Jeff over at Protein Wisdom gives us the scoop on the latest doings on the female empowerment front.
This is actually quite interesting: “The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), representing four military women and the activist Servicewomen’s Action Network (SWAN), has filed a San Francisco lawsuit demanding that female soldiers be forced into direct ground combat (infantry) battalions.”
The lawsuit is being filed because female soldiers have been proven to be just as good ad their male counterparts.
This despite “numerous studies and tests conducted over the past 30 years, in the direct ground combat environment” showing “women do not have an equal opportunity to survive, or to help fellow soldiers survive.”
Oh.
Well.
It must be sexist or racist or sexist-racist (sexiracist?) to keep women off the front lines, so let the litigation commence.
BTW: I'm with Jeff. If a woman can physically and mentally perform to the same degree as a man, she should be eligible to serve in any Obamafied kinetic military actions.
But that's not what this lawsuit is about.
It's about making women 'equal' to men, no matter how badly we have to torture biology and physics and math to make it happen.
Whatever. I for one have had it trying to protect thumbsucking anti-American leftoids from the consequences of their moronic policy prescriptions. Every day, members of the reality-based community furiously beat their spoons on their high chairs demanding the rest of us give in to every one of their thoughtless childish whims.
Screw it. Give the ACLU everything that it wants in this case. Marxists think women in combat is like the bestest idea ever? Cool. We should make Gloria Allred an eleventy-star general just to celebrate this marvelous achievement-free achievement.
As a matter of fact, if you look at the history of America, women have gotten off pretty easy when it comes to fighting in combat. Since the Revolutionary War, the overwhelming number of soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen have been men. The US government has been guilty of creating a disparate impact on our male citizens-soldiers. This sort of blatant sexist discrimination against almost half of our population cannot and will not stand.
Currently, the US Army is 13% female and 87% male. Those numbers need to change. If we're serious about righting the long-standing historic wrong our government has perpetrated against men, we must not only must allow women serve in combat. We have to go further, and make the Army an 87% female force.
Call me a radical feminist, but America will never be an equal society when women don't have to shoulder the burden of defending our country. That means our Army must stop taking in male recruits, while at the same time creating a massive new program to recruit and retain female Army candidates. It's the only way we can right one of the great civil rights failures in America's history.
I mean, why not let a Katy Perry video help determine our nation's military policy?
Shop-Rite has a solution for all your NHL lock-out needs.
Here's the problem the NHL has right now.
I'm a hockey fan. I've been rooting for the Rangers since I was in middle school. And I am slowly but surely getting used to not watching the NHL anymore.
I'll be frank; I've got plenty of options besides ice hockey to fill my time. The Giants are a first place team. The Knicks are having a resurgent year. The Yankees might sign Josh Hamilton. My teams are bringing drama and excitement every day of the week.
Mind you, those are just the sports entertainments I've used to replace my hockey enthusiasm. If we wanna get further afield than just professional athletics, there are many other things to watch, listen to, read, and play. "The Walking Dead" is finally turning into the gripping drama critics thought it could be three years ago. "Tale of The Tigers" is a great read from a terrific conservative blogger. Black Ops II just might get me back to giving third eyes to hapless noobs; *CQBDevilGod999* could pwn again.
Like I said, I'm a long-time supporter of American hockey and I'm moving on in relatively painless fashion. Think about the more casual fans out there. The guys who don't go see a ton of games live. The people who don't buy merchandise every five seconds. Those soft hockey fans probably barely noticed that the NHL isn't running games. Worse, they might not come back once the league decides to end the lock-out.
I don't know all the details of the work stoppage. I don't know everything that the players and owners are fighting over. My gut tells me that the owners probably more at fault than the players, but I could be wrong.
But ultimately, all that is a moot point. This is about the NHL bleeding fans who may never return once the lock-out is done. Whatever short and medium term financial issues at stake have to pale in comparison to the long-term sustainability of the National Hockey League. I mean, can the league continue to exist when the owners and players seem determined to alienate the people who support them?
A personal observation taken from the post-election wreckage.
On Election Night, I sat in a coffee house reading Twitter and scanning the Fox News website for the vote tallies. I couldn't sit in my cold dark place without power. I didn't feel like just listening to the radio for the returns to come in. So there I was, drinking a root beer and listening to cookie-cutter smooth jazz as Mitt Romney went down to ignominious defeat.
While making jokes to brighten my mood (Q--What do you call a guy who has $5 trillion dollars in debt, 8% unemployment and the Benghazi disaster? A--Mister President.) I overheard a conversation between two college girls. It went something like this:
Lady A: The election is tonight?
Lady B: Yeah.
Lady A: I kinda like Mitt Romney.
Lady B: Yeah, but he wants to take away student loans.
Lady A: Screw that shit.
Let me add--These two young women didn't seem like bad people. Maybe not as clued-in as one might hope, but not many 19 year-olds are terribly invested in national politics. They were just shooting the breeze at a coffee shop. It was clear that Mitt Romney and Barack Obama did not loom large in their lives. Which is pretty much how most Americans are disconnected from the daily political grind.
A few days later, I found myself at a gas station line waiting to fill some cans to feed my generator. The guy working there looked like he was in his early twenties. He must've seen the NRA sticker on my bumper because he asked me, "Is Obama really looking to end the right to keep and bear arms? Because I'm concerned about that."
Homeboy seemed like a nice enough dude. While he probably wasn't an Obama supporter, he didn't seem like an overly political person. He had a post-election worry regarding the newly re-elected President, but other than that he appeared like the sort of man who didn't engage himself in partisan bickering very often.
Both of these encounters struck me as amazing in their own ways.
It's important to note something sorta obvious: we live in an enormously diverse country. The opinions of the citizenry range from wide left to far right, from the lowest grubby obsessions to the highest spiritual aspirations. Because we are surrounded by this massive continent-spanning society, it's easy to forget just how dynamic our culture really is. Even our most wretched debased theories are vaguely interesting, if only because of the scope of the awfulness involved. On the other hand, our grandest and greatest ideas are so transcendent that they expand human freedom and perspective in previously unimaginable ways.
It's mind-blowing to think that two very different expressions of ideology--"Mitt wants to snatch my college money"/"Barack wants to confiscate my guns"--can happily coexist. Yet they do, in a more or less peaceful way. Our elections are bitterly contested, but for the most part actual wide-spread violence hasn't visited our political disputes for a long time.
What we learned on Elections Day--and this, sadly, is a lesson some of us will have to re-learn a few times now--is that our politics flows out from the vast American culture. Politicians are a reflection of our religious values, our social norms, our manners, our entertainments and even our petty diversions. As of November 2012, the result of our grand national partisan argument makes it unclear whether America really is the center-right country some of us have assumed it was.
Don't get it twisted. There are at least 59 million people who are at least sorta sympathetic to a right-of-center political vision. More people are reading conservative-ish books than liberal screeds. More people call themselves conservative than identify as left-wing. These are very large numbers. They indicate that there is still a sizable electoral minority and perhaps a broad plurality that comes to the ballot box with a traditionalist background.
Having said that, it appears that there are more Americans who believe that college loans (along with a whole host of things) should be doled out by the feds. At the very least, more lefty-sympathetic citizens than right-of-center folks can be motivated to vote. Do left-of-center people believe in big government because their politicians tell them to? Or do they come to the voting booth with progressive ideas already entrenched in their worldview and are simply looking for parties and politicians who can make liberal policies a reality?
I'd also argue that those who choose liberalism and buy it's wares are much like other consumers in our society. Social conservatives lament that American pop culture is full of filth and decadence and arrogance and stupidity. Free-market conservatives often respond that pop culture is merely producing what the market demands.
The same thing goes for American politics. Conservatives are often annoyed that so many people consume so much of the liberal kultursmog; the Washington Post, the Daily Kos, the English Department of Montclair State University and almost anything financed by Harvey Weinstein or written by Aaron Sorkin. Maybe people consume progressive media because it's the only one readily available. Most people will choose a debased culture rather than no culture at all.
Even worse, after another mortifying Election Night loss, righties scratch their heads and wonder why they got buried.
Seeing just how much cultural ground the Right has given up, along with how many delivery mechanisms the Left just flat-out owns, it's astounding that Republicans are able to squeak out any victories at all.
What the traditionalists, free-marketeers, social cons and defense hawks must get through their heads ASAFP is that they're never going to score decisive electoral victories without first scoring some major cultural victories first. They've already ceded so much ground to the vastleft-wingidiocracy. It's well past time for conservatives to start taking American civilization back from the degenerates, racists, whiners and liars that currently run the show.
Only then will the Right start to reverse both their electoral fortunes and the decline of the greatest country in the history of humanity.
The 'Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm--Barack Hussein Obama Children's Choir' were unavailable for this gig.
Shorter Future Children Project: Report your Romney-supporting parents to the Ministry of Love today!
Notice the concerns the makers of this propaganda place into the mouths of children. Endangered polar bears? Not even Premier Obama thinks that. Rampant strip mines dotting the American landscape? That's news to the miners. Conservatives think our failing schools are good enough? That must be why Milton Friedman was a proponent of school choice reform since the Eisenhower Administration. Endless wars? Here's another ten years of Obama drone strikes, you worthless hypocritical peace-creeps.
What's really amazing is wayback machine quality of the ad. The Left always accuses conservatives of wanting to travel back in time, but who is actually living in the past? The writers of the douchey bit act as if Barack Obama is still Captain Jesus-Man Lightbringer promising lower ocean levels and lower middle class tax rates. The last four years--$5 trillion dollars of debt, sky high unemployment, economic illiteracy--never happened for these progressives.
Or maybe this ad is just meant to stir the turd. The only people that might even sorta respond are die hard Obama fanbois and right-wingers making fun of them. So it's not really a campaign spot that's meant to get people to the polls. It's more like the flip-side of Jon Stewart's clap humor.
Okee-dokee. It's your dime, Future Children Project. Enjoy your pointless uninspiring performance art.
In case you were wondering where Part 1 is, clickety here.
I spotted this over at the terrific Coalition of The Swilling. Thanks, Mr. Bingley.
...the Left is going to make the 2000 recount, and their subsequent 8 year tantrum, look like a breezy pillow-fight.
Why do I say this? Because they are setting themselves up for the mother of all emotional letdowns. Watch as featured Daily Kossack propagandist Jed Lewison spins Obama's sinking poll numbers.
Bottom line: Yes, this is a close race. Yes, the first debate appears to have given Romney a boost, but it wasn't a big enough boost to put him ahead in the electoral math and there's no evidence to suggest that he continues to have any forward momentum. Even if the national popular vote were a tossup, Obama has a real edge in the states that matter. The race is by no means over, but for Romney to win, he needs to shift the electoral map in his favor. So far, he hasn't been able to do it.
(By the way--no linkie love for Kook Fringe jag-offs. Find it for yourself if you must.)
Meanwhile, Real Clear Politics' electoral map looks like this.
If you've been paying attention to the electoral maps, you'll recall that Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania used to lean Obama just a month ago. Check out where they are now. Notice that North Carolina and Missouri have both--finally--fallen into the Romney orbit. Wrap your mind around New Hampshire trending towards the GOP presidential ticket.
In other words, Romney's momentum has put formerly Obama states back in the toss-up column and moved other states into the Republican orbit. Meanwhile, Obama has not made inroads into Romney's safe or leaning states. Obama now has to defend his firewall from serious Republican inroads, while Mitt hasn't had to defend traditional GOP strongholds.
According to the statists, all that means St. Barry is a lead pipe lock.
Even worse, Team Bamster isn't waiting for the President to lose on Election Day to pass around rifle rounds for their circular firing squad. Take a guess who's taking a trip under Premier Barry's bus.
[Matt] Bai’s choice for the person who steered the president wrong this year is none other than former President Bill Clinton, who has widely been credited for having helped produce a post-convention boost for the Democrats. Clinton’s speech on behalf of Obama was viewed, with good reason, as being far more effective than anything the president or anyone else said on his behalf this year. But Bai points to Clinton as the primary advocate within high Democratic circles for changing the party’s strategy from one of bashing Mitt Romney as an inauthentic flip-flopper to one that centered on trying to assert that he was a conservative monster. Given that Romney demolished that false image in one smashing debate performance in Denver that seems to have changed the arc of the election, Clinton’s advice seems ripe for second-guessing right now.
Lets be clear: Bill Clinton has done more than any other prominent Democrat to carry Barack Obama's sorry ass across the finish line. Not Harry Reid. Not Nancy Pelosi. Not even Eva Longoria.
But now that pResident is about to shit the White House mattress, of course David Axelrod feeds Matt Bai the pre-emptive first strike on Slick Willy.
Amazing, really.
But the die-hard Outer Party hacks have no interest in reality. They think Obama has this election in the bag.
So when Romney wins, watch out for much banging of spoons on high chairs. But unlike the Republicans in 2008, the Democrats and their base will do no soul-searching. There won't be any ideological reassessments on the Left.
In the wake of an Obama defeat, the nutroots will take the easiest most emotionally gratifying path they know: An insane voter suppression conspiracy theory. And just like in 2000 and 2004, the mainstream media will egg on every MoveOn.Org/DemocratUnderground charge. The Leftwing Palace Guard, saddened by their Jesus figure's electoral defeat, will do all they can to encourage a resurgent Occupy movement to shit on cop cars and scream in bug-eyed rage at Mitt Romney, Wall Street and conventional ideas about hygiene.
I admit it; I had high hopes for this flick. Tell me this doesn't sound promising--"Ridley Scott explores the backstory of the Alien mythos, with a massive budget and big name acting talent to flesh out the sure-fire chills and thrills." On paper, that would seem to suggest something really amazing.
Yeah, not quite.
The basic plot is not without merit. Scientists find a map to a planet where the creators of humanity, called Engineers, are thought to live. Even though this is basically the storyline for every single episode of "Ancient Aliens", we'll let Ridley Scott off the hook for not keeping up with History Channel's re-commitment to super-realistic not completely bat-shit insane programming.
So naturally, the Weyland Corporation sends a group of unstable weirdos, emotional basketcases and a deliberately mysterious android to run a gazillion dollar mission to determine the origins of human life on Earth. Sure. That's how NASA does their job, right?
Then they get to the planet and of course all hell breaks loose, mostly because the people running the operation are about 50 IQ points dumber than their job titles would suggest. Everyone in the crew is supposed to be an expert in their field. Meanwhile, they constantly do stupid shit that gets them killed, mutated or impregnated with a freaky squid baby.
To be fair, the visuals of Prometheus are stunning. The viewer is immersed in an environment that looks otherworldly in the best sense of the word. Ridley Scott is an expert at making places like Iceland and Jordan's Wadi Rum look distinctly unTerra-like.
The problem is that the movie insists on being more than a silent montage of mind-blowing landscapes. The best science fiction raises questions about the nature of the human condition. Prometheus constantly raises interesting questions, builds them up and then...lets them float off into the ether.
A piece of speculative fiction also needs a level of consistency in order for the audience to remain interested. What does the black liquid--the stuff that seems like it's central to the movie--do exactly? It melts an Engineer's body, mutates space worms, zombiefies humans and sorta kinda in a roundabout way gets a woman pregnant with a proto-facehugger...maybe. If the audience can't make heads or tails out of the rules and logic of the film, it doesn't matter how meaningful the movie's questions are.
Beyond that, there are meta-issues with the film. Prometheus was hyped as a sorta-prequel to 1979's Alien. One of the big questions 'Promo' was supposed to answer--and like everything else in the flick it only hints at it--is the origin of the Aliens. But is this a story that really calls out to be told?
Let's look back at Alien for a second. At it's heart, that film has been famously characterized as a haunted house movie in space. Sure, there were some questions left unanswered. Yes, there was some sexualized body-horror elements thrown into the mix. Yet, Alien is still basically about a living killing machine tearing through a bunch of scared weak humans. In fact, all four "Alien" movies more or less tell the same tale: People versus an intensely scary space monster.
Now compare Alien to movies that came out in roughly the same era, the Star Wars trilogy. Alien was a fairly simple story that knew what it was supposed to do and delivered the goods in spades. Like Alien, the older Star Wars trilogy was an easy to understand tale done in a rousing energetic fashion.
So how did George Lucas build on the success of his first three Star Wars movies? He focused on Darth Vader, the principle bad guy of his original trilogy, and took him from being just a bad-ass villain with a complicated past and made him into the prophesied Intergalactic Messiah of the Star Wars universe. With the new SW prequels, George Lucas tried to weave themes of political upheaval, the death of democracy and the temptations of evil into the larger story of Darth Vader's rise and fall into the dark side. The simple yet effective storytelling of the first movies was discarded in the new prequels in an attempt to create an epic motion picture with deep messages.
