the early 80's there were only three TV networks, talk radio was lost in the sauce of the Fairness Doctrine and there were large nationwide systems for distributing movies and music. Thus if you were a consumer of mass culture, you were basically seeing or hearing or watching what everybody else did.
But what did people do before there was a national media culture? There were regional tastes that determined what people did to entertain themselves. Music and musicians patronized in the South was different than what people tended to like in places like New York City or Massachusetts.
My feeling is that once the nationwide system that reigned from the late 1940's till the late 1980's finally drifts into obsolescence, we will see a renaissance of the older more separated cultures. They will be less determined by location and more organized by tastes, age and yes, political ideology.
It will be quite different than what many people are used to. But as I stated before, it could result in a new flowering of right-of-center culture.
I want to look at something the preeminent jerkweed of our time, Mike Bloomberg, belched out the other day in reference to the Ground Zero Mosque:
"Every time they pass the basket in your church and you throw a buck in, [do you want someone to] run over and say, 'OK, now where do you come from, who are your parents, where'd you get this money?' . . . A handful of people ought to be ashamed of themselves."
Not only is this a classless little smear on the part of Nurse Bloomie, it's got a whiff of our old friend, Moral Equivalence. Because nothing gives a liberal a rock hard boner more than negatively comparing Christianity to Islam.
But hey, why not indulge Mayor Mike's magnificent retardation for a moment?
What would it take to make Christianity the moral equivalent to Islam?
There would have to be groups of Christians that call for violent acts in the name of Jesus. It could not just be the rare lone gunman-type with a Bible stuffed into his drawers and a raging desire to kill people for Christ wilding out. You'd need to have densely populated structures incorporated for the purpose of fomenting Jesus-inspired terror. These organizations would be populated by leaders that call for Christians to use terror to spread Christianity. The power of Christ would compel the members of these religious groups to do violence to other humans.
Ideally, the Christian terrorists in our scenario should be internationalist in scope. These Super SplodeyJesus Freaks should have sleeper cells and quasi-independent franchises in places like Jakarta, Mumbai, Fallujah, Jerusalem, Aden, London, Paris, Philadelphia and Toronto. All of them should be vocal about the supremacy of the Christian faith and how Jesus commands them to acts of violence. Along with the multinational flavor of these groups, there should be members of Christian governments that covertly sponsor our hypothetical Christian terrorists.
There would also have to be a long history of Christian terrorism in the 20th and 21st centuries. We're talking about elements of the Kooky Christian Thrill Kill Cult carrying out acts of terror over the course of many decades. As before, these atrocities should be happening all over the world.
Finally, there would have to poll after poll showing rank and file Christian opinion was ambiguous-if not supportive-over the use of terrorism to spread the word of Christ. Leaders of the Genocidal Jesus Peeps should be supported by disturbing pluralities of Christians.
Do any of these hypotheticals exist in the real world? Not even close. Not even within a light-year. But still the lefty thumbsuckers just have to make their moral equivalence arguments/slime jobs.
The truth of the matter is that our Muslim friends have a serious existential problem. Their religion has been infected by vicious life-hating cancers. The faith desperately needs to kill these tumors before it's too late. Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists cannot do this for them. We can support reformers and decry the back-asswards types within Islam, but in the end it's up to them to figure out how to exist peacefully within a multi-religious world.
There are Muslims of good faith who want to see real positive change.
In fact here's one now, talking about the Ground Zero Mosque:
“This is not a humble Islamic statement. A mosque such as this is actually a political structure that casts a shadow over a cemetery, over hallowed ground. 9/11 was the beginning of a kinetic war, it is not an opportunity for cultural exchange. It was the beginning of a conflict with those who want to destroy our way of life,” Dr. ZuhdiJasser, president and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, told The Daily Caller.
“I am in no way looking to infringe on First Amendment issues. I approach this as a Muslim that is dedicated to reform,” he said.
