All your body are belong to us...

Serving as I am as an embedded journalist in Pelosiville, I have never had the slightest doubt that Obama intends to destroy private health care. Obama is just a golem. He doesn't exist except as a physical projection of the collective psyche of the far left.

And they want a "single-payer" system so badly they are drooling. Not because it would help the poor or provide better medicine, but for the power it will give them. Government bureaucrats are overwhelmingly leftish, and they are going to be in charge of us at our weakest and most vulnerable moments. Think about it.

This video is great! You want to know what they are thinking? Watch...

Think about a future where you scrape the Palin bumper-sticker off your car before you go beg for a CAT scan or MRI...

Recommended

Charlene recommends Cultural Kleptos: How the Left Hijacks Art (and Everything Else) for the Good of Mankind, by Charles Winecoff...

...At the forefront of this morphing social tyranny: blacklist survivor Lillian Hellman. Again, she knew just how to make it work - for her. According to author Paul Johnson, after the release of the movie Julia, based on Hellman's fake memoir, the aged playwright enjoyed a renaissance as "the queen of radical chic and the most important single power-broker among the progressive intelligentsia and the society people who seethed around them.... She compiled her own blacklists and had them enforced by scores of servile intellectual flunkies."

Similarly, Karl Marx - the man - extolled the virtues of the working class, agitating for violent revolution, yet "so far as we know," wrote Johnson, "never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life. What is even more striking is Marx's hostility to fellow revolutionaries who had such experience - that is, working men who had become politically conscious... Marx made sure that working-class socialists were eliminated from any positions of influence."

Today, in America, we have a President who, rather than level with the trusting, hard-working voters who put him in office, plays mind games with them - asking them to believe that increasing the national debt is decreasing it, that less choice in health care is more choice, that standing up to violent savages makes us the savages, that reverse racism is post-racial. He seems to suck the meaning right out of words as he speaks them, always sure to distract with a mechanical smile.

But maybe he's just stupid....

"It's nice to be popular"

CURL: Global Obama fans outpace local ones - Washington Times:

Former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright on Thursday delivered some spectacular news to all Americans ashamed of their homeland: With President Obama now in office, you no longer have to pretend you're not from the States when you summer in Europe.

"It is nice to be popular, and I think that people feel better if we are liked, if, you know - Americans now don't have to say they're from Canada when they travel around," the Clinton-era diplomat said to laughter from a roomful of reporters at the National Press Club...

Animals. Worms. "Pretend you're Canadian." Yeah, right. But of course all those slime-animals continue to tuck into all the good things this great country provides, even as they spit upon her.

Hey, creeps, why don't you voluntarily reduce your standard of living to Canadian levels? Hmm? And when you get a rare and deadly disease, how about flying to Toronto? Eh? Or if you are traveling around, pretending not to be a scurvy American, and there's a revolution...and you're about to be lynched... How's about calling the Canadian Army? Hmm? You wouldn't want to get cooties from the US Marines, would you?

"It's nice to be popular." Yeah, like hippie teenagers trashing their middle-brow parents to their cool friends, while continuing to be supported by them. And running to them if they get into trouble.

Roll over the rotting log...

Michelle Malkin, investigating what it might mean when administration officials say, "We'll just let the science decide."

....Well, I did indeed read one of [Obama Administration "science czar"] Holdren's recent works that reveals his clingy reverence for, and allegiance to, the gurus of population control authoritarianism. He's just gotten smarter about cloaking it behind global warming hysteria. In 2007, he addressed the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. Holdren served as AAAS president; the organization posted his full slide presentation on its website.

In the opening slide, Holdren admitted that his "preoccupation" with apocalyptic matters such as "the rates at which people breed" was a lifelong obsession spurred by scientist Harrison Brown's work. Holdren heaped praise on Brown's half-century-old book, "The Challenge to Man's Future," then proceeded to paint doom-and-gloom scenarios requiring drastic government interventions to control climate change.

Who is Holdren's intellectual mentor, Harrison Brown? He was a "distinguished member" of the International Eugenics Society whom Holdren later worked with on a book about — you guessed it — world population and fertility. Brown advocated the same population control-freak measures Holdren put forth in Ecoscience. In "The Challenge to Man's Future," Brown envisioned a regime in which the "number of abortions and artificial inseminations permitted in a given year would be determined completely by the difference between the number of deaths and the number of births in the year previous."

Brown exhorted readers to accept that "we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that artifical means must be applied to limit birth rates." If we don't, Brown warned, we faced a planet "with a writhing mass of human beings." He likened the global population to a "pulsating mass of maggots."...

One of the promises of the "Enlightenment" was that if people threw off the shackles of "superstition," the result would be happiness and progress. This assumed that the "real person" inside us was born good, and any badness we manifest was learned. But various peculiar things happened when those hoary old superstitions were discraded. One of them was the rise of a considerable number of people who think that "happiness and progress" depend not on enlightening people, but in simply eliminating them!