I'd argue that with Prometheus, Ridley Scott has made the same mistake George Lucas made with his Star Wars prequels. Regardless of his possible reasons, Scott didn't want to make another straightforward horror movie like Alien. For all it's gore and scary visuals, Prometheus really wants to be a philosophical meditation on the mankind's place in the universe. However, humanity's creation story seems like an awkward fit for the Alien and it's related mythos.
Is Prometheus worth watching? Of course. The visuals alone are worth the price of admission. But does the film succeed by the standards it sets for itself? Not quite. Instead of being a true science fiction masterpiece, Prometheus is a decent movie with deep flaws.
MORE: Greg over at The Mind Is An Unexplored Country has a few choice words for Prometheus.
Seriously, I believe the People In Charge Of The Oscars should create a new category: Most Justifiably Ridiculed Mocked and Parodied Motion Picture. Just for this pile of cinema crud.
Oooof. There's more there, so read the rest.
Also, he found the Honest Trailer for the Prometheus. Funny, but definitely full of spoilers and most assuredly Not Safe For Work.
Golden Tate shoved a Green Bay defender out of the way, wrestled another for the ball and was awarded a disputed touchdown on the final play. But it was another 10 minutes before the game actually ended, when the Seattle Seahawks and the stunned Packers were called back on the field for the extra point.
Replacement ref rage may have peaked Monday night.
Just when it seemed that NFL coaches, players and fans couldn't get any angrier, along came a fiasco that trumped any of the complaints from the weekend. The Seahawks' 14-12 victory featured one of the most bizarre finishes in recent memory, and was certain to reignite frustrations over the locked-out officials.
''Don't ask me a question about the officials,'' Green Bay coach Mike McCarthy said. ''I've never seen anything like that in all my years in football.''
''I know it's been a wild weekend in the NFL and I guess we're part of it now,'' he said.
The commissioner, Roger Goodell, insists that the right call was made at the end of the Packers-Seahawks game. In other news: the NFL is officially pissing down the legs of NFL fans, but they assure us that it's actually raining.
The NFL is in some real danger here. The games are becoming a lame joke. Before Monday's game, the players and coaches had little respect for the second-hand zebras. After this latest train wreck, that thin patina of behavioral restraint is probably gone. Next week's games could easily degenerate into a bush league hockey match.
So the replacement refs are a big issue. Even though these men will probably get better in the coming weeks--they probably couldn't get worse, could they?-- they'll probably never be as good as the real zebras. But as bad as the new officials have been, their troublesome tenure brings into sharp relief some of the core problems within the pro football game.
Remember when you could look back on a week of football and see one or two really egregiously blown calls? Yes, maybe your team was victimized by a out-of-nowhere penalty or a dopey non-flag. It might've cost the club a win, but over the course of the season most fans know that the horrible calls will be balanced out by generous rulings. The law of averages and probabilities generally comes out to a rough equilibrium that the vast majority of NFL enthusiasts can live with.
Now, under the new officials, the fan cannot be sure his team isn't going to get screwed week after week. Through inexperience, ignorance of the rules, the intimidation factor from players and coaches and just being overwhelmed by the speed of the game, the replacement refs cannot seem to call a consistent contest from week to week. Or quarter to quarter for that matter. The new guys make everybody involved in the sport pine for the regular officials.
As much as getting the old referees back will improve the flow and consistency of the National Football League, there are problems with the game that even the best on-field judges cannot not solve. In the midst of Monday's Seahawks-Packers contest, former NFL official Jerry Austin was a part of ESPN's broadcast team. Austin, an expert in the rules who had reffed two Super Bowls, said that the play was not reviewable because simultaneous catches could not be reviewed by instant replay. The next day the NFL contradicted him by saying that, through a rules change that had happened over the off-season, all facets of a touchdown play could be reviewed.
When one of the most respected veteran officials in the game is unsure of the rules, that's probably a sign that the sport is insanely over-legislated. Not only are there too many rules in the NFL, they change every year and they are open to an absurd level of interpretation by the people officiating the game. This leads to fan confusion and annoyance; how can you enjoy a football contest if you don't understand the guidelines under which it is played?
It shouldn't take a law degree to understand how a child's game is conducted. We're reaching a point where the sport is being choked to death by its obsession with legalistic minutiae. Even the best regular official on his best day cannot handle the insane number of factors they have to consider when making a call on the field. This points to a massive structural problem that the NFL has not acknowledged.
Think I'm joking about the league killing itself with too many rules? Consider the NFL's international ambitions. American pro football desperately wants to expand beyond the US market. It's spent billions of dollars promoting games in Europe, Canada and Mexico. Yet non-Americans stubbornly cling to their soccer and largely reject our most successful professional sport. The NFL is baffled as to why their game won't take hold in foreign markets.
Compare football's rules to international soccer's diktats. While both are lengthy, the NFL's guidelines are far longer. More importantly, the NFL's guidelines are far more open to broad and ambiguous interpretation: You can't hit the quarterback except when you can, you can't hit the wide receiver except when you can, this player is eligible to catch a forward pass except when he can't, that player is ineligible to receive a forward pass except when he can, etc.
For people who have not grown up with the pro football game, it's much harder for them to understand the various and sundry by-laws of the NFL. If it's a chore to learn all the wrinkles of the game, most people are just going to stick with what they know. In the case of most non-Americans, that's soccer. As a result, the American gridiron sport not only has to overcome foreign people's love of soccer and their understandable reticence to change, but the over-ruled nature of US football itself.
The fact of the matter is that watching soccer is just about the most boring television program ever. Scoring is minimal and not enough happens. The Julliard level of acting required to draw penalties is unseemly and stupid. But soccer has an enormous advantage: simplicity. It's easy for people to understand. Anyone, from an illiterate shepherd in Zimbabwe to the President of the United States, can quickly grasp the basic concepts of the sport. Within a few viewings, much of the nuances can be gleaned as well.
By contrast, American football is violent, exciting and great to watch on TV. The problem is that the sport is becoming increasingly unknowable. If people cannot understand the game, people will turn it off. I used to think it was cool that the television networks include former officials to help fans interpret the on-field action. Now I see it as part of the problem. You shouldn't need the voice of God to understand an offside call. You shouldn't require ten minutes of instant replay with second by second commentary from a retired zebra to determine who has possession of the ball. In short, the referees shouldn't be this visible and this integral to the functioning of the sport.
So by all means, let's bring the real officials back. Under the current situation, each game is a potential humiliation for the entire league. Getting the regular refs on the field will stop the bleeding and bring a much-needed level of professionalism back to the sport. If nothing else, the normal officials will get the games moving faster, which will be a big help.
Having said that, there are flaws in the National Football League that cannot be solved by the real refs. The game is being crushed under the weight of its own rulebook. If it is to continue to grow both here and across the world, it will have to simplify or it will die.
Not as splashy as the one from eleven years ago, but there is a body count, giving members of the Religion of "Peace" the comfort of saying that they stayed true to the orignal intent of very first "celebration."
Not wanting to be outdone in celebrating, Libyans burn down the US Consulate in Bengazi, rocket the vehicle containing the US Ambassador and other fleeing personnel. Then, they murder all of the occupants of the vehicle--Ambassador John Christopher Stevens was reportedly "suffocated." The very recognizable body of Ambassador Stevens is then paraded through the streets. (WARNING: VERY GRAPHIC PHOTOS.)
All of these events were supposedly done in response to a youtube film about Muhammad, one made by an American pastor--Terry Jones--in conjunction with ex-pat Coptic Christians from Egypt.
All occurred yesterday, the eleventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. And all are acts of war.
The Embassy
of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided
individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts
to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the
September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are
honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to
the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of
American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the
universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.
If you think such public moral equivalence didn't have approval from the White House, you're still in deep denial about the person who "leads" our country.
Remember what Barack Obama said long before he became president. On page 261 in Audacity of Hope, Mr. Obama pledged to "stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction." He was talking about detention camps, e.g. the FDR-approved camps designated for Japanese-, German- and Italian-Americans during World War II.
But what other "ugly political directions" does the president have in mind? The hurting of religious feelings, perhaps? If you hurt a Muslims's feelings about his theology and/or his prophet, what is he allowed to do to you and on whose side will the President of the United States of America be? With whom will he stand when those ugly winds blow?
Will he allow your body to be paraded through the streets of, say, Dearborn, MI?
So many unanswered questions. Here's another: when will there be a reckoning?
CORRECTION REGARDING THE EVENTS IN LIBYA:
Wanis al-Sharef, a Libyan Interior Ministry official in Benghazi,
said the four Americans were killed when the angry mob, which gathered
to protest a U.S.-made film that ridicules Islam's Prophet Muhammad,
fired guns and burned down the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
He
said Stevens, 52, and other officials were moved to a second building -
deemed safer - after the initial wave of protests at the consulate
compound. According to al-Sharef, members of the Libyan security team
seem to have indicated to the protesters the building to which the
American officials had been relocated, and that building then came under
attack.
Stevens, 52, was the first U.S. ambassador to be killed in the line of duty since 1979.
TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) — Libya's interim president has apologized to the United States for the attack on the U.S. consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi that killed the American ambassador and three of his staff.
Mohammed el-Megarif described the attack as "cowardly" and offered his condolences on the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens
and the three other Americans. Speaking to reporters, he vowed to bring
the culprits to justice and maintain his country's close relations with
the United States.
It's good to see an apology from some other entity besides an arm of the US government.
I know there are a lot of folks--Republicans and Democrats--who didn't like Clint Eastwood's address to the Republican National Convention. Let's take a look.
I admit that Clint was kinda all over the place. Whether the teleprompter died or he just abandoned script, the address was not Clint at his best. It might not have been Clint at his worst, though.
Check out the sneering annoyed reaction from MSNBC's lead tedium-dispenser Rachel Maddow.
Even though Clint wasn't really on point, his mockery of President Obama was by and large effective. The bit about Bamster getting a smaller plane was great. Clint's conversation with an empty chair underscored just how vacuous our Great Dingy Captain really is. More importantly, most liberal media viewers--to say nothing of the Obama Cult Stenographers--had never seen anything like that.
The Barry-Lover press corps have basically cocooned themselves in liberalism's cozy blanket of comedic ignorance. They've never watched Red Eye. Their web browsers have never clicked on Iowahawk, Manhattan Infidel or Jim Treacher. The only time they hear an Obama joke is when Jon Stewart forgets to take out his tampon and cajoles Saint Obambi for being too damn nice to the evil reich-wing Rethuglicans. Because the lamestream media all runs on the same premise--Our President Is Not To Be Touched--Clint Eastwood's barbs might've been the first time the socialist media have seen someone make fun of Barack Obama in any sort of sustained way.
Everybody's second-favorite community organizer Saul Alinksy said that ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It works so well because it rallies your troops. Even better, when a well-played joke lands squarely on target, it causes problems for the other side. Look at how the Stalinists were so discombobulated by Clint's mockery of their Saviour. When they went into Panic Alert Obama Defense Level Five, they spent a lot of time addressing Clint's speech rather than dealing with Mitt Romney.
If that was the only thing Eastwood's speech accomplished, it would've been enough. But it did more than that. Clint's mockery of Obama was probably a hit with many undecided citizens. These are low-information voters who don't pay attention to politics on a day-to-day level. A lot of people who watch the conventions get their first look at the presidential candidates and their parties from these events.
What did these more or less apolitical folks see? They saw a Hollywood icon laughing at the President. Here too, this might be the first instance that they've watched a media figure of this magnitude actually make fun of Barack Obama.
I'm not saying undecided voters are going to make their decision to vote for Mitt Romney based on Clint Eastwood talking greasy about Barack Obama. What is happening is that Clint's derision of the President sends a subtle signal: "Obama is a joke and it's okay for you to laugh at him."
Remember that the lamestream media has all but completely embargoed humor at Premier Barry's expense. Yet here comes Clint Eastwood on an international stage to cut Barack Obama down a few notches. CNN, MSNBC, CBS and ABC couldn't simply disappear Clint down the memory hole like they did to Artur Davis, Mia Love or Brian Sandoval. They had to cover it. Once they did, it opened up Barack Obama to the kind of mockery they've never allowed to hit him before.
That's why the leftist media hacks fudged their Depends over Clint. Even though he wasn't as strong as he could be, Eastwood's jokes will turn more than a few undecided voters. Clint's speech also breaks the humor blockade that many people have when it comes to mocking Obama. After last night, St. Barack is no longer a holy messiah figure above criticism from his petty subjects. He can, in fact, be mocked.
And, as it turns out, there is a lot to laugh at when it comes to Barack Obama.
Funny how it took an 82-year-old Clint Eastwood--a little sloppy, a little doddering, but still strong--to point that out to the rest of America.
BONUS: Here are 170 great Clint Eastwood quotes. Not safe for work; very safe for awesomeness.
"I-i-i-i-dio-"
"Idiots. It's for you."
That's the line Clint should've dropped on Obama's head.
Oh well. Eastwood still rules.
EVEN MORE BONUSEY: Da Tech Guy's post on the Clint speech fleshes out a point I was trying...and I think failing...to make.
Take a look at this image from Memeorandum as of 8:31 AM
And here is the stuff on the Romney speech same page:
What is Missing? Attacks on Romney’s speech!Today was the day that the Democrats should be hitting Romney’s speech and trying to counter it a-la Ryan. Instead the readers of the morning papers, cable TV and the left blogs are reading attacks on Eastwood. Clint Eastwood is playing the same role as a hero in an old western, drawing all the fire so the good guy could escape unharmed.
While the lamestreamers are scratching their heads and angrily snarling at Eastwood, Mitt Romney comes off looking presidential with little pushback from the progs.
In 2016, the GOP should have Chuck Norris karate-chopping an imaginary Joe Biden while dressed like Lady Gaga right before President Romney gives his speech.
John over at the fantastic Sentry Journal has a tale of the strange. I'm pretty much gonna steal his entire post, but it's too good to edit.
Last week my wife and I decided to stop at Burger King for a quick bite to eat. Burger King is currently running a promotional game called Family Food. It’s a scratch game that ask you a question and gives you three possible answers. You of course must select the correct answer in order to have an opportunity to win a prize. The prizes range from food to cash. We pulled the game piece off my large ice tea and she read the question to me. I correctly answered the question and won a $25 dollar gift certificate.
We presented the winning game piece to the employee behind the counter and she informed my wife that we would have to mail the game piece into Burger King in a blue envelop she handed to us. In order to redeem the prize you must provide your social security number to prove you’re are U.S. citizens. When my wife informed the employee that she wasn’t comfortable writing her social security number down on an envelop and sending to people she didn’t know, the employee told her it was the only way we could prove citizenship in order to redeem the prize. The point of the story is if you can’t even redeem cash prizes from Burger King’s Family Food Game without proof of U.S. citizenship, then what’s the big deal about providing some form of ID to prove who you are at the polling stations on election day. I wonder why we don’t hear the cries from the left on how Burger King is disenfranchising non U.S. citizens with their Family Food game.
The mind reels.
We live in a schizophrenic country. To be fair, most of the time America does a good job of hiding it's wackiness. In fact us Yanks are probably the best at keeping our various neuroses out of public view. Hell, there are nations that parade their insanity on a global stage. Compared to that, the US is a model of restraint.
But every once in a while, we get confronted with our own mind-wrenching goofiness. This is one of those times.
Ponder the situation: Burger King, a fast food chain, runs a contest. If you win one of these BK prizes, you must present a form of identification to the company in order to claim your winnings. If John wants that $25, he has to, in effect, show his papers.
These kinds of rules seem to be fairly common; most US companies that run contests like this stipulate that only American citizens are eligible to win prizes in the United States. Further, these sorts of contest bylaws don't raise any hackles in the Bedwetter Community. Nobody whines about 'discrimination' or 'lack of access'. Citizenship as a requirement for eligibility in a company's promotional game is one of those unquestioned parts of American life.
Say, you know what part of American life the thumbsucker caucus questions over and over and over and over again? This whole crazy mixed-up terribly-cliched old-fogie 'citizenship' dealie. Why should citizenship confer any privileges? What's so special about the US and A anyhow? Why shouldn't anyone be able to walk into a voting booth without getting hassled by some stuffy government bureaucrat who has a wacky hang-up about 'rules' or 'citizenship status' or 'laws' or Constitutional requirements'?
Remember what I said about schizophrenia?