Jasser sees the danger inherent in the Ground Zero Mosque. He also realizes the need for a peace-loving tolerant renaissance within Islam. Because he's accepted some hard truths about his faith, he doesn't engage in bullshit moral equivalence.
We have more than enough head-in-the-sand unrealists like Mike Bloomberg.
The Muslim religion...and the rest of us...desperately need more clear-eyed people like ZuhdiJasser.
Pretty much all who follow the news regularly—and many who don’t—know about the controversy surrounding the proposed construction of a Mosque near the site of what used to be the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.
The backers of this project and many others –including the mayor of New York--have cast the intent as a “freedom of religion” issue.
The opponents of the project—which are many—cast it mostly in emotional terms; I’m with them, but those terms, by their very nature, allow themselves to be argued down.
However, there is one reason to be against it—one which sets itself above all the others, one which is existential and practical rather than emotional.
A “Victory Mosque” set in the shadow of Ground Zero will be just that: a symbol of victory for the Islamists at the site of one of the greatest body counts in the name of Allah. And the existence of such symbols will invite more attempts at military conquest from the Soldiers of Allah.
Go on about the First Amendment and about misinterpretations of the phrase ‘hallowed ground.’ Keep pretending that blocking the construction of this particular mosque is somehow preventing New York Muslims from freely exercising their religion—as if permission to build a church or a synagogue anywhere in NYC would automatically be granted. But know this: our enemies will take our notions of “fairness” and explode it in our faces; not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here on the Hallowed Ground which stretches from sea to shining sea.
By the way, if we infidels aren’t quickly jumping to convert to Islam, to die or to become dhimmis, are we violating the First Amendment? Just wondering. Because that would be the full flowering of the free exercise of Islam.
Lots of First Amendment violations in that, don’t you think?
The Muslim Canadian Congress
(MCC) is urging the Cordoba House Initiative to abandon its proposed
Ground-Zero Mosque in New York in the face of outrage expressed by large
segments of the American population calling the proposal an act of 'fitna' or mischief.
In
a letter to Imam Faisal Rauf that will be delivered on Tuesday, August
10 by MCC’s board member Raheel Raza, the MCC says, “Many Muslims
suspect that the idea behind the Ground Zero mosque is meant to be a
deliberate provocation, to thumb our noses at the 'infidel.' We believe
the proposal has been made in bad faith and, in Islamic parlance, is
creating 'fitna,' meaning 'mischief-making,' an act clearly forbidden
in the Qur’an.”
Karl Rove once claimed that President George W. Bush read 95 books in a year as part of a bet.
...
[President Obama:] "Yeah, you have very little chance to really read. I basically floss my teeth and watch Sports Center."
And play, golf, of course.
This isn't surprising, however. There's a segment of the so-called highly-educated populace which never reads anything unless there's some immediate gain involved--usually monetary in nature. Additionally, President Obama strikes me as someone who believes he knows all of the things he needs to know.
I'm guessing that means that he won't read my book. Too bad; he might learn something.
As a Knicks fan, it kills me to say this but...Michael Jordan is exactly correct.
The latest Big Three backlash came Sunday from none other than Michael Jordan, who contributed his weighty opinion to the debate about whether LeBron James should've teamed up with two superstars instead of trying to beat them.
"There's no way, with hindsight, I would've ever called up Larry, called up Magic and said, 'Hey, look, let's get together and play on one team,'" Jordan said after finishing tied for 22nd in the American Century Championship golf tournament in Stateline, Nev. "But that's ... things are different. I can't say that's a bad thing. It's an opportunity these kids have today. In all honesty, I was trying to beat those guys."
Bingo.
The thing about LeBron is that he has consciously modeled himself on Jordan's career. That means that he's supposed to be the guy who's taking the last shot at the end of games. He's the leader in the locker room. Most importantly, he's taking slightly less money to help his franchise bring a supporting cast to him and his team.
Instead, Bron-Bron decided to join the three-headed monster in Miami. More and more, the free agent summit Bosh, Wade and James held in June looks like just a cheesey attempt to rig the system to get their spoiled-brat way. While it's not collusion in the legal sense, it looks really bad. Perception in the NBA is really important. LeBron has done great damage to the way he is perceived by non-Heat fans nowadays.
The idea that James is the next coming of Michael Jordan has been forever tarnished by him leaving Cleveland to join Wade and Bosh in Miami. In MJ's Chicago, there was no doubt who was taking the big shot at the end of games. It wasn't Horace Grant and it sure wasn't Scottie Pippen. On and off the floor, Jordan was the undisputed leader of the Bulls.
One more thing: Jordan never left Chicago to team up with his buddies. He just went out and beat everybody. He whipped absolutely phenomenal players in the most pressure-filled situations. Look at who he defeated in order to get his championships. Magic Johnson, James Worthy, Clyde Drexler, Charles Barkley, Tom Chambers, Shawn Kemp, Gary Payton, John Stockton and Karl Malone: These are just some of the all-world players MJ beat in order to win his hardware. That doesn't take into account playoff series wins and conference championships, where he scored victories against mega-stars like Larry Bird, Patrick Ewing and Isiah Thomas.
Compare Jordan's resume to LeBron's curriculum vitae. He hasn't beaten anybody. No last second heroics, no monster performances to carry his team and no rings. Sure, he's been stellar in the regular season. But god-like players aren't born beating up on the Nets or the Kings in the middle of a December road trip.
One gets the feeling that LeBron has little interest in being 'the guy' and much more interest in getting paid. This is weird considering that everybody connected with him keeps telling us he's the greatest player in the world. It's hard to be the number 1 star when you're a supporting cast member in somebody else's show. I think James is going to be in for a rude awakening as NBA fans rethink Bron-Bron's place in the basketball world's hierarchy of stars.
Congratulations LeBron. You've just turned yourself into a second tier star. Enjoy being Dwayne Wade's caddie.
Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, the longest-serving senator in
American history, died Monday at the age of 92, a spokesman for the
family said.
Byrd, a Democrat who served in the U.S. Senate since 1959, had been
plagued by health problems in recent years and was confined to a
wheelchair. He had skipped several votes in Congress in the past
months.
Jesse Jacobs, a family spokesman, said Byrd died peacefully at about 3
a.m. at Inova Hospital in Fairfax, Va.
So ends the life of Robert C. Byrd.
As Ted Kennedy was a symbol of the moral rot within the
modern Democratic Party, the career of Robert Byrd is a manifestation
of a distinctly American type of political corrosion. Much is made
of the fact that Byrd was the longest serving member of the Senate in US
history. Why is that such a magnificent accomplishment? It only means
he was able to win a bunch of popularity contests over the years. If
Darth Vader gave away $3.3 billlion in other
people's money to West Virginia, he'd be awfully popular with the
voters as well.
You know who else polls really well, year after year, without fail?
Santa Claus. Why? Because he gives away free toys and all you have to
do is behave yourself and you get a first class ticket on the Christmas
gravy train. Unlike jolly ol' Saint Nick, Robert Byrd's pork
masquerading as generosity came directly from the US taxpayers. It's
quite easy to be Mister Awesomely Popular when there is never some
federally subsidized boondoggle you'll say no to.
It would've taken real leadership for Senator Byrd to tell his
constituents that they can't have their cake (paid for by the other 49
states) and eat it too. He probably wouldn't have every left-wing
douche fighting to fellate him for the last 50 years. He might've lost
an election and go back into private life. Perhaps he would not have
been able to create a Senatorial fiefdom based on ring-kissing patronage
and barely concealed graft. Then again, he might instead be remembered
as a responsible steward of taxpayer money. It's not nearly as sexy as
'longest sitting Senator evah', but it would be a far more
respectable legacy.
Let us not forget the overarching American concern over racism and
Robert Byrd's role in the evolution of racial policies in the nation.
The Senator was a former member of the KKK, but continued to kiss their asses for
years after he supposedly left the group.