The open-borders crowd, ethnic grievance groups and the Left--but I repeat myself three times--have helped create a situation where a person winning a $25 prize from a burger joint has to prove he's a US citizen, but a person voting for President does not.
That, my friends, should be the textbook definition of insanity, at least when it comes to national policy.
More importantly, it cannot be allowed to stand.
Either we give a shit about who votes in our elections or we don't. Either citizenship confers real tangible benefits to the people who have it or it doesn't. If the only thing being a citizen gets you is a Burger King crown, being American has become meaningless.
An abortion would have absolutely been better for my mother. An abortion would have made it more likely that she would finish high school and get a college education. At college in the late 1960s, it seems likely she would have found feminism or psychology or something that would have helped her overcome her childhood trauma and pick better partners. She would have been better prepared when she had children. If nothing else, getting an abortion would have saved her from plunging into poverty. She likely would have stayed in the same socioeconomic strata as her parents and grandparents who were professors. I wish she had aborted me because I love her and want what is best for her.
Abortion would have been a better option for me. If you believe what reproductive scientists tell us, that I was nothing more than a conglomeration of cells, then there was nothing lost. I could have experienced no consciousness or pain. But even if you discount science and believe I had consciousness and could experience pain at six gestational weeks, I would chose the brief pain or fear of an abortion over the decades of suffering I endured.
An abortion would have been best for me because there is no way that my love-starved, trauma-addled mother could have ever put me up for adoption. It was either abortion or raising me herself, and she was in no position to raise a child. She had suffered a traumatic brain injury, witnessed and experienced severe domestic violence, and while she was in grade school she was raped by a stranger and her mother committed suicide. She was severely depressed and suicidal, had an extremely poor support system, was experiencing an unplanned pregnancy that resulted from coercive sex, and she was so young that her brain was still undeveloped.
Nihilism disguised as selflessness.
Beyond that, look at the amazing speculative leaps Lynn Beisner makes in order to prove her point. If the mother had aborted Ms. Beisner, she asserts that her mom probably would've been better off. In the next paragraph, she runs through the long laundry list of reasons why her mother was in really awful shape at the time she was pregnant with Ms.Beisner.
Well, since we're playing "What if?" counter-factual history games, what makes Beisner think it all that likely that her young abused brain-damaged depressed rape victim mother would've finished high school in the first place? A person with that many strikes against them--and a truly tragic personal history to boot--is far more likely to drop out of high school then to finish with a diploma, regardless of whether the person has an unplanned pregnancy or not. That means no college. It also means no 'feminism or psychology or something' to help her cope with her extremely difficult circumstances.
Now it's true that Beisner's mom had a horrible life before she had her child. Let us suppose that her life was made more difficult by taking an unplanned pregnancy to term. Concede for a moment the idea that caring for a child under less than ideal circumstances was a substantial burden on Mommy Beisner.
The fact remains that the writer Lynn Beisner lives and breathes because, even though her mother was ill-suited to the role of parent, she still decided to give her daughter a life. Isn't there even a speck of nobility to be found in that act? Even if Beisner's mother was a train-wreck, the fact remains that she cared enough to bring her child into the world. While it might be a mundane occurrence, it's still an amazingly selfless thing to do for another human being.
Sadly, Ms. Beisner isn't done pwning herself.
The world would not be a darker or poorer place without me. Actually, in terms of contributions to the world, I am a net loss. Everything that I have done – including parenting, teaching, researching, and being a loving partner – could have been done as well, if not better by other people. Any positive contributions that I have made are completely offset by what it has cost society to help me overcome the disadvantages and injuries of my childhood to become a functional and contributing member of society.
Conservatives are often accused of reducing people down to dry statistics. But what has the theology of abortion done here? Beisner is asserting that her life is pretty much meaningless. She is, in her own words, a net loss. That's about as reductive as it gets.
It is said that a liberal is a person who won't take their own side in an argument. Beisner's thesis is the barren withered endpoint of the pro-abortion movement: "We support infanticide because we are pointless."
This is far beyond just giving women reproductive 'choice'. This Abortion Above All Else philosophy argues against humans and everything they do. Work, being a good parent, romantic love; all these things are to be reduced down to a finite quantifiable value which can be used to determine whether a person made a positive contribution to the world. Because Ms. Beisner clearly hates herself, she sees her own life as something unworthy of her mother's initial sacrifice to give birth to her daughter.
Are the people within the pro-abortion movement prepared to look at their own lives with the same kind of self-loathing criticism? Is the anti-life cause ready to apply Ms. Beisner's criterion for judging a 'good' life to themselves and everyone else? If Ms.Beisner' essay is any indication, the answer is a very chilling yes.
UPDATE (baldilocks): Welcome to Ace of Spades HQ ONT Moronstm and Moronettestm!
Pauline Kael, the famous New Yorker film critic, is probably just as notable these days for her insulated leftism as her movie reviews. Back in 1972, many Democrats were shocked that Richard Nixon was re-elected over the great progressive hero George McGovern. But few lefties expressed their haughty dismay quite like Ms. Kael.
‘I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.'
Remember that Ms. Kael said this in 1972. The ideological bubble that wraps the left in a protective husk of ignorance has been around for at least 40 years, and probably for a lot longer. When conservatives ponder how to argue with progressives, it's important to recognize just how established this intellectual tradition is within American liberalism.
Fast forward to now. Leftists will sometimes wonder how their expectations often--unexpectedly!--don't mesh with reality. More narrowly, progressives will occasionally ponder why Red State Americans aren't more reasonable, secular, intelligent and cool, like the hip folks on the left. They'll cite surveys that say the American people agree with them on this issue or that candidate, then crow about it for a while until the next shiny new data point rolls across their talking points radar screen.
First, let’s look at CBS’ lead on the new poll numbers, which they tout as good news for Barack Obama and bad news for Mitt Romney:
President Obama leads Mitt Romney among likely voters in Ohio and Florida – and has a double-digit lead in Pennsylvania – according to a Quinnipiac University/CBS News/New York Times poll released this morning.
The poll, conducted from July 24-30, shows Mr. Obama leading his presumptive Republican challenger 53 percent to 42 percent in Pennsylvania. The 11-point lead results largely from independents, who favor the president by 22 points, and women, who favor the president by 24 points.
Mr. Obama holds a six-point lead in Ohio, 50 percent to 44 percent, a state where he holds a campaign event later today. His lead here is also due in large part to women, who back him by a 21-point margin. Romney leads by ten points among Ohio men, and seven points among Ohio whites.
In Florida, Mr. Obama also holds a six point lead, 51 percent to 45 percent. He holds a small lead among both men and women and a 19-point lead among Hispanics, while Romney leads by double-digits among whites and voters age 65 and above.
On the surface, this doesn't look good for Mitt Romney. It could be cause for concern among Republican voters. It could conceivably be a sign that the GOP will have to drastically change their tactics and strategies in order to secure victory in November.
On the other hand, dig the party affiliation of the people polled.
Now let’s take a look at the partisan breakdown (D/R/I) in the sample data for each state, and compare them to 2008 and 2010 exit polling:
According to the NYT/CBS poll, Barack Obama is beating Romney by 6% in Florida using a survey that gives Democrats a 9 point edge over the GOP.
In 2008, when Obama won the state over John McCain, Democrats had a three point edge. In 2010, a year that saw the GOP pick up the governorship and retain a US Senate seat in a topsy-turvy three way race, the two parties were tied at 36%.
The Quinnipiac University/CBS News/New York Times poll is skewed in a way that doesn't even sorta reflect reality in the Sunshine State. The governor of Florida is a Republican. The Florida state senate is controlled by Republicans. The Florida state house is controlled by Republicans. The state's US Senate delegation is split, but the US House of Representatives delegation is majority Republican.
This would seem to suggest that many Floridians are quite comfortable with the GOP. It would also suggest that a nine point Democrat edge in party identification is kinda crazy. Even adjusting for the often mercurial whims of voters on Election Day, a state population that has elected so many Republicans probably can't have a voter base that skews Democrat by almost ten percent.
Two quick reminders: Who reads the New York Times and watches CBS News? Liberals. Who doesn't get their news from those two sources? Conservatives.
And now you see how a left-wing intellectual bubble is created and maintained.
The NYT/CBS/Quinnipiac poll was not meant to elucidate the readers and watchers of these MSM news outlets. It was not created to help illustrate a possible voter trend. No, the poll was taken for no other reason than to buck up sagging Democratic voters in the media and other lefty enclaves.
Let's go back to Florida for a moment. Think about a poll where the party identifcation numbers split the difference between the 2008 and 2010 figures. There might be a few more independents, and a few less of the two major parties, but it sure as hell wouldn't have a nine point Donkey Puncher edge.
The problem is a realistic poll in Florida wouldn't give Obama a six point lead in that vital swing state. It would instead display in vivid detail how badly the commander-in-chief is getting his ass kicked by Mitt Romney in the Sunshine State. And we can't have Democrats getting emo in the months leading up to re-electing President Pitching Wedge.
Now, I don't have necessarily have a problem with left-wingers trying to buck up the spirits of their fellow statists. Robust confidence is almost always more appealing than dour pessimism. But liberals should recognize the difference between the cheerleading propaganda they create for their Outer Party members and the real world. Increasingly, it seems like progressives have put strapped the industrial strength blinders on because they can't handle the bad news they've brought onto themselves.
So in one reality we have a standard-issue right-wing character assassination piece against a liberal activist few liberals had actually heard of — think Van Jones, redux — that has grown into a much larger campaign accusing him, without evidence, of serious crimes, all because of his long-forgotten past. In the other version, an untrustworthy huckster who’s insinuated himself into a certain circle of liberal activism panics when conservatives highlight his disturbing criminal past and put his current position in jeopardy, and he responds with a campaign of shameless legal intimidation — and, perhaps, certain allies of his go even further. Your tribal political sympathies — or your opinion of the people involved on each side – may determine on which side you fall, though no one involved seems capable of telling the whole truth.
Naturally, Alex is above such tribalisms.
*pause*
Hahahahahaaaaaaaaahahahaaaa!
Please read the rest of Dan Collins' piece over at the terrific Conservatory.
Alex Pareene's pathetic whitewash job on the Brett Kimberlin/SWATing affair is not a shocker. Homeboy gets off on preening his hipster-lefty credentials. It would be more surprising if a junior Juice-Box Mafia cheapshot artist and all-around hack liberal stenographer such as Alex Pareene broke with his fellow thumbsuckers and actually dealt with Brett Kimberlin's actions in an honest way.
But Dan's post got me thinking about how progressives are prone to a very convenient sort of selective amnesia. In Liberal Fascism, one of author Jonah Goldberg's larger points is that progressives have tried to cover up their movement's adoption of many fascist tenets. This is problematic because most people tend to think rather poorly of fascism. Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini are rightly seen as some of the 20th century's worst world leaders. As such, folks are loath to openly associate themselves with murderous dictators or their repellent political beliefs
So how does the Left go about having fascist tendencies while denouncing the ideology at the same time? Simple. It pins any past fascism they were guilty of on "America". But what about Woodrow Wilson's press censorship, paramilitary neighborhood watch programs and a general hatred for dissent? How are we supposed to feel about FDR's reliance on utopian Third Way politics, relentless economic experimentation and internment camps? For the liberals, none of those things are the sins of a particular left-leaning political party. Instead, they--and many other radical agendas--are examples of the basically evil nature of the United States.
At the same time, the progressive movement insists that traditional American conservatives, the intellectual children of 19th century laissez-faire liberalism, are the actual fascists in American life. This means that conservative shortcomings are always assigned to the Right's report card while liberalism's faults are never marked against them. Liberalism is never to blame when something goes wrong in the US, even when it's obvious they've gone and shit the mattress.
In 2012, political intimidation in American public life is an instrument exclusively employed by the Left. Elements of contemporary liberalism either ignore it, encourage it or subsidize it. In many quarters, progressives find silencing their political rivals through violence or threats useful.
However, when our modern-day Maoists become too bored or ashamed of Brett Kimberlin and his tactics, he will meet the same fate as the Left's torrid love affair with 20th century fascism. First, there will be a concerted effort to shove him down the memory hole. Then, in a few years, he'll be transformed from the Tides Foundation's favorite Alinsky-guided missile to a vicious right-wing reactionary. Finally, when all the dust has cleared, Brett Kimberlin will be a cautionary tale of how we all have to 'tone down' our 'heated rhetoric'.
RELATED: The great RS McCain goes deeper into Salon magazine's woes. Alex Pareene gets a friendly shout-out!
Leave it to El Numero Uno Conservative On Fire--aka, Jim--to remind us of yet another enormous mountain of doom that nobody wants to deal with.
When I entered the words “municipal bankruptcies” in my search engine, I found that in February and March of this year that there were a few articles on this important subject. But, they didn’t seem to garner much attention. One such article written in March at the American Dream blog. The article, which I highly recommend, lays out ten signs that America is on the verge of a municipal debt crisis. This is sign No. 10:
#10 In all, there have been 21 municipal defaults so far in 2012. The grand total of those defaults comes to 978 million dollars.
The article also has an excellent video on the effects of even minor increases in interest rates on our national debt.
So, if municipal debt bubbles are so serious, why aren’t we hearing about it from the major media outlets? More importantly, why aren’t we hearing about it from the big investment banks, of which J.P. Morgan is the biggest player?
According to this New York Post article, Morgan has done an in-depth study and found that there is indeed a major muni-bond crisis heading our way. Morgan, however, decided to keep their report secret. Well, except for a few of their best clients. And Wall Street wonders why the public is so down on them.
Read. The. Whole. Post. There are big doin's in that post. Jim does a great job of analyzing the data...which is horrifying.
To be fair, a big issue here is that reporters who cover the whole country are loathe to discuss something that breaks down to a problem in 50 individual state and countless cities/towns. If you told your average New York Times or Boston Globe national news desk scribe about this, chances are they'd blow it off. 'This is a state issue', they'd likely say and not without some plausible deniability.
But that doesn't excuse the rest of the American chattering class. One gets a sense that the reporters who should be reporting this don't want to because talking about psychotic municipal debt makes the blue state model look absolutely abysmal. If there is one voting bloc that is deeply invested in massive welfare structures, big dumb government compassion and--most of all--generous public employee pay-outs, it is the mainstream media. Knowing this it's really not shocking why reporters would clam up when it comes to something this close to their hearts.
It's like expecting them to investigate Eric Holder for Fast & Furious. The leftist Attorney General hates the Second Amendment. The leftist American dinosaur media hates the Second Amendment. So what if Brian Terry is no longer available for comment? Eric Holder meant well, so that's close enough for Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman and Gail Collins. After all, it takes a lot of double-think if you wanna make it as an Obama-era court stenographer.
The looming municipal debt debacle is something most hacks just don't wanna talk about. So they won't. Until the problem annihilates state and local governments. Then it'll be Romney's fault.
When I was on my way to church this morning, I saw something very interesting near my house.
The "Church" of Scientology has been building centers in and around South Central Los Angeles and in Inglewood--something that had previously been unheard of. Today, being Fathers' Day, I guess there was some big event at the center near me. But guess which organization was celebrating the day with them? The Nation of Islam. FOI, bean pies, and white "garments" (similar to burkhas) all over the place!
Did a little research when I got home. There isn't much to go on, but one website reports that, back in 2009, Louis Farrakhan said that there was some sort of "marriage" between the two organizations. Marriage, eh? One wonders who will get to be on top in the end.
Hustler Magazine publisher Larry Flynt told The Daily Caller Wednesday that he had a right to publish a fake image of conservative commentator S.E. Cupp engaging in a sex act.
Nice.
Look, I've been known to post fart jokes and cleavage pics so maybe I'm not the best guy to say this, but whatever: The American Left is populated by the intellectual equivalent of a third grade remedial Play-Doh class.
You doubt my hypothesis? Go watch your kid play with his classmates for about twenty minutes. Inevitably, the girls of the class will get picked on by the boys. The thing is, the boys aren't teasing the girls because they dislike them. More often than not, they're making fun of the girls because they really like them, but can't express themselves properly. As they get closer to their teen years, this behavior only gets worse as the confusion of puberty kicks in.
After you're done observing your son awkwardly try to start a conversation with his middle school crush by shoving her off the swing set, examine how liberals have reacted to Michelle Malkin, Laura Ingraham, Sarah Palin and now SE Cupp. It's the same behavior, only less mature.
Conservative woman: "I believe that gun control is wrong."
Liberal: "YOU CAN CONTROL MY GUN ANYTIME, LADY!!!!! AM I RIGHT, FELLAS?!?!?!"