The ex-Klansman allegedly ended his ties with the group in 1943. He
may have stopped paying dues, but he continued to pay homage to the KKK.
Republicans in West Virginia discovered a letter Sen. Byrd had written
to the Imperial Wizard of the KKK three years after he says he abandoned
the group. He wrote: "The Klan is needed today as never before and I am
anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia" and "in every state
in the Union."
...The ex-Klansman vowed never to fight "with a Negro by my side.
Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the
dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become
degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the
wilds."
Although he later denounced the Ku Klux Klan, his renunciation didn't
stop him from fillibustering the
1964 Civil Rights Act. He also had a habit of opposing black Supreme
Court nominations; both Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas got the
thumbs down from Senator Byrd, which makes his opposition to them seem
less about ideological differences and more about personal animus
towards African-Americans. Only in the soft-bigoted topsy-turvy bizarro
world of the American progressive movement can a man with that kind of
record of blatant racism rise to become the 'conscience of the Senate'.
The fact that such a rancorous bigot could soar to the heights of
political grandeur is a testament the 'power for power's sake' mentality
within the contemporary Left.
There will always be racists. There will forever be pockets of
bigotry in America. People are born flawed and unfortunately racism
is one of mankind's unwashable sins. Hatemongers will be with us in one
form or another till the end of time. But we don't have to elevate
racist dickbags like Senator Byrd to the pinnacle of American political
life.
Having said all that, surely Byrd's family is mourning the loss of a
towering figure in their lives. It is said that the Senator was a
devoted family man and a born again Christian. These things do not
erase his public legacy. But they are yet another sign that people are
complicated creatures, capable of magnanimity, generosity and love or
cruelty, selfishness and hate.
It should also be noted that the Senator was ailing for quite some
time. It is hoped that with his passing from this world, Mr. Byrd finds
the comfort and grace of his Creator.
Rest In Peace.
AWESOME UPDATE: If you are not charitably inclined towards
Senator Byrd...and I cannot say I blame you...take a spin over to Feed
Your ADHD. Snarky Basterd's byline? Hell.
Satan, [Ted] Kennedy’s rival for control of Hell, welcomed Byrd to
his kingdom of filth.
“It is with great honor that I bestow the title of KKK Grand Dragon
on Senator Byrd,” Satan said. “Only a true Democrat – and we’re all
Democrats down here in Hell – could have uttered the great statements he
has made over the years.”
Check that stuff out, yo.
ANOTHER AWESOME UPDATE: Nick Gillespie has a nice cold showerfor
the Byrd-o-philes. Oooof.
But it's Byrd's status as the Babe Ruth of pork-barrel spending and
taxpayer-funded narcissism that is his real legacy and the one we should
never forget or forgive. Here lies a man who pushed his home state to build a statue of him in defiance of a rule
that such honorees be dead for 50 years.
Back in 2006, Citizens Against Government Waste called Byrd the
"Emperor Palpatine of Pork" and gave him their lifetime achievement award...
STILL ANOTHER AWESOME UPDATE: Ed Driscoll has a sweet take down.
President Obama’s potential words of praise to a racial demagogue far
worse than even Rev. Wright himself should be
especially interesting to watch.
UPDATE (baldilocks): Byrd refused to serve in World War Two
due to blacks being a part of the force, even in their lowly status
before the desegregation of the US Armed Forces in
1948. I cited that here
using Wiki, but the reference has been cleaned up.
If, by some chance Byrd got to go to Heaven, I hope he gets to be Dorie Miller's
butler.
I don't know who Rory Bremner is. I do know that he seems spooked.
Bremner was discussing the future of satire with David Frost on Frost on Satire, a BBC documentary. “The greatest danger now is that one of the toughest issues of our time is religion,” says Bremner, as quoted in the Daily Telegraph. He says that, when he’s writing a sketch about Islam, “I’m writing a line and I think, ‘If this goes down badly, I’m writing my own death warrant there.’ Because there are people who will say, ‘Not only do I not think that’s funny but I’m going to kill you’ – and that’s chilling.”