Conservative woman: "I am against abortion."
Liberal: "HAHAHA!!! YOU LOVE BABIES!!!! WHAT DO WANNA DO MARRY A BABY?!?!?!? BABY-LOVER!!!!!"
Conservative woman: "I think Barack Obama is not a good president."
And you can forget all about any attempts at civility if a female right-winger has the gall to forcefully argue her political positions.
Too much sass-talk from the women-folk give liberals a wicked headache.
Why, it's almost like leftists just can't handle strong women expressing themselves or something.
No. That can't be it. They always insist that they believe in equality. Naturally, they show their love for the ladies by not paying them the same as men.
As for SE Cupp, getting attacked by a rolling bag of slime like Larry Flynt is horrible. But she has one very large advantage over Larry Flynt: She's not Larry Flynt.
Hustler got a vicious little cheap shot in on one of their political enemies. I hope the Hustler Photoshop super-geniuses savor their tiny pointless victory. At least Cupp will still have a viable business model in five years. Unlike Larry Flynt's flailing soon-to-be-bankrupt sleaze outfit, Cupp's talent and brains aren't going out of style.
This was originally a Facebook note, but I think it needs to be said at as many places as I can say it. It is slightly edited from the original.
*****
Recently, I had a misunderstanding with a Facebook friend about a comment I left on her page. My comment wasn't directed at her and the particulars of the misunderstanding aren't important, but I've seen the idea floating around for some years now--especially since it has become well known that there are a lot of black Americans who still hold a grudge against white Americans for slavery and Jim Crow and especially since a certain person became President of the United States--that black Americans ought to be grateful for those white Americans who died "for" our ancestors' freedom.
Let's get something straight.
I'm quite grateful to God for planting me in this country, in spite of the means of how it was done. It delivered me and mine from idolatry and Islam. God makes all things work together for the good for those who love Him and are called to His purposes.
This country was founded on freedom for all and, it took some time, but America has lived up to its foundation. I hate the fact that Americans had to walk in the wilderness to make that happen: to kill each other in a Civil War and to make some of its citizens live in quasi-citizenship for 100 years after that. But it happened, nonetheless.
Here's the thing: did those who fought for the freedom of my ancestors 150 years ago and for the true citizenship of me, my parents and grandparents fifty years ago (my lifespan) do it to earn the gratitude of black Americans or did they do it for God and/or the honor of our country? One wonders if black Americans' freedom could have been accomplished without the bloodshed. Perhaps not, but black slaves certainly did not make white Americans kill each other over the bondage of the former.
If life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are gifts from the Creator granted to all human beings, then those who defend the same should not care about gratitude from other human beings. As far as this matter goes, any gratitude which the likes of me might offer only serves to engender pride in the recipient. Pride is a sin; all types of pride.
True freedom fighters have the clean conscious of God. May that be enough for them.
I've lived a relatively long time and I've never known or heard of anyone who "demanded gratitude" for the sacrifices made to free the slaves in this country. Has anyone? That's a straw man...
Some people are quick to call you a liar when your experience doesn't match theirs. Humans...
As most of my readers know, like Barack Obama, my biological father is Kenyan and my mother is American. Mom--no fan of the president’s, to be sure--does not believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya either. Her reasoning makes sense.
Mom went to Germany as a young teen—she’s a military brat—and, as a result, is familiar with the international transport procedures of the 1950s and 1960s. (Coolness factor: she returned to the United States by sea.)
Additionally, Mom gave birth to me in the same month and year that Stanley Ann Obama gave birth to Barack Obama. Armed with intimate knowledge of travel and child-birth in the Dark Ages, Mom says that there is no way that Stanley Ann Obama could have given birth in what was then British East Africa, gotten papers, immunizations, etc. in order, and made it back to the other side of the world in time to apply for extension courses from the University of Washington (state) two weeks after her son was born.
Assuming that the details surrounding the president’s birth and his mother’s actions during that period are accurate (yes, I know), I don’t think the birthplace was a mistake by his literary agent as that agent claims.
Barack Obama has a history of dissembling—much of it designed to make himself look better than the average American, especially the average black American. It wasn’t enough for him that his father was Kenyan; he had to make himself even better by claiming to be born there. “Better?” I hear you ask. Yes, better, from the perspective of a person long-simmered in hatred of this country.
Allow me to give a little insight to the mindset. Often, when I mention that my biological father is Kenyan, people assume that I was born in Kenya as well, usually in the context that it is better to have been born somewhere other than in the United States. The assumption is an irritant for two reasons: 1) I am “proud” and grateful to have been born in the United States of America, and 2) If I had been born in Kenya, there would be no reason whatsoever to mention the birthplace of my father.
If Barack Obama did lie on his literary bio, did this bit of lying in the service of pride of self and hatred for this country back-fire on him? Can't say that it has. That bio has been in the public domain for all to see since 1991, but no entity of the mainstream media saw fit to present this very pertinent fact to the American voting public. Fancy that.
Hey, I don't know if you've heard but President Obama has come out in favor of same-sex marriage.
The Obamatron's announcement that he now supports gay nuptials--after he was against it which came after he was for it--has led to some strange reactions in the leftoversphere. Most have been positively proggasmic. But some have used the occasion to go on offense against their hated enemies.
Here's syndicated columnist DeWayne Wickham (D-Obama Stenographer Media), chastising the Log Cabin Republicans for attacking Obama on his newly-found support for gay marriage while not criticizing Mitt Romney for his belief in traditional marriage.
The Log Cabin Republicans are outcasts within the GOP. The marital equality they seek is opposed by Romney and many of the right-wingers whose votes he hopes will help him defeat Obama in November.
The Republican homosexual group seems bent on subjecting its members to an unyielding brand of political flagellation.
It is apparently willing to pay any price, bear any burden and endure any insult to maintain a toehold in the GOP ranks — a political obsession that is as oxymoronic as a black joining the Ku Klux Klan, or a Jew becoming a follower of Hamas.
Of course, he's correct.
I'm sure you remember the Republican Party's long sordid history of firebombing Greenwich Village cosmetology schools and orchestrating drive-by shootings at San Francisco antique stores.
Worse than the dickbag moral equivalency ploy is the Wickham's narrow-mindedness when it comes to gay and lesbian voters. It simply doesn't occur to him that a homosexual person could possibly be a Republican too. Ergo, these freaky-deaky pink elephant GOPers should go back to being good dutiful soldiers for the Democrat Party rather than sucking up to the hate-fueled Republicans.
Let's flip the script for a second: Suppose there was a large chunk of union-member Democrats who really hated Cap-n-Trade. They agreed with almost everything else on the DonkeyPuncher agenda--ObamaCare, tax hikes, the role of government in citizens' lives--but they really disliked a government-mandated carbon credit trading system. According to Wickham's logic, those anti-C&T union guys should stop being Democrats and join the Republican Party. After all, they aren't marching lockstep with the Democrat Party on Cap-n-Trade, so union people must be barking up the wrong political tree.
Seen this way, Wickham's premise starts to look like chicken-fried nonsense wrapped in a flaky breaded crust of illogic and glazed with a zesty bullshit marinade.
Back in the real world, gay and lesbians make political decisions the same way everybody else does. They base their partisan affiliation on feelings, ideologies, gut instincts and what they generally want out of the government. There are still a few pro-life Democrats, even though the Dems are overwhelmingly pro-abortion. Ron Paul and many of his supporters are Republicans who are against the large well-funded US military most GOPers have embraced. In both cases, the reason why these people remain in their respective parties has nothing to do with some sort of sycophantic apple-polisher's desire to be liked that Wickham ascribes to the Log Cabin Republicans. Instead, pro-life Democrats and pro-military cuts Paulians have all made calculations based on their political priorities. Why Wickham thinks gays and lesbians are incapable of making the sorts of sophisticated voting decisions that everyone else does is a mystery.
I mean, is it so wacky to think there are gays and lesbians who support smaller government, tax cuts and strong national defense?
Is it all that odd that those same homosexuals wouldn't make gay marriage the make-or-break issue that keeps them in the Republican Party?
And a whole lot of other paperwork too, even though Doug Mataconis insists that we don't.
My response to this question is another question, why do we need to see the transcripts?Of what possible relevance are the grades that Barack Obama got at Occidental, Columbia, or Harvard Law School to judging his time in office and whether he deserves to be re-elected? What would it reveal about his Presidency that we don’t know? To ask the same question about Romney, what possible relevance to evaluating whether he’d be a good President his grades at Brigham Young University and Harvard (where Romney simultaneously obtained a J.D. and an M.B.A.) could possibly be. It’s been 37 years since Mitt Romney finished his college education, and 20 years since Obama finished his, as James Joyner asked back in 2008, isn’t there a statute of limitations on the use of college achievements as evidence of achievement? If there’s not, there should be.
To be fair, Mataconis stipulates that Obama's college transcripts might have been more revelatory back in 2008 than they would be today. Good point and its one I'll concede. Obama's record as President is plenty damaging all on it's own. How he did in Western Civ I is not as important as his current position on entitlement reform.
However, here's a question: Do businesses and organizations use college transcripts as a way of judging prospective hires? Do companies demand college records as part of the application process? Are college transcripts used as a way of comparing and contrasting several candidates who are going for the same job?
Let me get this straight: Getting the assistant regional manager position at Staples means showing college scrips, but scoring the US President gig doesn't require any presentation of higher education records.
Okay.
Makes perfect sense.
Especially in modern America, where getting college credit isn't necessary for hardly any jobs.
But Mataconis isn't done.
...the demands for transcripts is often linked to the equally erroneous belief that he wasn’t properly vetted in 2008. As I noted earlier this month, that’s a ridiculous idea:
Barack Obama has been President of the United States for nearly four years now, and he’s been on the national scene as either a candidate for President or as President since 2007. The idea that we have no idea who the man is, or that he hasn’t been “vetted” is simply an absurd fantasy that partisans are using in what looks for all the world like a desperate effort to find something, anything that they can use against him in the upcoming election.
Yes, because the press didn't have to be dragged kicking and screaming to report that Obama ate dogs.
Mataconis seems to be arguing that conservatives should focus on 'important' issues rather than on demanding the media do a better job vetting the President. Now that's a noble sentiment. But why did the Right have such a good time hammering the Exotic Food Connoisseur In Chief about chowing down on Fido-burgers? It wasn't simply to playfully zing Barack Obama for a few days. There was a political motivation in answering back as well.
In 1983, Romney took his family on vacation and, faced with a packed station wagon, put his Irish setter Seamus in a travel kennel strapped to the roof of the car. Romney constructed a special windshield in an effort to make the dog more comfortable, but Seamus ended up relieving himself on the roof, which reportedly caused much consternation among the Romney boys. Ever since the story got out -- it was reported by the Boston Globe in 2007, during Romney's first run for president -- Romney opponents have used it in semiserious and sometimes fully serious ways to portray him as insensitive.
In late January, for example, top Obama campaign aide David Axelrod sent out a tweet that included a photo of Obama with his Portuguese water dog Bo in the back seat of the presidential limousine. "How loving owners transport their dogs," Axelrod wrote.
It wasn't a random comment. "They're obsessed with the dog thing," liberal journalist Chris Hayes said on his MSNBC program Sunday morning, referring to the Obama campaign. "And the reason is that, I have heard, in focus groups, the dog story totally tanks Mitt Romney's approval rating."
Under Mataconis' rubric, Team Barry is engaging in yucky politics when bringing up Mitt's supposedly poor treatment of his dog.
When this or any other charge of allegedly dirty pool is brought up against the Obama campaign, Axelrod and Co. inevitably answers with a hearty "So what?" A fair fight is the other guys problem. That means they really don't give a shit what Doug Mataconis or anybody else thinks should be discussed. When they brought up the Seamus story, it was because they knew it damaged Mitt Romney's chances of beating Barack Obama in November.
Mataconis thinks that elections are about winning arguments. They're not. They're ultimately about winning votes. Which is what Obama was trying to do by beating Romney over the head with the Seamus story. But when the Right engages the issue to turn it back against Obama--again, in the hopes that their preferred candidate would get more votes than his opponents--guys like Mataconis wring their hands over distractions.
Worse than that, Mataconis doesn't see the larger issue, which is the utter stinking corruption of the mainstream media. Think about the most recent example. Barack Obama stops fighting his feelings and embraces gay marriage. Naturally this causes everyone in the media to simultaneously proggasm over the President's new-found enlightenment. The next day, the Washington Post runs a story about a school age Mitt Romney possibly bullying a classmate who may or may not have been gay.
Forget that Robert Stacy McCain has spotted the flaws, baseless insinuations,White House/media coordination and outright lies in the WaPo story. The fact is the Washington Post blatantly tag-teamed with Camp Obambi to damage Mitt Romney on a political issue. Not MSNBC, the Daily Kos or The Nation. Instead, it was the completely nonpartisan, totally unbiased, nope-no-sir-no-dog-in-this-fight Washington Post that was Obama's press enabler here.
Whether it's the MSM making Barack Obama's college years terra non grata or coordinating an attack on the Republican nominee for president, the result is the same. The American media is a major component of the President's re-election campaign. They are actively participating in the fight to marginalize St. Barry's opponent.
Mataconis wants us to ignore all that. He'd have the Republicans and conservatives fighting by the Marquess of Queensbury rules while the Democrats and the MSM bring a shotgun into the ring. That's the smart move here.
Because Obama's college transcripts are not 'relevant'.
They're only irrelevant if you don't want to see how badly the media is gaming the system.
Ultimately, getting the President's college transcripts is not really about vetting the President. It's part of vetting the mainstream media. The MSM, which hates anything to the right of Noam Chomsky and desperately wants Obama to win in November.
The President needs to be investigated. But the left-wing press corps and the Gulfstream Jacobins in the entertainment industry need to be vetted as well. After all, they're playing for the same team. Only a person who has deliberately blinded himself to reality would fail to see why the goverment-media complex needs to get taken down.
Old And Busted: Getting people off the public dole.
New Hotness: Getting lots and lots of people back on the public dole.
The Congressional Budget Office said Thursday that 45 million people in 2011 received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, a 70% increase from 2007.
Political Junkie Mom is right. Having the Obama administration do stuff to increase employment or oil production is just silly rugged individualist conservative yakkety-yak. Far better for the government to do the things its really good at, like fostering long-term dependency.
But hey, it's not poor people who are getting pounded by this administration. The "rich" are about to get their comeuppance as well.
If you thought paying your taxes was painful this year, get ready for more heartache next year, when taxpayers could be on the hook for almost $500 billion in higher taxes... That's the size of "Taxmageddon."
Taxmageddon is the tax hike set to slam the economy and taxpayers on Jan. 1, 2013. It's made up of seven different categories of tax cuts set to expire, and six tax hikes from the health-care law set to kick in, as soon as the ball drops on New Year's Eve.
The Left's definition of 'shared' sacrifice: Make the poor into a permanent underclass so they can easily be exploited for votes while simultaneously punishing anyone who tries to escape the statist suck-hole of fail.
Or maybe I'm being too hard on Obama and the rest of the progressive movement. Perhaps I'm ascribing a conscious plan to people who really have no idea what they're doing. It could be that the President and his administration are just incompetent dolts.
Then again, that would go against everything we've been told about Barack Obama for the last five years. People who identify themselves as conservative think Obama is scary smart. Scions of the Left have insisted that Barack Obama is a great intelligence. How many prestigious universities did Barack Obama go to? Occidental, Columbia and Harvard represent the pinnacle of higher education not just in America but across the globe. Anyone who wrote not one but two memoirs before the age of fifty has to be pretty sharp.
If President Obama is as smart as his sycophants and enablers insist he is, then he has the intelligence to see how his proposals affect the nation. That means that Obama is happy to see more and more people on food stamps. Obama wants to hammer Americans with tax hikes. The current state of affairs in the United States is pretty much exactly what the community-organizer-in-chief ordered.
Here's the rub--I think Obama is going to play dumb during this campaign season. In 2008, dude was supposed to walk on water during a three dimensional chess marathon while simultaneously developing a vaccine for athlete's foot. In 2012, everything--and I mean EVERYTHING--will be somebody else's fault. Crappy economy? Damn you, Bushitler. Wallet-punishing gas prices? Darth Cheney and his roving band of nefarious petroleum speculators are killing the electric car with their diabolical oil-based superpowers. Stratospheric unemployment? John 'Satan's Personal Oompaloompa' Boehner simply won't let America have the kajillions of eco-tastic green jobs that every US company is just dying to create.