Bremner cites the case of a Danish cartoonist, who isn’t named in the Telegrapharticle, but is likely to be Kurt Westergaard, who drew a cartoon of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. His life changed after that and other cartoons appeared in Jyllands-Posten, and Muslims reacted with violence.
“If you’re a Danish cartoonist and you work in a Western tradition, people don’t take that too seriously,” Bremner tells Frost in the interview, to be aired Thursday.
“Suddenly you’re confronted by a group of people who are fundamentalist and extreme and they say, ‘We’re going to kill you because of what you have said or drawn.’ Where does satire go from there, because we like to be brave but not foolish.”
This may seem like a very small nit to pick with Islam. After all, we're talking about one yappy performer expressing nervousness over making fun of a religion. Aren't there larger issues-the Israel/Gaza situation, the threat of Iranian nukes, the ongoing Afghan War-that we could be dealing with? All these issues touch on the question of Islam and it's interactions with the West to one degree or another and they seem more pressing than some British jokester's jitters.
I agree that the foreign conundrums involving Islam are dire. In some cases, these are civilizational questions we face. What kind of world will it be when Iran gets the bomb? What lengths must Israel go to in order to ensure it's existence? What if America loses the war against the Taliban? Clearly, these are not mundane policy decisions here, but truly deep concerns.
But none of these issues-as deadly serious as they are-lap so directly upon our shores as the way Islam is practiced within Western nations. Rory Bremner may be one guy, but his reaction to the potential actions of Muslims is to avoid making fun of them. Why does he do this? Because he fears the very real possibility that he will be physically attacked by a Muslim who has taken offense to Bremner's act.
Wrap your mind around that sad state of affiars for a while.
For every cultural relativist out there who wallows in multi-culti feel goodisms, consider the absurdity of extremist Presbyterians kicking the crap out of a comedian who pokes fun at Christians. No matter how much one strains to find a case that fits that general description, one simply can't be found. It doesn't exist, except in the minds of lefty handwringers that kvetch about the oft-feared yet somehow never-occurring anti Islamic backlash coming from psychotic Christian racist teabaggers. Meanwhile, as the Muslim-coddlers worry over non-existent Jesus Freak violence, out in the real world members of the Islamic faith continue to use gangster style threats to cow people into submission and fear.
Remember when liberals complained that Bush's domestic surveillance programs were creating a chilling effect on free speech? It was bullshit of course, but now we have real actual-factual proof that freedom of expression is being severely curtailed in England. Not by the government of course, but by followers of Islam. Where are the leftists beating their chests and writing 10,000 word treatises on the chilling effect on free speech Muslims are creating in Great Britain?
Truth be told, the stifling of criticism of Islam is an existential threat to the West. It might not be as dramatic as a shooting war or foreign policy brinkmanship. However, it affects the general population-both liberals and conservatives-of the Western nations. More importantly, it's probably going to take all facets of the political spectrum pulling together to turn the tide of this new-fangled form of dhimmitude.
Rory Bremner is yet another canary in the coal mine, warning us of the decay that is happening to our culture. Will we mobilize ourselves in time to win?
UPDATE (baldilocks): King Shamus has permission to call me PC.
It’s not just long-ago sins like imperialism and colonialism and Eurocentric white male patriarchy and other fancies barely within living memory. Our very lifestyle demands penitence: Americans have easily accessible oil reserves, but it would be wrong to touch them, so poor old BP have to do the “environmentally responsible” thing and be out in the middle of the Gulf a mile underwater. If you’re rich enough to be that stupid, what won’t you subsidize? The top al-Qaeda recruiter in Britain, Abu Qatada, had 150,000 pounds in his bank account courtesy of the taxpayer before the comically misnamed Department for Work and Pensions decided to cut back his benefits.
The green jobs, the gay parades, the jihadist welfare queens, the Greek public sector unions, all have to be paid for by a shrinking base of contributing workers whose children and grandchildren will lead poorer and meaner lives because of the fecklessness of government. The social compact of the postwar era cannot hold. Across the developed world, a beleaguered middle class is beginning to understand that it’s no longer that rich. At some point, it will look at the sheer waste of government spending, the other shoe will drop, and it will decide that it no longer wishes to be that stupid.
The Republicans had a majority in the House of Representatives for, what, 12 years? During that time, the GOP did very little to break the Left’s choke-hold on the levers of power. Oh sure, the GOP would win a presidency and yeah, they’d gain control of the Senate for a time or two. But the basically permanent federal bureaucracy, which is overwhelmingly liberal, hardly changed.
The left-wing hacks that infest almost every layer of the federal government are very protective of their fiefdoms from outside-aka conservative-influences. Here’s a question: Does anybody think the mega-bureaucracy that is Obama-Care will be any sort of compatible with small government reforms?
Look at something as seemingly benign as PBS. From Sesame Street to Nova, it’s a bastion of left-wing politics. It indoctrinates kids and adults in liberal propaganda with your tax dollars, then guilt-trips you into donating $100 for a $5 tote bag. In the history of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, have they ever been in any danger of being weaned off the public trough? Have they ever been in any danger of just having their budgets cut?
Elements of the government have long been in bed with barely-legal groups like La Raza and ACORN. Socialism, race-hustling and criminal conduct…all of these things are aided and abetted by taxpayer dollars.
Don’t get me wrong. Elections still matter. 2010 is most assuredly going to be a big battle in the fight against the statist project. But on a deeper level, the government life support system for the Left must have it’s plug pulled. If we are to make any progress against the Progressives, we must stop giving the liberals a blank check from the government to meddle in American public life.
PHOENIX -- The The Phoenix Suns will wear "Los Suns" on their jerseys in Game 2 of the Western Conference semifinals on Wednesday night, owner Robert Sarver said, "to honor our Latino community and the diversity of our league, the state of Arizona, and our nation."
The decision to wear the jerseys on the Cinco de Mayo holiday stems from a law passed by the Arizona Legislature and signed by Gov. Jan Brewer that has drawn widespread criticism from Latino organizations and civil rights groups that say it could lead to racial profiling of Hispanics. President Barack Obama has called the law "misguided."
Sarver, who was born and raised in Tucson, said frustration with the federal government's failure to deal with the illegal immigration issue led to the passage of what he called "a flawed state law."
"However intended, the result of passing the law is that our basic principles of equal rights and protection under the law are being called into question," he said, "and Arizona's already struggling economy will suffer even further setbacks at a time when the state can ill-afford them."
I for one think this is great. Because everybody knows that the Phoenix Suns should be focusing on making a political statement, not...you know...winning playoff games.
National Review's Jay Nordlinger has spoken a great deal about the death of "safe zones"-venues and events that are free from the day-to-day grind of politics. Sports are one of those areas of life where people should be able to safely let down their partisan guards and simply be fans. What Robert Sarver has done is made many of the followers of his basketball team very uncomfortable. Why? Because, as AllahPundit notes, the law is very popular-try 70% favorability on for size-amongst the citizens of Arizona.
What exactly is Sarver saying to Suns fans by having his team stage a protest rally during one of their games? It sounds something like-"Hey Phoenix supporters: Thanks for buying our overpriced crap and shelling out a wad of cash to come to our playoff contest, you knuckledragging fascist dickbags." That's a pretty interesting method of winning over fans. What's next? 'Free Face Punch From Amar'e Stoudemire Night'?
Even better, Sarver has taken some heat from fans for being a cheap owner. Wow. So the douchedrinker won't spend money to get players to compliment the spectacularly gifted Steve Nash while the guard is still in his prime. On the other hand, he's willing to turn his team into a walking pep rally for an intensely unpopular partisan agenda that insults his team's fanbase. What an insufferable jerk.