That line of nonsense cannot be allowed to fly. Obama has constantly billed himself--and actively encouraged others to sing from the same hymnal by the way--as a super genius. Its time to throw that achievement-free arrogance back in his face.
Dedicated to the memory of the fearless Andrew Breitbart.
Note: I began composing this essay some months before the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman shooting, but, in its wake, I felt that it was time to finish it and post it.
Usually I’m reading several books at once and using Kindle for Blackberry iPhone has exacerbated this low level of ADD.
One of the opened books on my device is Lee Harris’s The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West. The subject matter is obvious; however, in the preface and the first few chapters, Harris barely mentions Islam at all. Instead, he does two very valuable things: he defines his terms and lays the ideological foundation for those terms as they relate to his subject. The two sets of players in the scenarios that Harris describes are: rational actors and tribal actors or fanatics. All of the following excerpts are taken from the book’s preface.
Throughout most of human history, men have not behaved like rational actors but like tribal actors; and in many cultures of the world today, they continue to behave that way. They have no choice. When everyone around you is a member of a tribe, you must either belong to a tribe or be an outcast. Whereas the rational actor asks himself, “What is best for me,” the tribal actor must ask himself,” What is best for us?”
*****
[W]hat limits [the tribal actor’s] freedom is not so much the pressure of the tribal mind applied externally, but rather the fact that the tribal actor thinks with the tribal mind, and so cannot even imagine doing things differently from the way they are done by his tribe.
*****
The rational actor has the luxury of appealing to his conscience in order to condemn the behavior of his own community.
*****
The tribal actor, on the other hand, cannot take a moral stance outside the perspective of his tribe. For the tribal actor, the highest ethical idea is: “My tribe, right or wrong.” The mere idea that his tribe could be wrong is unthinkable for the tribal actor, since he defines as right whatever the tribe deems right, and wrong as whatever the tribe deems wrong.
So let’s see how these observable truths relate to black Americans.
We have seen black Americans like former presidential candidate Herman Cain (R-GA), Rep. Allen West (R-FL), and Rep. Tim Scott (R-SC)--people who are obviously black and of African descent, using the eyeball test and known heritage--be deemed "not really black.”i Men like the foregoing are those who are not Democrats, who oppose the policies supported by the Democrat Party and who do not politically support Democrats of any race or color, not even the present President of the United States of America. But how can black Americans who are not Democrats or Liberals or Leftists become not themselves? And what gives Democrats—even white ones—the authority to determine who is black and who is not?
The following videos have a common theme.
The pride/shame dynamic is what is on display here. This feature is used rein in members of a tribe who step outside of pre-defined tribal boundaries.
Black Americans are, for the most part, a tribe. Some will take offense to that opinion, but if we look into the specifics of our existence as Americans since the practice of enslaving imported Africans became widespread, we see that there is nothing else that we can be called.
Remember, our ancestors, of various West African tribes, were bought here, sold, and forcibly stripped of their various names, languages, cultures, and religions. That conditioning created a new tribe: the Negro. And even after the abolition of slavery, Americans of African descent were confined to a certain level of society. A few managed to break the barrier, but the vast majority remained in the legal, economic, educational social and tribal space into which the US Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson allowed state and local governments to pen them.
But along came the Civil Rights Era, really beginning in the 1940s and reaching its apex in the 1970s. The Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts heralded the end of our status as a tribe within a nation and they harkened to the objective ideals on which this nation was founded.
These landmarks of legislation stated that we belonged to the American “tribe” all along. But, concurrently, another idea—an ideology--was on the ascent as well: Black Pride.
Pride. When we hear the word, we interpret it in two ways.
So-called benign pride is represented in the following example: we are proud of ourselves when we achieve hard-won goals-- educational, personal, etc.; we are proudof cherished relatives and friends who do the same.
The not-so-good type of pride is that which the Bible warns against--"the high look," “the up-tilt of the chin.”
Recall that in the days before the Civil Rights Era, being a black American was a matter of shame and degradation, but the idea of “Black Pride" served to counter that. The concept of Black Pride, while initially a good thing, has, however, brought black Americans from one extreme mindset and deposited us into another. It took us away from the shame of being black to a place in which no one may criticize a black person who is deemed to be in good standing with the “tribe.” Many (most?) black Americans believe that blackness is a way of thinking and a political position and, stemming from these ideas, that any black person who deviates from the “black” mindset and political position—a black conservative--isn't really black. This idea stems further from the Left co-opting "black pride" and using it to keep anger and grievances alive long past their dates of pertinence. The purpose of this tactic is to keep the wedge open between black and white Americans, drive it wider, and produce violence. We've seen it happen many times. The ultimate purpose, taken together with many other tactics, is to destroy America.
Pride is what is always has been: inordinate high opinion of one's superiority and goodness; the preening to appear better than on-lookers. (My great-aunt calls it “floor-showing.") That we had to use pride--a sin--to “rid” ourselves of the mindset of shame and degradation is the problem. We went too far in the other direction, so far in that direction that the things which are destroying us--the things which we should be ashamed of--we have deemed inherent to blackness and called them good. We call the chains of the New Slavery--bastardy, illiteracy, mis-education, self-genocide, etc.—our due, our rights. And we believe that any of our number who breaks free ideologically and tries to tell their brethren how to be free is a traitor to the tribe. (Harriett Tubman would understand.) Shame is no longer an option, except as a cudgel for those who point this out. ii
In addition, we deem the New Slavers--the modern-day Democrat Party--to be our friends even though their forebears were always the perpetrators of overt black American slavery and oppression and they have lured all too many of us into contemporary bondage. This sort of tribal pride blocks the ability to see what's right in front of one’s face and the ability to accurately map out the future. It blocks reality.
Herman Cain was dead on when he called it brainwashing and it has been a decades-long process, coinciding with the Left's agenda to hollow out the institutions of this country.
Here’s the thing: I think that certain types of tribalism are beneficial to those within and even without some sets of tribal boundaries. Some years back, Bill Whittle famously expounded on the tribe of Sheepdogs, those rough men—and, sometimes, women--who make it their business to protect sheep from the wolves of this world. “You choose your tribe,” said Bill, and allowing oneself that choice is the province of rational actors. This isn’t to say that one should separate self from one’s racial, ethnic, national, or ideological tribe. However, it is to say that blindly following each one of the presumed norms of the tribe into which one was born is folly and it is the province of tribal actors. That is the place where into which all too many of my fellow black Americans find ourselves locked, mentally and emotionally.
Through this mindset, black Americans have become the organized Left's shock troops in latter’s war against America and all too many of us have become the Left's overseers, tasked to force the "deserters" back into formation using the tools of ridicule and shame. I almost said that the Left was at war with black people, but the Left doesn't esteem blacks enough to deem us as their enemies. We are merely tools to be used for the task at hand—to foment violent racial discord which will have to be put down using infinitely stronger government violence--and to be discarded when the task is completed, assuming that there will be any of us left after the New Civil War. And we let ourselves be used for one reason: tribal vengeance; for slavery and for oppression.
I submit that the Obama Administration, representing black Americans and no others, declared a tribal war against white Americans when Attorney General Eric Holder refused to prosecute members of the New Black Panther Party after the latter's blatant violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Department of Justice’s inaction sent a message mirroring that of the US Supreme Court Dred Scott decision (1857): that the white man has no rights which the black man is bound to respect. Leftist ideology has been inculcated into black Americans for quite some time now and one of the strategies of this process has been to keep alive racial anger and the desire for tribal vengeance for past oppression. The Obama Administration's inaction in the above matter was merely a formal declaration, but the anger has long been simmering and, all too often, it boils over. Am I exaggerating? I don’t think so. And I think that many Americans have gotten the message.
Assuming that the above is true, let’s leave aside morality and conscience for a bit and look at this declaration strictly from a strategic point of view. Leaderless families and the resultant black-on-black killings are prevalent among black Americans and directly attributable to the lure of LBJ’s New Slavery Great Society programs. (I contend that these two features are merely the aforementioned ‘shame and degradation of being black’ re-packaged and internalized. If the leaders of a people—men—don’t love their progeny enough to marry the women who bear their children and/or remain in the lives of those children long enough to bring them into functioning adulthood, why would those children love themselves or those who look like them? And abortion is merely the black female method of black-on-black killing.)
So we black Americans murder ourselves within in womb and without, assert the former as our right, and ignore the latter. These methods of self-genocide have greatly thinned the “troops.” Taking this into account, one logically concludes that starting a war with a “tribe” that outnumbers us 12-1 and outguns us is pure folly.
It will bring the tribal suicide which we’ve been slowly committing, to a quick and devastating conclusion.
Turning back to conscience and morality, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob reserves vengeance to Himself, and instructs Jewish and Christian believers to forego it. But even if one does not believe in Him, it’s easy to see the chaos which is nearly always brought about by the unending cycle of human vengeance. You murder/enslave/oppress mine, then I take vengeance and murder/enslave/oppress yours. Then you take vengeance and murder/enslave/oppress more of mine. Then I…
Is this what you want, Americans? I do not.
Harris points out that rational actors can only live as rational actors if those around him—those in his society—continue to behave as rational actors as well. He also says that, when a rational actor finds himself surrounded by tribal actors—fanatics—it becomes rational for a rational actor to revert to being a tribal actor. The alternative is to perish.
We all tend to forget that all human beings are only a few steps away from reverting to the Law of the Jungle. Twentieth-century Europe demonstrated and the Muslim world still demonstrates the truth of this. Will we Americans—all of us--continue in the way of most of humanity? Everyday, I pray not.
[i] It’s interesting that Liberals think that black people have a certain way of thinking embedded in the DNA. White supremacists think this as well.
[ii] Until recently, I found it puzzling that some black Liberals hurl all manner of racial epithets at black Conservatives; but now I realize that it’s the pride/shame mindset. Those who use this tactic, however, don’t realize that it’s ineffectual on persons who recognize it for what it is.
(Re-edited.)
UPDATE: Lloyd Marcus: Democrats Responsible for Black Culture of Anger. More precisely, Leftists are. Read the comments, tremble for your country and, most importantly, pray to The Living God for mercy and deliverence.
Jeff Goldstein, kickin' it on the satirical tip over at Protein Wisdom, gives us a sneak peak into the likely liberal reaction if ObamaCare gets overturned.
See? There’s that far-right extremist conservatism again, insisting that laws must be followed to the letter, and not simply be ignored to accommodate the spirit of “social justice”.
They fetishize a document, and yet they care not for 26-year-old children forced (by choice) to live without health insurance! It’s an abomination. And I think it is the kind of decision, should this be the Court’s final ruling, that, like Citizens United before it, suggests that the Court can no longer be trusted to act compassionately, and can therefore be ignored.
For the greater good.
After all: the ruling is just words. And the only power they have, really, resides in our willingness to accept them and/or enforce them. But who says we have to do that…?
That's just crazy, right? Would a President really just ignore the Supreme Court, a coequal branch of the federal government, just to get his way?
President Andrew Jackson dismissed the Supreme Court's decision in the Worcester v. Georgia case. This paved the way for the removal of the Cherokee Indian tribe to Oklahoma. Jackson basically told Chief Justice John Marshall and the rest of the Supremes to blow it out their collective ass.
Besides the Jacksonian precedent, it's easy to forget all that would be lost for the Left if ObamaCare gets annihilated. How long has the progressive movement wanted a nationalized health care system? Harry Truman called for it back in 1945. ObamaCare represents a liberal dream come true nearly seventy years in the making.
Besides that, what did it cost the Democrats to get their health care plan passed? The Louisiana Purchase and Cornhusker Kickback revealed the level of corruption the Democrat Party was willing to stoop to in order get their way. The political drubbing the party took in the 2010 midterms displayed the Party's willingness to endure a brutal self-flagellation in service to the cause of socialized medicine.
Seen in that context, who thinks the President and the rest of the Stalinists are going to lay down and accept the Supreme Court striking down ObamaCare?
It could be a 5-4 decision. It could go 6-3. Hell, it could be a 9-0 decision to vaporize the bill. It doesn't matter.
The Left won't allow some silly old enumerated powers shit get in the way of getting their way.
This is going to require a Republican Congress and a Republican president and probably another originalist Supreme Court justice to finally kill ObamaCare--and that still might not be enough.
Just remember: Everybody knows the GOP field of presidential candidates is a pack of weak sisters compared to that rara avis Barack "Scary Smart Exceptional Temperament" Obama.
President Barack Obama blamed Fox News for his political woes in a private meeting with labor leaders in 2010, saying he was “losing white males” who tune into the cable outlet and “hear Obama is a Muslim 24/7,” according to journalist David Corn’s new book, “Showdown.”
...Corn writes that after the midterm elections, Obama told labor leaders in December 2010 that he held Fox partly responsible for him “losing white males.”
“…Fed by Fox News, they hear Obama is a Muslim 24/7, and it begins to seep in…The Republicans have been at this for 40 years. They have new resources, but the strategy is old,” Corn recounted Obama as saying.
You remember how George W. Bush constantly whined how MSNBC hurt him among the douchedrinker neo-hippie voting bloc, right?
Then again, why is anybody surprised when the crybaby-in-chief loses his shit over conservative criticism of his record? Other people write his books, yet he gets all the credit. He skated through his 15 minute US Senate career by voting 'present' and showing up late to hearings. The American media coverage of Obama's presidency has run the gamut from fawning to tongue-bath.
Everywhere this spoiled brat of a man has gone in his political career St. Barry has been somebody's pretty silky pony. From the Chicago Left to national progressive organizations, Obama always had to be sheltered from the tough-minded critiques of his policies. His achievement-free self-esteem couldn't handle the shock of real sustained dissent.
Obama thinks that Fox News caused his party to lose the white male vote in 2010. It couldn't be that white males honestly disagree with the President's administration. Nope. Of course its racism and Fox News that pushed the caucasian persuasion dude caucus to vote with the Republican Party. That explains everything. [sarc/]
I snagged this link from Iowahawk's twitter feed. Thank you, sir.
One of the cool things about blogging is communicating with people like Neptunus Lex, someone I probably would have never talked to in real life, what with him being a Navy captain and me being an Air Force NCO. (We're both retired.)
One of the bad things about blogging, people still die, and so it is with Neptunus Lex.
A civilian pilot flying for Airborne Tactical Advantage Co., was killed Tuesday morning when his F-21 Kfir jet crashed near the west gate of Naval Air Station Fallon, six miles east of the city limits.
Say 'hi' to God for me, Lex, and I'll see you later.
With a terrible feeling of pain and loss we announce the passing of Andrew Breitbart.
Andrew passed away unexpectedly from natural causes shortly after midnight this morning in Los Angeles.
We have lost a husband, a father, a son, a brother, a dear friend, a patriot and a happy warrior.
Andrew lived boldly, so that we more timid souls would dare to live freely and fully, and fight for the fragile liberty he showed us how to love.
Say a prayer for Mr. Breitbart's wife and four children. Undoubtedly, they are in terrible pain and grief. We can only hope that in the midst of their mourning they can find some solace in the bosom of their faith and their extended family.
I first read the news over at The Conservatory. After my initial shock--Wait? What? Only 43 years old? How?--I started to look around and see what his friends and allies had to say.
He may have been the greatest genius I’ve ever met, with a keen, intuitive mind. Although he had been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder — he had a freewheeling quality about him, and his schedule was quite improvisational – Breitbart was also capable of a laser-like focus on whatever subject captured his interest. There were times you’d be talking to him and, if that spark of passionate interest hit, his luminous blue eyes would glow with an intensity that was almost frightening.
You can read elsewhere all about Andrew's remarkable impact on public communications in this country, helping found Huffington Post and the Drudge Report and then his own developing online empire of Big sites. He was often controversial because his opponents often couldn't answer his stories online, so they went after the messenger.
Andrew loved it. He was one of the few people you encounter in life who bite at every experience, good and bad. Where does that energy come from? You'd get a late-night call with Andrew excitedly talking up a whole package he was about to post. Might as well listen because you weren't going to get a word in.
In person he'd get so excited in an argument that he'd be shouting inches away. You'd raise a hand as if 'OK, Andrew, I'm right here.' He'd laugh at himself and lower the volume. Andrew couldn't stand hypocrisy and lying and hiding.
He also couldn't stand passivity. Friends would describe some awful thing happening and instead of a hug he'd shake them out of wallowing with, "So?" And you'd stop and think, 'Yeh, right. So what am I going to do about it to take control back?'
He was the spiritual leader of the modern conservative, libertarian cause. He was immersed in pop culture and wished to drag the right into the modern world - knowing this is how America speaks to the world. He was the heart of the matter. The fighter. Losing him is like a fiery planet going dark.
Few people are indispensable to a cause, but Andrew Breitbart was. There is no one else like him around. A good number of commentators have been saying that we should honor him by carrying on his fight using the methods he developed, and they are correct: we must not let his life’s work be in vain because his life’s work was to defeat the malignant forces of the Left and see America restored to the ways of The Founders. However, we have some mighty big shoes to fill, so it will not be easy.
At this crucial juncture in our history, we have been deprived of one of best generals. The long slog just got tougher.
He was an unapologetic conservative, but one who defied the media's template; pro-civil rights, pro-drug legalization, pro-gay rights, to the point of boycotting CPAC when it barred the gay conservative group GOProud. Other than his mainstream pro-life views (he was, after all, adopted) you would be hard pressed to characterize him as a right winger on social issues...
Plenty will be written about Andrew Breitbart in the next few days, some flattering, some not. As for me, I will drink two beers in his honor tonight, and remember him the way he was last December in Venice - a big, lovable, random, generous, fearless, patriotic grinning goofball surrounded by his family, basking in the coolness of it all.
What was truly charismatic about Breitbart was his never-ending enthusiasm and energy. He spoke fast because he thought fast. He changed topics quickly because he had six or seven plans in mind at any one time.
He actually did things. He was instinctual. Athletes cannot afford the deliberation of thought. They move by instinct and training and muscle memory. They act.
Why did Breitbart sign a lease for a pricey townhouse in DC? Because, he said, "it feels mischievous." It felt mischievous to establish an Embassy of citizen empowerment in the capital of statist overreach.
He had ten plans a month. He accomplished five of them a month. He acted.
He took over the Weiner press conference because it felt like something he ought to do.
He was brazen. He was bold. The right had no more enthusiastic champion and the left had no more implacable foe.
...I was privileged to sit a mere five rows back from Andrew when he addressed the delegates at Presidency 5 this September. He was mesmerizing from the moment he gamboled out to the podium. What a treat that was and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world in normal circumstances. Who could ever have imagined this day six months later, when dealing with a force of nature like Breitbart?
What Andrew understood and embraced as a conservative media activist was that, when his name was in the headlines, it was because he was battling for what he most believed in. He also knew that his enemies, the headline writers in many ways, were engaged - and he was fighting. Andrew, like so many of us, lived for that fight. He understood how necessary it was for the right to engage it.
It's significant that Andrew picked his battlefields as a brave and fearless man. When you are fighting what many conservatives believe to be a biased media in their headlines, you are fighting them on their turf, not retreating, surrendering, or simply musing off in your own little protected, right-leaning corner of the media world.
Andrew Breitbart gave his opponents every advantage by engaging them as he did. And he often beat them.
Amen to all of that.
Read the rest of every one of those pieces. You'll become angry, you'll get sad, you'll laugh and be inspired all at once.
Beyond the shock of Andrew Breitbart's passing, one of the most overwhelming things I take away is the flattening finality of it. I was a fan of his 'Big' websites. "Righteous Indignation" is one of the best political memoirs of the 21st century. His twitter-feed was a long hilarious practical joke on the American socialist movement. Breitbart was like a rolling partisan kegger where the Right could rock out and the Left could buzz off. It seemed like nothing could stop him or his merry-making ways.
Maybe its the suddenness of it that makes this so tough to take. Breitbart wasn't supposed to go this way. He was supposed to be our gleeful prankster for decades to come. The roastmaster general wasn't supposed to be taken seemingly in the blink of an eye.
Breitbart's time in the spotlight might've been tragically cut short but it was certainly not poorly spent. In a way, his career trajectory is reminiscent of a Hall of Fame baseball star. The Major Leagues typically elect two kinds of players into their most hallowed pantheon. The first type is the guy who play for many years. He may not be an overwhelming presence in the sport, but he does well enough and last long enough to have fairly large statistics by the time he retires. The second type is the man who doesn't play for very long, but makes up for it by his sheer overwhelming dominance. Andrew Breitbart has become the Right's supernova, their short-lived hot-burning star.
Gaze in wonder at the innumerable enemies that Breitbart cultivated over the years. In life, they couldn't stop giving him ammunition. In death, he has given the Left a glorious opportunity to beclown themselves. Breitbart probably would've had a great laugh over the irony.
For every liberal who commented on Breitbart's passing with dignity, there were many many more who took the low road. Matt Taibbi, Matt Yglesias and a vasthorde of internet lefties all happily danced on Breitbart's casket. While it's hard to read so much bile, the hate on the progressive side is a reminder that their constant calls for ratcheting down political rhetoric is just a cheap ploy to censor their ideological foes on the Right.
The fact that Andrew Breitbart made such strident classless enemies is amazing. What is even more astounding is how Breitbart used the hate thrown at him as fuel for his fights. Many people will tell you that they enjoy being targeted by the Progressive Church of Latter-Day Stalinists. Often, that brave sentiment will melt in the face of a full-frontal assault from liberal media. Not since William F. Buckley have we seen a man who not only sought out spectacular clashes with the Left, but who did it with such joy. All he did was laugh at the multitudes of angry liberals and their constant raaaaacist!/sexist!/homophobe! bleats, then turn the hate back on them.
Which is what we on the Right should always do. For too long, many conservatives played the media's game by their rules. This meant a lot of mewling when a liberal accused them of bigotry or greed or some other doubleplusungood thoughtcrime. Breitbart thought that kind of defensiveness was absurd and would always lead to defeat. Instead, he realized that conservatives had to take back the culture before the Right would ever achieve lasting political victories.
That is the greatest lesson we can learn from Andrew Breitbart's boisterous inspiring life. Breitbart was a warrior in the best sense of the term. His patriotic fervor and unabashed love of the great American experiment was something to behold. The best way we can honor his memory is to remain focused on changing our culture back to one that respects individual liberty in general and the values of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in particular. It was his life's work and it should be ours as well.
Let's cut the President some slack. He thinks he can cool the planet and make the oceans recede. Turning the slime in your under-maintained backyard swimming pool into automotive fuel is small beer for Barry the Miracle Worker. What's another half-billion dollars in taxpayer-funded loans or subsidies or just plain-old handouts?
To be fair, research and development is a tricky thing. At one time, petroleum was probably considered a risky source of energy to use for anything, much less base a whole economy around. Figuring out how to turn the black crap that came out of the ground into something useful was an arduous process that a lot of people likely thought wasn't going to pan out. Obama might be right to think that algae is the wave of the future. But his track record on energy policy shouldn't fill you with loads of confidence.
Even though it's likely that algae will be yet another Solyndra-sized government boondoggle, I kinda want Obama to pursue this wacky project. If it works, great. If it doesn't, then we can all get a laugh as Juan Williams accuses Newt Gingrich of being a racist when the former Speaker calls Barack Obama the 'pond-scum President'.
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.
I'm here in the blogger room with the usual: conservative blogging luminaries, crappy wi-fi and the occasional celebrity-like visit from the featured speakers.
Did an old-fashioned interview with Bruce McQuain of Q and O. The topic? The GOP front-runners, such as they are.
If this post and my posting seem perfunctory and uninspired, it's because they are. As I told Bruce, I think we've reach a point of no return with this country's economy. It matters little now who the GOP nominee is or even if that person wins. We are on a collision course with some hard life-choices.
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In a blogger meeting as Andrew Breitbart, Lee Stranahan and others talk about the exposure of the Occupy Movement. Follow Citizens United on Twitter and Facebook.
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(February 16, 2012): Well, my blogging laziness prevailed. But I made it back home safely, so there's that.
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.
I don't get IFC channel, but because I read Sitting On The Edge of The Sandbox, Biting My Tongue and her great blog I don't have to. She's a fan of "Portlandia", a show on IFC. Check out her take.
The real white people are not in New Hampshire, and certainly not in Iowa or South Carolina. The real white people are in the Pacific North-West, and they are California transplants.
We started watching Portlandia on a Big Hollywood tip, and I can’t believe nobody told us about it last year. Like Stuff White People Like, a blog I proudly feature on my blogroll under humor, Portlandia ridicules mores and tastes of white upper middle class liberals.
...Liberals making fun of themselves, quite maliciously so at times, is nothing new. What’s surprising is that self-mockery is coming from Carrie Brownstein of a super-earnest grrrl band Sleater-Kinny and Fred Armisen who sabotages Obama skits on SNL. I suspect Brownstein and Armisen feel liberated to be funny on Portlandia only when they are performing for an elite audience of like-minded white liberals.
All I know is that this is the funniest Fred Armisen has ever been in his entire half-assed comedy career.
Watch him in this Saturday Night Live opening skit. Get your pillow and blankie for when you doze off 25 seconds in.
Granted, the writers gave Armisen a whole 2.3 jokes to fill a three minute bit. It's hard to be funny there isn't anything remotely resembling humor anywhere in the material. That doesn't excuse Fragile Fred for his ponderous performance. Armisen doesn't deliver a punchline so much as wrestle it to the ground, tear it open, light it on fire, stuff it into your mailbox, then look at you with pleading eyes desperately craving your approval.
One gets the sense that Armisen--and SNL in general--can't really go after Obama all that hard. They don't want to hammer the President because he's their guy. SNL, along with the rest of the court jester/palace guard media, will not humiliate the politician that most reflects their values. So they pull their punches at every opportunity, which not only makes them kool-aid drinkers but incredibly boring as well.
But the shackles come off when slightly famous liberals can make fun of average everyday liberals on a cable TV show. Watch the Portlandia clip.
Oh well. We'll call that progress.
Funny, timely and just a little self-deprecating to boot. Wow. It's amazing what one can do when you're not shooting jokes in the balls so they don't hurt your side of the political spectrum.
What's really cool is how "Portlandia" is pretty much the proggy version of Larry The Cable Guy. I know liberals--especially bitter old hacks like David Cross-- hate Larry The Cable Guy. What the lefties can't get is that Larry isn't glorifying the hillbilly peckerwood lifestyle, he's satirizing it. His material pokes fun at the silliness of the South. He's a conservative Southerner laughing with--and at--other Southerners.
It's easier to take jokes from your own people, rather than take them from an outsider. Irishmen can call their fellow Emerald Islanders drunk bog-trotting micks and it's all good. If Germans were actually capable of generating humor, they'd start by calling themselves humorless krauts and then they'd politely giggle about it under their breath.
Same thing with Southerners. They know Cable Guy is having a laugh at their expense. But they can take it from him because a) he's one of theirs and b) they know Larry's bits are based in the reality of Southern life.
"Portlandia" is the comforting laugh that lefties can have on themselves. Conveniently, it's also the laugh conservatives can have on liberalism too. That's always nice.
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.
Soul Food: it’s yummy stuff. The origins of what is known a Soul Food, however, are often forgotten. For very pertinent reasons, it can legitimately be called ‘Black Food.’
Foods such as rice, sorghum (known by Europeans as "guinea corn"), and okra — all common elements of West African cuisine — were introduced to the Americas as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Yams and watermelon are other examples.
Eventually, such fare became known as Southern Food. These days, Soul Food is considered a delicacy. (Personal note: I like the stuff very much, with the following exceptions. Yams and chitlins have crossed the threshold of my lips only once, respectively.) But, back in the bad old days, masters fed their slaves the type of food considered crap, and saved the choice meats, grains, and vegetables for themselves. Much of the fare called Soul Food consists of plantation throwaways.
European enslavers fed their captive workers as cheaply as possible, often with leftover/waste foods from the plantation, forcing slaves to make do with the ingredients at hand. In slave households, 'vegetables' consisted of the tops of turnips, beets, and dandelions. Soon, African-American slaves were cooking with new types of "greens": collards, kale, cress, mustard, and pokeweed. They also developed recipes which used lard, cornmeal, and offal; discarded cuts of meat such as pigs' feet, oxtail, ham hocks, chitterlings/"chitlins" (i.e., pigs' small intestines), pig ears, hog jowls, tripe, and skin.
The Occupy Wall Street volunteer kitchen staff launched a “counter” revolution yesterday -- because they’re angry about working 18-hour days to provide food for “professional homeless” people and ex-cons masquerading as protesters.
For three days beginning tomorrow, the cooks will serve only brown rice and other spartan grub instead of the usual menu of organic chicken and vegetables, spaghetti bolognese, and roasted beet and sheep’s-milk-cheese salad.
They will also provide directions to local soup kitchens for the vagrants, criminals and other freeloaders who have been descending on Zuccotti Park in increasing numbers every day.
(All bolding mine.)
Rice and other Spartan grub. Hmmm.
One wonders how the OWS cooks know that the “freeloaders” are vagrants and criminals. After all, aren’t both the “professional homeless” and the “amateur homeless” (the OWS protesters) squatting on land that does not belong to them? I bet I know how they know: most of the amateurs are white and most of professionals are black. And both groups are freeloaders. After all it isn’t as if the OWS protesters bought the food.
I wonder why the OWS cooks don’t want to cook for the “professional homeless” aka “freeloaders.” And what are the “non-freeloaders” doing to help the cooks? Delivering the goods? Chopping the vegetables? Washing the dishes? Disposing of litter? Not according to reports. But, of course, the “non-freeloaders” are speaking “truth to power,” so, one assumes that counts.
But, oh wait! Some designated persons labored to prepare the food and want it to go to the hungry and downtrodden! Except not the actual hungry and downtrodden.
But, oh wait! The “freeloaders” are vagrant and criminals! But according to the Left, vagrants and criminals do what they do only because the rich won’t help them. So the OWS want to help them! Except they don’t.
But, oh wait! OWS cooks will still feed the “professional homeless”—just not the good stuff. Only the slave food.
But, oh wait! There are soup kitchens where the “vagrants, criminals, and freeloaders” can eat. Wonder who funds those places. No matter. The “vagrants, criminals, and freeloaders” have the soup kitchens--equal but separate facilities in which to chow down. They can “freeload” on someone else’s dime and time.
So, in one ill-considered decision, the Occupy Wall Street sorts manage to epitomize hundreds of years of slavery and government oppression against black Americans and, on top of that, managed to promote one of the principles in the Bible—that those who do not work, should not eat. In one fell swoop, they have become everything they say they are against.
Operation Soaring Donkey Punch has reached it'sbloody end.
Libyans rejoiced and the world breathed a collective sigh of relief Thursday at news of the death of ousted leader MuammarQaddafi, but details of his capture and killing remained in dispute.
His convoy was hit by NATO airstrikes but not destroyed. And he later was captured alive in his hometown of Sirte. However, numerous reports -- often contradictory -- continue to surface about how he was captured and how he ended up dead, apparently from a bullet.
A U.S. Predator drone was involved in the airstrike on MuammarQaddafi's convoy Thursday in the moments before his death, as he tried to escape Sirte, a U.S. defense official told Fox News.
The official said the drone, along with a French fighter jet, fired on the "large convoy." A French defense official earlier said about 80 vehicles were in the convoy -- the official said the strike did not destroy the convoy but that fighters on the ground afterward intercepted the vehicle carrying Qaddafi. He was later killed, reportedly in the crossfire between Qaddafi supporters and opponents as he was being transferred.
Arab broadcasters showed graphic images of the balding, goateedGadhafi -- wounded, with a bloodied face and shirt -- but alive, as he was pushed around by a crowd of revolutionaries. Later video showed fighters rolling Qaddafi's lifeless body over on the pavement, stripped to the waist and a pool of blood under his head.
Much as I'd like to think this is an unalloyed good, the horrifying undignified death (Warning-It's graphic gory video of a dead dictator) of Khadafi probably generates more questions than it answers.
First, Barack Obama brought us to this war against the Libyan psycho-regime. What exactly did our President's Maghreb adventurism get us? The Coalition of the Swilling's Tree Hugging Sister makes a disturbing point.
What I am appalled by is an American President who can tout “American Leadership” in a statement patting himself on the back for what was basically the assassination cream-on-top of a patently illegal operation to begin with. Leadership would have BEEN calling out to Iranians on rooftops desperate for encouragement.
Obama couldn’t lead himself to the men’s room.
So, is that what our proud military’s for? To flush out the easy-target dirtbag of choice, who can then (eventually) can be pulled out of a pipe by a random hodgepodge of “Freedom Fighters”, beaten to a pulp and summarily executed there on the shoulder of the highway, all the while we can claim no boots on the ground and no blood on lily white hands?
Read the rest.