Even More: The jerkiness is not just relegated to Suns' ownership. Overeducated undertalented sportswriters are working their tedious moral outrage muscles as well.
Tiger Woods violates his marriage vows repeatedly and all people like Eugene Robinson care about is the race of of the near-dozen women not-his-wife with whom Tiger has allegedly had relations. Eugene's problem? None of these women are black.
Listen closely, black people: Tiger Woods' job here on Earth is the same as that of each individual person--to do what God wants him to do. What that probably does not entail: validating the attractiveness of black women via serial adultery, humiliation of Mrs. Woods and, possibly, tainting the relationship between him and his children.
Just a guess.
Listen closely again, black people: get over yourselves. Everything is not about you. Heck, my novel is about interracial relationships, but there are subjects that transcend this. As a matter of fact vows to God transcend everything.
But consider this: Tiger is a very blessed man, even in this situation. Don't think so? Consider the case of the late Steve McNair.
Sometimes God gets tired of your BS and removes his protection. God thinks Eldrick Woods is still teachable.
[W]e are interested because Tiger Woods,
who may legitimately be the best golfer ever, had been turned into an
all-purpose icon: a man of personal rectitude, a lovely smile, apparent
openness; a family man, with a lovely wife and two adorable babies. And
of course, he was our first living embodiment of the collective hope
for racial reconciliation. Who knew that the early reports of his
betrayed wife Elin swinging at him with a golf club constituted literal
icon-smashing?
We
are staring because we've been had. Betrayed. We see now that the image
was all a fraud. The talent was real. But the things that made the
public like Tiger personally -- the low-key demeanor, manners, and
sweet smile of countless sports-page photos, magazine covers, political
analogies, and most important, product endorsements, was an act. That
would be betrayal enough. But it wasn't just Woods' act. The
larger lesson here is about how much artifice -- sustained, deliberate
deception -- goes into the construction of a public persona when there
is profit to be made or power to be had.
Read the whole thing and note the parallels (however imperfect--hey, that's a joke!) to another demigod walking on clay feet.
Lots of things going on today, but two of them seem to demonstrate one of my convictions that there is no such thing as a coincidence.
John Allen Muhammad--the lead Beltway Sniper--is scheduled to be executed today at 6PM 9PM EST in Virginia.
Muhammad is set to die by injection Tuesday night at Greensville Correctional Center
in Jarratt. His attorneys had asked Kaine to commute his sentence to
life in prison because they say he is mentally ill. The U.S. Supreme
Court turned down his final appeal.
"I
find no compelling reason to set aside the sentence that was
recommended by the jury and then imposed and affirmed by the courts,"
[Virginia Governor Tim] Kaine, who is known for carefully considering death penalty cases, said in a statement. "Accordingly, I decline to intervene."
Muhammad
was sentenced to death for killing Dean Harold Meyers at a Manassas gas
station during a three-week spree that left 10 dead across Maryland,
Virginia and Washington, D.C.
But before earthly justice is served for the 2002 series of cowardly acts, the victims of another Jihadist are being memorialized with the president and the First Lady in attendance.
During their planned four-hour visit to Fort Hood, the Obamas were
scheduled to meet first with the families of those who were killed
Thursday in the shootings at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center,
then with wounded soldiers and their relatives.
Obama later planned to address the Fort Hood community at a memorial
service scheduled to start at 1 p.m. Central time, giving him another
opportunity to express outrage over the deaths and to tell the nation
that the government is taking steps to prevent similar tragedies in the
future.
After the service, the president and first lady were scheduled to
meet with wounded soldiers at Fort Hood's Darnall Army Medical Center
before flying back to Washington.
Remembering the time period from September 11, 2001 to March of 2003, there seem to be a spirit of threat over the US and the West. Is that spirit returning?
But the spirit of fear is not from God, so rebuke it in the name of Jesus Christ...if you dare.