Remember how President Nobel Laureate painstakingly worked to get Congressional approval for the Libyan War? How about all those trips to the United Nations to discuss why Khadafi had to be removed from power? Do recall how many agonizing months we delayed our military operations in North Africa just to make sure we had all of our legal and Constitutional ducks in a row?
Yeah, me neither.
But you gotta give it up to the Obama Administration--at least they're not spiking the football.
"We came, we saw, he died."
Hey American progressives, I give you your glorious avatar: A corpulent hack lawyer/former junior US Senator/former First Lady waddling her overfed frame into a fawning media appearance so she can giggle about killing the leader of another country.
Speaking of idiots, The Daily Kos is in full-on hopeful puppy dog mode.
The world will soon move on to other matters, forgetting Libya ever existed. But as trite an observation as it might be, getting rid of Gaddafi is likely to be the easy part in Libya's hopeful transition to a better, more democratic future.
Amazing. This is the same guy who spent most of the Dubya years in high dudgeon over 'illegal wars' and the 'imperial presidency'. How Kos--and the rest of the progressive movement--used to righteously thunder on and on and on about the alleged abuses of power from the evil American Warlord Premier Bush. Naturally, when Barack Obama refuses to get Congressional authorization to use force and then subsequently pushes through some half-assed quickie UN Security Council resolution against Khadafi, it's all good in the hood.
Granted, Kos is a little concerned over how the post-Khadafi transition will look. He frets about the hard part still to come. But basically, summarizing his and the broader left-wing's position on Libya is simple: "Mission Accomplished".
The dissonance between liberalism's anti-war rhetoric during the Bush Administration and the left's more recent fawning accolades for their Glorious Warrior President should put a massive dent in their neo-pacifist credibility for a generation. No more can progressives claim the moral high ground. By hitching their wagon to the newly butched-upDemocrat Party, they have demolished the notion of a viable American anti-war movement. It should now be clear that the Dubya era crying over Iraq was not done out of principle, but instead out of a vulgar partisan hate for Bush.
But perhaps I'm being too harsh on our progressive colleagues. On second thought, lets let bygones be bygones and give the Left a warm welcome to the Paul Wolfowitz/Donald Rumsfeld/Darth Cheney Axis of Neoconservatism. You libs are a little late to the shin-dig, but whatevs. Be sure to give William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer a shout-out at the beer pong tournament.
(BTW--I'm not linking to Kos' site. You can find it for yourself.)
Swinging back over into the real world, there are going to be actual-factual consequences that America will have to deal with in the wake of Khadafi'sdeath.
Qaddafi was not America’s friend, but the vision of U.S. troops pulling Saddam Hussein from a spider hole in Iraq did persuade him that having America as an enemy was not smart. So he gave up his drive to develop nuclear weapons and coughed up useful intelligence on how that project had been organized. He stopped financing terrorism — as far as we’re aware. He did continue oppressing his own people. Both the Bush and the Obama administrations pretty much gave him a pass on that.
If the Great Arab Revolt — “Arab Spring” is a hopeful, not descriptive term — ends up only removing Qaddafi and, from neighboring Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, a despot who was, nonetheless, a reasonably pliant client of the U.S., and if Iran’s theocrats remain in power and manage to save the Assad dynasty in Syria while continuing to use Hezbollah to control Lebanon and sponsoring Hamas in Gaza, the lesson will be clear: It is more dangerous to be America’s ally than its enemy.
Such a lesson will carry long-term strategic consequences. If there are strategic planners in the current administration, now would be a good time for them to start worrying.
Egypt has been allowed to drift into a Muslim Brotherhood/military coalitiongovernment. Turkey has become more and more Islamist over the last decade. Now Libya will get the chance to replace their brutal dictator with...what, exactly? The chances of finding Jeffersonian democrats, Madisonian constitutionalists or even FDR-ite liberals amongst the Libyan freedom fighters are negligible.
Instead, it is very likely that Libya will be allowed to fall into the hands of al-Qaeda sympathizers and other hardline Sunni Muslim theocrats. That's great if you're a Islamist radical; not so great if you're an Egyptian Copt, a Libyan Jew, an American anything...or pretty much anybody else.
But according to President Obama's logic, America simply had to help throw out Khadafi, even though our short and long term interests would've been better served by keeping him around. Meanwhile, Bashar al-Assad still hasn't taken a laser-guided thermobariccurbstomp. The Iranian mullahs, who somehow managed to keep power even after the 2009 Persian uprising should've shown America just how brittle the Tehran theocracy really is, have yet to be shown the business end of a J-Dam.
It would be a far better and much more stable world if our real enemies were punished for their actions. But then again, is stability really what Obama is seeking to create in the world? His actions in Libya suggest he has some other goal in mind.
In any case, MoamarKhadafi has been put to death at the hands of the people he brutally oppressed for decades. There is a certain ironic justice to the mad Colonel's inglorious termination. Even though there are many troubling ambiguities, his execution rids the world of a mass murderer and large-scale terrorist sponsor. He has the blood of countless people on his hands, both in Libya and across the globe. Pan Am Flight 103 was simply the most direct assault on US citizens that Khadafi ordered against America.
The planet is a far better place with Khadafiroasting on a spit in Satan's special nuclear fire dictator barbeque pit. Regardless of America's domestic political situation, the death of the crazy Colonel is still a day to be celebrated. What happens next is a mystery, what happened this week should at least give some relief to the people who were impacted by Khadafi's evil.
Overall, 45% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the president's performance. Fifty-five percent (55%) at least somewhat disapprove.
Ouch.
But then it gets interesting.
Allahpundit notes that some Democrats are emo about the Bamster.
“Given all that, it’s no surprise that many Democrats are running away from Obama. But here’s the problem: He did what Democrats wanted him to do. Health care, stimulus, taxes, you name it — Obama did what his party wanted. Not what the public at large wanted, but what many Democrats wanted. And now, as the negative electoral consequences of their own priorities stare them in the face, those Democrats are blaming the president…
“‘It’s ingratitude,’ says a Democratic strategist who asked to remain anonymous. ‘People are saying to [Obama], ‘You didn’t do everything you told me you were going to do.’ If you’re a member of a union, you didn’t get everything you wanted. If you’re an environmentalist, you didn’t get everything you wanted.But the left wants to go beyond what’s possible.’…
“This is a serious question: If you’re a Democrat, what’s not to like? What kind of unreasonable standard would make a Democrat unhappy with a president who accomplished those things?And yet many Democrats are beside themselves with frustration and anxiety.”
They're still stoked for the Barry agenda to the tune of 77%.
Republicans never loved President GreenJobsMcPassThisBill, so that 13% approval rating isn't surprising (in fact, it's more shocking that Obama's GOP approval numbers are so high).
So if rank and file DonkeyPunchers still basically dig St. Bambi and Republicans continue to dislike the pResident, why is the Duffer-in-Chief in trouble? A few things are happening here. First, Obama is underwater amongst moderates. These folks are basically low-information voters and people disengaged with American politics. They're basically going with their gut impression of the President's performance. They have found him wanting.
The other reason why Obama is tanking now has to do with his base. Over three quarters of Democrats think Obama is doing a good job. That sounds rad, but is it really so impressive? 21% of Americans identify as liberals, compared with 41% who think of themselves as conservative and 36% who call themselves moderates. What this means is that Obama--and liberals in general--have a much tougher fight to maintain approval from the American electorate. Seventy seven percent of 21 isn't as good as fifty percent of 41.
In other words, a liberal can have his base on lock-down and still be toast if the right has totally tuned him out and the middle is repulsed.
Don't get me wrong. I think a lot of Democrats are getting annoyed with their Messiah figure. They're not mad because Obama has gone too far to the left. They're anxious because they feel like all the statist gains the socialists have made over the last few years--Dodd-Frank, Cap-n-Tax, ObamaCare, the promise of endless stimuli/union prop-ups, are going to end or be reversed due to Obama's inability to rally a winning electoral coalition to the Democrat flag anymore. Most of all, they're pissed because Obama hasn't been able to go to the left and maintained his popularity at the same time.
In other words, the American Left once again finds itself angrily stamping their feet against a reality they just can't accept. This is a position they find themselves in quite often. You'd think they'd be used to it by now.
On September 11th 2001, ordinary Americans were caught in the horror of al-Qaeda's monstrous sadism. The victims of the 9/11 attacks were a more or less random sampling of people from a broad spectrum of life in the States. While none of them could've known that they would be murdered by pure human evil that day, many men and women rose up and became America's first heroes in the war against radical Islam.
The 45-year-old flight attendant was on American Airline Flight 11, the first of two that crashed into the World Trade Center. During the hijacking, Ong hid in the back galley, picked up a crew phone and bravely called the airline reservation desk.
"The cockpit is not answering their phone," Ong said during the hijacking. "There's somebody stabbed in business class and we can't breathe...somebody's got mace or something."
The call lasted 23 minutes. Ong spoke calmly, giving important details of the chaotic last moments.
The 9/11 Commission declared Ong a hero.
Indeed.
Here is the phone call she placed--in the midst of the hijacking, with murder surrounding her and in danger of being killed by terrorists--telling authorities what was happening on her flight.
And then this valiant woman was gone.
What did the 9/11 attacks cost us? We can talk about the trillion dollars that simply evaporated from the American economy in a single morning. The destruction of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon was meant to be a symbolic demolition of the United States' economic and military dominance. But as important as these things are, they pale in comparison to the human price America paid on that day.
Think about the hopes and dreams of the three thousand people who died on that day. What did Betty Ong want for her life? Was she saving for a house or new car? Did she want to get married? Were children in her plans? Did she have career aspirations? These are questions that seem so banal, at least for the living. Tragically, they cannot be answered when it comes to Ms. Ong--or anyone else who died because of Osama bin Laden's perverse ideology.
Three thousand people are no longer with us, which means three thousand sets of families and friends were victimized on September 11th. Those people who had a connection to the 9/11 victims not only had a part of their lives ripped away from them, but they had a part of their future destroyed as well; the weddings that didn't happen, the children that won't be born, the birthdays that have become a time of mourning. When seen from that perspective, the 9/11 attacks take on an almost unthinkably barbaric and inhuman dimension.
It was Osama bin Laden and his followers who decided to make war against us in this fashion. It was bin Laden, one of the most extreme adherents of a religion that has trouble reconciling itself to democracy, human rights, free market economics and the rest of modern civilization, that elected to use large scale terrorism on the United States. America did not seek out this fight. The fight was brought right into our home. We had no choice but to bring war upon bin Laden and all those that would stand with him. We have no choice but to continue to fight against all who follow in al-Qaeda's path.
On this day, we should mourn. We should mourn for those who had loved ones taken from them. We should mourn for our country and all that it lost on that day. But we should also celebrate the men and women that gave their lives in order to save us. We almost never think of our neighbors and coworkers as potential heroes. As it turns out, the 9/11 attacks showed us that America is full of people who will rise in the face of unimaginable danger to help others.
At one of the darkest moments in this country's history, there were many like Betty Ong who put themselves in harm's way in order to do the right thing. During the worst attack on America's soil, there were citizens that sacrificed their own lives in order to save the lives of others. These folks were not sports icons, blowhard politicians or members of the celebrity class. Our fallen 9/11 heroes were in fact ordinary Americans who were placed into unspeakable situations and performed extraordinary feats of selfless bravery.
On this day of sadness and pain, we should leave some room in our hearts for wonder. Hopefully we never stop marvelling at the feats of our fallen champions from September 11th. The valorous dead deserves our remembrance and our reverence. We owe them far more than we can ever repay.
Update I: Robert Stacy McCain shares his rememberences of 9/11. He also knows who the real enemy is.
Update II: Manhattan Infidel posts a poignant piece about his 9/11. The Infidel speaks a hard but necessary truth:
What happened that day makes me angry. It still makes me angry. To call Islam Medieval is an insult to the middle ages. Islam is pre-medieval. It is stone age. It is barbaric.
Read the whole thing.
Update III: Karen Howes of the terrific Eastern Right has this to say:
May we always continue to be Americans.
Amen, Karen. Amen.
Update IV: Matt of the Conservative Hideout has some thoughts about American unity.
Update V: Chris Wysocki of WyBlog reminds us that we still need patriots.
Update VI: Edge of the Sandbox is annoyed at Muslim imams getting invited to places they don't really belong. Preach on, sister.
Update VII: The Crack Emcee gives us the enduring strength of George W. Bush. He kept us safe and we ended up hating him for it.
Update VIII: David Wong of Cracked.com tells the story of how "Loose Change" poisoned the 9/11 tragedy.
Update IX: Right Hand Man of the superb Sentry Journal talks about heart.
Update X: Angel of Woman Honor Thyself honors those taken from us on 9/11 with a heart-wrenching piece.
Update XI: CG Hill takes a look at his September 13th 2001 reaction and fisks it.
Let's face facts. Dystopian non-fiction can be a total buzzkill. People generally like happy endings in their summer reading. Most pessimistic interpretations of tomorrow don't have the kind of emotionally uplifting finale the paying customers are used to. In tales of the disasters to come, the reader doesn't often get the relief of a grand reversal of civilizational decline. The story's third act usually doesn't include a great reawakening where the citizenry regain their bearings and right the ship of state just in the nick of time. Instead, it's all pandemic death counts, epic societal collapse and lurid Thunderdome scenarios.
If one is going to travel deep into the territories of pessimism about the future, it helps if the tour guide is quick with the jokes as you pass by the scenic civilizational wreckage. In "After America", prominent conservative writer Mark Steyn employs his masterful satiric wit and playful use of language to craft the most laugh-out-loud funny postapocalyptic nightmare since his last piece of doom "America Alone".
In many ways "After America" is the logical extension of Steyn's older work. "Alone" was the author's reaction to the 9/11 attacks, the depopulation of Europe and the ascension of Islam in the West. It's main theme was that the demographic collapse of native Europeans was not going to occur in a vacuum, that the rise of Eurabia was going to have serious consequences on America's future. "After America", on the other hand, discusses a USA that doesn't have a future, at least not a future most Americans would want for their country.
What will be the cause of Old Glory's demise? Conservatives are familiar with many of the reasons: smothering bureaucracy, insane federal spending, the overwhelming arrogance of elected officials, the rise of the dependency state. What Steyn does so well is wrap his worrisome statistics and downward spiral trend lines in jaunty wit. If a little bit of sugar helps the medicine go down, a healthy shovelful of high fructose corn syrup makes the cure seem like laughing gas, even as the book goes from bleak to bleaker.
What is most bleak isn't the list of horribles Steyn recites. These are mere symptoms of the fatal disease. What really ails America? It's not all about the money or the dopey leaders we elect. It's the cultural rot that's killing us. Ponder this passage:
Incidentally, over half the illegal population supposedly came into America after September 11, 2001. That's to say, they broke into a country on Code Orange alert. Odd that. Even under the panoptic surveillance of the "security state", certain identity groups seem to be indulged by Big Government. In California one notices that the same regulatory leviathan that thinks nothing of sending in the heavies if a hardware store is offering complimentary coffee to its customers seems somewhat shyer of enforcing its bazillions of building code/food prep/environmental/health and safety rules against ad hoc mobile kitchens serving piping hot Mexican dishes up and down the highway...
This multicultural squeamishness is most instructive. Illegal immigrants are providing a model for survival in an impoverished statist America, and on the whole the state is happy to let them do so.
On the surface, the issues wrapped up in illegal immigration involve hard tangible things like borders, fences and security architecture. Dig deeper and one sees the schizoid nature of a government too eager to punish the rule-abiders and too ready to ignore the rule-breakers. At the bottom however, it's about a society that's so confused it has trouble determining why it has laws or what it would mean to reform them.
Along the way, "After America" doesn't just point out the ideological incoherence of American life, it names names. The feckless Barack Obama and the smug incompetent Mike Bloomberg take much deserved lumps but appropriately for a book about culture, the author doesn't just stick it to our elected leaders. The whiny liberal thumbsucker Joe Klein and The New York Time's resident ChiCom fluffer Thomas Friedman--among others in the pantheon of American fail--take their hits in utterly enjoyable ways. It's one thing to take the bark off knee-jerk statist tools. It's quite another to break down the preening vanity of the cultural vanguard while having a hearty laugh at their expense.
Ultimately, Mark Steyn's "After America" hasn't just posited a future we must do everything in our power to avoid. Although it is a far different book in tone and subject matter, "After America" is just as critical as Mark Levin's "Liberty and Tyranny" if one seeks to understand the current trajectory of the Untied States. Most importantly, it gives readers an idea of how to pull away from the brink of disaster and retake their nation.