One wonders whether the selection of McCain's Alaskan pro-drilling running mate and the GOP's humongous post VP selection, post-convention bounce had any thing to do with this decision.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Monday morning that the newest Democratic energy bill will be brought to the floor under normal rules and will be subject to a vote on a Republican alternative that is likely to call for even more drilling than Democrats are prepared to swallow. [SNIP]
The move is a dramatic departure from Democrats’ pre-August recess strategy, in which they brought up each of their energy bills under suspension of the rules and, in doing so, avoided having any votes on Republican measures calling for offshore drilling. But by embracing this strategy, Democrats also failed to get the two-thirds majority necessary to pass the majority of their energy bills.
And check this out:
A leadership aide said last week that Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) adoption of a pro-drilling position was a strategic one designed to bring the party in line with its presidential nominee, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), and give vulnerable caucus members political cover heading into the November elections.
For the Democrats, it's not about the welfare of the people but about keeping their jobs and about staying in line with their capricious candidate whose positions change with the wind--a wind so apparently strong that it ought to be considered an alternative energy source. Surprised? Me neither.
Another Obama sibling is found in a shanty on the outskirts of Nairobi. (Hey, you can’t pick your parents or your siblings, but was O’s father busy or what?)
Leading Democrats—the Speaker and the Candidate—are now mouthing new words on domestic drilling, but the 2008 Democratic Party Platform going into next week's convention tells the same old story.
Condoleezza Rice and Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski sign agreement to put a missile defense base in Poland, one which will contain ten American interceptor missiles. That deal had been nearly dead but Russia’s invasion of Georgia resuscitated it.
With Mexican news dominated by the kidnap-killing of 14-year-old Fernando Marti, the execution of Mexican Jose Medellin for the 1993 rape-murder of two girls in Texas appears to have sparked far less outrage than people here have shown in previous death penalty cases. [SNIP]
"There is no reason for outrage. The man was a rapist," said lawyer Gustavo Sanchez, 40, as he got a shoeshine on a Mexico City street. "If we had the death penalty here, there wouldn't be so many crimes."
As is nearly always the case the world over, the government has a different view than the people:
Mexico's Foreign Relations Department said it sent a note of protest to the U.S. State Department about the decision to execute Medellin. The World Court ordered [sic] U.S. authorities to review the case, which drew international attention because of allegations that Medellin wasn't allowed to consult the Mexican consulate for legal help following his arrest.
The Mexican government statement said officials "were concerned for the precedent that (the execution) may create for the rights of Mexican nationals who may be detained in that country.
Hopefully, foreigners who would rape and murder in the US will be concerned with the Medallin precedent as well. Of course, I may have a different precedent in mind than does the Mexican government.
The US execution of a Mexican national used to spark vehement citizen protests and denunciations south of the border. No more. If we think things are bad here, they are far worse down there, where police brutality takes on a whole new meaning.
Human nature is such that lawlessness will reign when the lawless have nothing to make them think twice about committing crime. No matter how often our betters tell us that humanity is basically good, unconstrained humans will stoop ever lower to prove that axiom false.
Unholy troika: Linking the 2008 Democrat nominee for President of the United States to Senate Majority Leader Reid (D-NV) and Speaker of the US House of Representatives Pelosi (D-CA is an “attack” now—especially when the subject is oil-drilling.
And why wouldn’t Obama want to be associated with the Speaker? After all, by driving us all into the poorhouse via the refusal to allow domestic drilling, she’s Saving the Planet!
Part of the problem: Senator Ted Steven (R-AK) is indicted for seven counts of lying according to the federal grand jury.
Lenin twirls: The billionaires come out at night in Moscow. Rich, no doubt, due to oil.
Have you ever watched a movie for the 10th time and noticed something that you've never seen before? Did you wonder how you possibly could have missed it?
That's the way I felt when I learned that John Carlos and Tommie Smith flew to Australia to serve as pallbearers in the funeral of Peter Norman, the third man on the medal stand with them in that iconic photo of their black-gloved protest at the 1968 Olympics.
Recent Comments