Football star Chad Ochocinco recently got into a bit of Twitter heat for tweeting that he was reading conservative blogger Glenn Beck’s book “Broke.”
He tweeted the following:
“Gotten through 3 chapters in @glennbeck book and so far everything he’s said is either common or his opinion based off research.”
“I don’t agree with a lot of this s— but nonetheless its interesting reading the views n opinions from what I’d like to call the other side.”
(...)
Therefore upon sending out the tweets, Ochocinco was heavily criticized by followers—some even un-followed him.
One follower responded: “unfollowing [you] after two years because you’re a Beck fan. Disgraceful and disappointing.”
(...)
Since when did [black people] put a limitation on whose book we could read, or what types of books we are entitled to read? It is a very sad day in modern America when a Black man is ostracized for reading a book. Seems very reminiscent to the days of slavery when Blacks privately read (for purposes of knowledge) in hopes that the slave master wouldn’t catch them, or worse.
Right. In the days of American slavery, it was often legally forbidden to teach a slave to read and those who did so were punished with jail time or worse--along with their students. Refusing to follow the Twitter feed of an athlete who reads certain books is a response clearly not in the league of the legal proscriptions of the Bad Old Days. However, the mentality is identical. The person displaying either response has one goal in mind: control.
"Do what I want or I'll kill you."
"Do what I want or I'll ostracize you."
One wonders how many black people are no longer fans of Mr. Ochocinco due to his reading material. I'm sure that the number would blow the lid off the irony caldron.
Side note: I'm just happy to see a pro-athlete reading anything. I might send him a copy of my book; a little football, a little love--I'm sure he'd love it. :)
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.
The top congressional leaders from both parties gathered at the White House for a working discussion over the shape and size of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan. The meeting was designed to promote bipartisanship.
But Obama showed that in an ideological debate, he’s not averse to using a jab.
Challenged by one Republican senator over the contents of the package, the new president, according to participants, replied: “I won.”
As a statement of fact, the Bamster was of course correct. He did win the 2008 presidential election in very handy fashion. John McCain was a lousy candidate, but that doesn't change the fact that 52% of the public pulled the HopeyChangey lever.
As it relates to the contemporary fight over the debt ceiling, Obama's 2009 triumphalism represents just how badly the President misread the circumstances that swept him into power. Candidate Barry ran as an aspirational post-partisan Lightbringer. He was going to change the country's imperial posture on the world stage and reverse the damage done to the US's reputation by the American warlord Premier Bush. International intellectual elites, formerly hostile governments, hardcore terrorists; all would fall for Barack Obama's apologies for past American misbehavior and his sophisticated charisma.
On the home front, an Obama presidency was advertised as an even-keeled moderate administration that would stand athwart the ideological poles of American politics cooing, "Let's Be Nice." President Pantscrease (thanks again, David Brooks!) wasn't going to give in to the extremes of the Republican Party hacks of course, but he also wasn't going to let Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi define his political agenda either. Sure, there would be some new spending, but nothing crazy. Yes, there were going to be some tax hikes, but only on the really rich people.
A conciliatory anti-Dubya abroad and a pragmatic centrist in the domestic sphere: this is the Barack Obama many Americans voted for in 2008.
In 2011 we find ourselves sifting through the wreckage of Obama's presidency. All the ridiculous spending with absolutely nothing to show for it, all the bloated Leviathan government programs passed against the public's will, all the ludicrous domestic decisions that have damn near annihilated the private sector, all the random wars started with little public explanation and even fewer plans for victory; all of these things and more were borne out of Barack Obama's self-delusion. This arrogant ideologically-blinkered talentless achievement-free hack of a man, with decades of politically correct college campus leftism crammed into his thick Ivy League skull, actually thought that just because he snookered some folks into believing his factless self-description he could govern like the Marxoid rabble-rouser he actually is.
Better still, Barack Obama wants John Boehner and the rest of the GOP--you know, the folks who won last November--to make the exact same mistake he did back in 2009. In the budget ceiling battle going on, the President needs Speaker Boehner far more than he probably ever thought he would. In fact, Obama's chances for pulling a victory out of this (and saving his re-election bacon) rest on John Boehner's forgetting the reason why people voted for the GOP in the midterm elections.
Related: Let's look at the grand agreement that Obama wants and needs Boehner to approve. The Democrats get the Republicans to stop hammering them about profligate spending. In exchange for that, the GOP gets what exactly?
...the president and his allies are playing a familiar card. It’s not that they are against entitlement “reform,” they say, it’s just that they want to protect the beneficiaries from any financial sacrifice. And so we learn in recent days (see here and here) that Democrats are willing to put sizeable Medicare and Medicaid “cuts” on the table. Among the changes that are reportedly under consideration are further reductions in what providers of services and products are paid, trims in Medicare’s support of hospital-based physician-training programs, and importation of Medicaid’s pharmaceutical-rebate scheme into the Medicare prescription-drug benefit for the so-called “dually eligible” (that is, the elderly who are enrolled in both programs). And apparently some Republicans are willing to play along.
These kinds of changes in Medicare and Medicaid are nothing new. Various versions of them have been included in every budget deal going back 30 years, and most especially in the bipartisan deals of 1990 and 1997. They do not constitute genuine entitlement reform. They will not fix Medicare and Medicaid. And they will not solve the nation’s budget problem.
Yes, on paper, the Congressional Budget Office will say they save money, perhaps even a lot of money. But CBO has said that every time a budget deal in the past has included similar provisions. As the years go by, the savings always vanish in the regulatory complexity of the programs, and entitlement spending continues to rise just as it always has. Moreover, arbitrary across-the-board payment cuts are actually damaging to the efficient operation of the health system. They lead to cost shifting, and they drive willing suppliers of services out of the marketplace. In the end, price controls do nothing to change the underlying reasons for cost growth.
So...the Republicans would get nothing. And a whole lot of it.
Excuse my Frogtalk, but why the frack should the GOP cave in on this? Because some jack-ass grandees over at the Washington Post are crying about it? Newsflash: The mainstream media hates Republicans and conservatives the way Roman Polanski hates statutory rape laws. They lie and lie and lie some more, all in the hopes of convincing enough people of the progressive-approved narratives.
More than a few people got their knickers in a twist when Rush Limbaugh said he hoped Barack Obama would fail. Very few people, even those on the Right, ever mention the countless magazine articles, newspaper op-eds and television pieces the MSM produces every goddamn day that practically begs the Lord for the Republicans to fall down a sinkhole and vanish from the political scene.
What about the Mitch McConnell horrible train wreck compromise, you ask? 'Demoralizing' would be a grotesque understatement. Imagine if in World War II the Allies spent months planning the D-Day invasion of Normandy, executed the landing, suffered horrendous casualties and successfully secured a beachhead in France...then turned around and went back to England on June 7th. That's the kind of insanity Senator McConnell is proposing here.
The Republicans have gone too far to stop now. If they do some sort of preemptive surrender where they end up with no real spending cuts while giving their imprimatur to Obama's liberalism, the GOP will all but guarantee the formation of a third party. That in turn will probably mean an Obama win in 2012. The stakes are that high.
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 Afghan War has been a constant part of America's political and cultural landscape for almost ten years. Like catching sand in a sieve, victory has been incredibly hard to grasp. The war has bedeviled two presidents, two Secretaries of Defense (soon to be three) and numerous top commanders. Unlike Iraq, where American perceptions have shifted to see it as a victory for the US military, Afghanistan is seen as a confusing morass where winning just might be impossible.
Into this muddled situation comes "The Wrong War" by Bing West. The author, a former Marine, lays out the details on the ground in stark terms. By putting himself directly into battles alongside the American and Afghan troops, West gives the reader a view of the fighting from the eye of the soldiers themselves. West focuses on two areas, the Konar Province in the northeast and the Helmand province in the southwest. Each has it's own tribal tensions, linguistic diversity, economic issues, geographical challenges and political difficulties.
Reading "The Wrong War" makes it clear just how foolish our nation-building efforts have been in Afghanistan. The country--and calling Afghanistan a 'country' is almost comical-- is spectacularly unsuited for the kind of Western political reforms we've been trying to graft onto it. West details several ways that Hamid Karzai, our hand-picked 'democrat', has undercut much of what we are trying to accomplish. The battle of Barge Mattal, where Americans fought and bled not to secure a military objective but to secure votes for Karzai's reelection, is an especially infuriating portion of the book.
In 2009, Karzai put pressure on the American commander General Stanley McCrystal to retake Barge Mattal. The town, deep in the Nuristan Province and close to the wide-open Pakistan border, served as an optimal location for insurgents to jump between the two countries and conduct operations. However, Karzai didn't really care about the military importance of Barge Mattal so much as the political expediency of taking back the town to look tough and get votes.
This put heavy constraints on what the Americans could and could not do to achieve the mission. Worse, there was no counterinsurgency goal to be had there. Instead, the US was forced to land Batallion 1-32 into the middle of Barge Mattal's 'punchbowl' location, surrounded by high cliffs from which the enemy could shoot from the high ground onto the American forces. Predictably, this resulted in the needless deaths of American troops.
West offers Barge Mattal up as an example of the incompetence and corruption of Hamid Karzai's cronyed-up leadership. But it's not just the Afghan elite that is suspect. The rules of engagement that the Western forces labor under are constructed so poorly that the enemy uses them to their own advantage. In a stunning passage, West finds himself in a firefight alongside American, British and Afghan security forces against an insurgent group.
"I see one over here, ' Cpl. Gareth Robson yelled from a side wall. Le ran over and peered through his M4 scope at a man dressed in black who was running bent over to the west end of the building, presenting an easy target.
"Should I shoot him?" Le [Ed.-Pfc. Khanh Le] asked me.
"I'm just a writer," I said. "It's your call."
A few meters away, Roxy [Ed.-Sgt. Scott Roxborough, a British soldier] pursed his lips to emit a farting sound, amplified by jeers from the two Marines and several Brits.
"Okay, okay, " I relented. "In Vietnam, I'd light him up. Now, what's your ROE?"
"I don't see a weapon," Le said.
"Our rule," Roxy shouted, "is that you have to testify at your hearing that the shooting was justified."
The absurdity of that conversation is mind-boggling. "The Wrong War" is littered with the frustration, lost opportunities and senseless American deaths brought about due to horrible ROEs. Not only do we send our troops into harms way, we readily tie their hands while gleefully patting ourselves on the back for our humanitarianism. War is already insane; how we have forced our troops to conduct themselves in Afghanistan borders on the suicidal.
When the American armed forces are not busy looking through the Yellow Pages for lawyers to defend them at the court-martial they could be subject to for accidentally farting on an insurgent's pet goat/next meal/best friend with benefits, the Afghan civilians often do their best to kill our troops as well.
The picture above shows Afghan teenagers strewing rocks into the path of the 1-32 during an ambush at the village of Ganjigal. They did this in order to hem the Americans into a narrow area so that insurgents could have a better chance of killing US forces. Remember that these are the people the US taxpayer has invested billions of dollars in order to turn them into democrats. Worse, these are the people the US citizen has sacrificed its sons and daughters in order to turn Afghanistan away from international terrorism.
Why has Afghanistan gone so horribly wrong? In West's estimation, it's because America has tried to run a counterinsurgency operation that focuses on protecting the civilian population rather than killing the enemy. This brings into question what the American civilian leadership and the generals believe the US military is meant to do. The fact that there are people in positions of power who see our military as just a heavily armed Peace Corps is an indictment on the American military command, the civilian leadership and the American voter who puts up with monumentally incompetent leaders talking massively wrong-headed strategies.
"The Wrong War" is not just a scathing indictment of the current debacle in Afghanistan. West offers up stories that highlight the tremendous professionalism, deadly skill and selfless courage that are critical assets of our military men and women. The ambush at Ganjigal might've been an unmitigated American tragedy. Instead, the courageous actions of Corporal Dakotah Meyer--which West documents here--are nothing short of breathtaking. For every tale of misery in "The Wrong War", there are incidences of American heroism and resolve that should be part of our national mythos.
Moreover, West offers his solutions for an exit strategy. The final chapter should be required reading for anybody even remotely connected to the decision-making process in Afghanistan. His ideas help the American troops maintain their reputation for being the most deadly fighting force on the planet. Better still, they remove the American military from being pawns of Hamid Karzai and the scumfuck Afghan elite's tribal machinations.
In light of Barack Obama's unrealistic dewy-eyed dreamer's speech last week, "The Wrong War" becomes only that much more vital. Bing West's book is a cold honest assessment that counter-balances the President's partisan political agenda with facts, insight and real workable solutions. For anybody that cares about the global war on terror, the American military and our national security, "The Wrong War" is vital to understanding where we are now and where we should be in the future.
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.
In the post 9/11 age, Westerners have tried to explain why Islam has taken such a violent turn. From full-throated terrorist apologias to more sober hard-eyed analyses, America and her civilizational cousins have examined the reasons for violent jihad. Great debates have been had over the last ten years. September 11th was a wake-up call for many Westerners. While many of us are still asleep, the US conservative movement has at long last decided to examine the deeper motivations and passions that drive Islamic fundamentalism.
While this process of examination has been beneficial, sometimes it is necessary to listen to Muslim dissidents themselves. They will often tell you far more of the story than you'd likely get from other sources. That's why Raymond Ibrahim's translation of a Khaled Montaser piece is pretty important.
We Muslims have an inferiority complex and are terribly sensitive to the world, feeling that our Islamic religion needs constant, practically daily, confirmation by way of Europeans and Americans converting to Islam. What rapturous joy takes us when a European or American announces [their conversion to] Islam—proof that we are in a constant state of fear, alarm, and chronic anticipation for Western validation or American confirmation that our religion is "okay." We are hostages of this anticipation, as if our victory hinges on it—forgetting that true victory is for us to create or to accomplish something, such as those [civilizations] that these converts to our faith abandon.
And we pound our drums and blow our horns [in triumph] and drag the convert to our backwardness, so that he may stand with us at the back of the world's line of laziness, [in the Muslim world] wherein no new scientific inventions have appeared in the last 500 years. Sometimes those who convert relocate to our countries—only to get on a small boat and escape on the high seas back to their own countries.
There's a lot of truth to digest there.
First, it is important to note that there are Muslim scientists and thinkers doing important work. They study and invent and innovate not in Damascus, Jakarta or Tehran but in London, Frankfurt and Chicago. This indicates that there is no genetic or racial basis for the lack of 'Islamic inventions'. It is the culture of Muslim-majority nations that is stifling.
The West in general, and America in particular, is the only place where a Muslim can safely use his mind to create something other than yet another jihadist ideology or violent terrorist organization. If you're a clever Muslim who wants to invent something in the United States, chances are that the fast-thinking Farouk will be rewarded for his hard work and labor should his innovation actually perform. The same cannot be said for the vast swath of kleptocracies that riddle the Middle East. The man with a plan in the Islamic sphere will most likely see his good idea stolen by the thieves that man the important government posts or ignored by religious fundamentalists. There's really no reason for the intelligent person to even bother trying, so he doesn't.
That five hundred year failure rate has to gall many hard-core Muslims. While the mongrelized infidels in America and Europe have dominated the world with rapidly changing technology, vibrant expansionist pop culture and wild commercial success, Muslims live off the fruits of Western intellectualism but cannot hope to emulate it in their own homelands. According to the Koran, it is Muslims that have the truth--and more importantly, God--on their side. For Islamic supremacists, having God in their corner should've meant that they would be blessed with inventions and innovations. They should've been the winners of progress, not the debauched kaffir West.
Consider another irony. Even many of the Islamic sphere's bad ideas come from us. The Ba'ath party that dominated Iraq and continues to oppress Syria is merely an Arab facelift for a German socialism. Bashar al-Assad is basically Erich Honeker with a much funnier name and a slightly more brutal secret police organization.
More to the point of Montaser's article, Islam's constant seeking of Western validation--specifically through the conversion of Westerners to Islam--speaks to the inherent weakness of the faith. We in the West sometimes think that Muslim expansionism is a sign that the Western world or that Judeo-Christian values are in decline. But what does it say about Islam when the only way they can feel good about themselves is if some Eurotrash brainfart or American half-wit starts praying to Mecca five times a day?
When you always have to have the approval of others, you are doomed. The same is likely true for the supremacist version of Islam. While non-Muslims cannot do much to make that collapse happen, we can encourage those voices who criticize the backwardness of modern Islam.
I snagged the link from Kathy Shaidle's Five Feet Of Fury, who directed me to Jihad Watch, which got me to Raymond Inrahim's post. Thanks to all.
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.
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