Guys like Stalin and Mao and Hitler and Pol Pot worked in round numbers of tens of millions. Today's "scientists" consider them pikers trying to nickle-and-dime it. Now we get the "big vision," expressing the numbers of people to be eliminated in nice tidy "billions!"

That's the "real us" that emerges without the "shackles" of traditional "superstition." The "real me" for that matter; I can easily look at the maggot-like masses swarming the city and think, "How much better things would be if the bottom 20% we eliminated." How much happier. How much cleaner!

Candle-light vigil postponed...

...Awaiting the inauguration of President Palin. Then the pacifists and fake-Quakers will come out of the woodwork and start blubbering about how un-Christian it is to believe in anything enough to fight for it...

From an Instapundit reader... (Thanks to AOG)

Notice how there was no "antiwar" movement during the '90's, even though we were at war the entire time in Iraq, Haiti, Kosovo, a dab here and there in Afghanistan and Sudan. Then, after 9/11, it was the "Next Vietnam" with a passionate "antiwar" movement with the NYTs full treasonous participation, just like the good old days. And now, even though the daily death count has matched the highest daily rate we ever saw in Iraq, there is no "antiwar" movement or daily casualty count in all the newspapers. It's like the "antiwar" movement can be turned off and on like a switch, depending on which party is in the White House.

It's not war the pacifist dreads, it's when the President says that we are the good guys, undertaking a noble cause worth sacrificing for.

Good GOP commercial....

Just... letting you know...

Zelaya Computers had 'certified' results for referendum that was never held. (Thanks to Alan)

...Rick Moran
This has been all over the Honduran and Central American press for more than 24 hours but, as Alberto de la Cruz of Babalu Blog points out, no English speaking wire service or media has picked up on it yet.

Authorities seized several computers used by former president Zelaya that contained "official" results of the constitutional referendum that was never held showing his bid to change the law so that he could run for office again winning easily....

So, Mr Obama, you're planning to say you are sorry? Or are you looking into hiring Honduran computer consultants?

Go here, click on chart....

I caught a bit of Rush this morning. He mentioned this New York Post piece, DEMOCRATS HEALTH CARE PLAN FUNDING MAY TAX NEW YORK WEALTHY 57%. I'm sure you agree with all sensible people that the wealthy are parasites who should be relieved of the riches they have stolen from the little people, but, um, there IS the teensy little fact that NYC's economy is dependent, much more than most big cities, on........wealthy people. Get rid of them and the city dies.

...Congressional plans to fund a massive health-care overhaul could have a job-killing effect on New York, creating a tax rate of nearly 60 percent for the state's top earners and possibly pressuring small-business owners to shed workers.

New York's top income bracket could reach as high as 57 percent -- rates not seen in three decades -- to pay for the massive health coverage proposed by House Democrats this week....

The chart that accompanies this article makes things veddy clear. It's no wonder such a bill gets crafted behind closed doors, and that Dems are trying to rush it through.

Rush was also commenting on a poll that showed Sarah Palin with a 72% approval rating among Republicans. And on just how amazing that is, considering the year of non-stop trashing she has received from the media.

Not to mention attacks and sneers by what he called, charmingly, low-wattage looking-down-the-nose elitists on the Republican side.

"The logic of the Terror"

Ralph Hancock on Bastille Day...

...The disconcerting suggestion that arises from a comparative reflection on the theoretical cores of the two Revolutions is the idea of human rights that informs the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 cannot be altogether severed from the logic of the Terror. The potential for unlimited radicalization seems to exist from the moment the rights of man are extracted from a framework defined by the laws of nature and nature's God and made to stand on their own as assertions of human autonomy.

The germ of the Terror, the dream of the regeneration of humanity by political means, may already be present in the radically modern idea of sovereignty that informs the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. The political denial of an authoritative realm of meaning beyond politics appears barely separable from the absorption of all meaning into the political realm. Hobbes' radical materialism, which accompanies his rejection of the priority of natural law to human rights, invites Rousseau's idealism, or his craving for a comprehensive moral order not grounded in nature but created by human beings. If politics is all there is, then politics must be everything, it must hold the key to fulfilling not only the ordinary needs but even the deepest longings of humanity.

Those who propose to liberate human beings by reducing them to their naked individuality and destroying the bonds that connect them with principles understood to reside beyond human power risk arrogating to themselves the right to forge new and tighter chains. If there is no Truth above the People, then the People are led to create their own truth — in effect, of course, some revolutionary elite must create it in the name of the People, whatever the human cost. The violence of the Terror appears thus to spring from a theoretical violence to human nature...

Palin Derangement Syndrome goes on...

Jim Geraghty, on the absurd Vanity Fair hit piece on Sarah Palin: Why They Hate Her, The Angelina Jolie of Politics:

...Liberals believe their ideas, philosophy, worldview and policies liberate its believers and contend the conservative equivalents limit people. Liberals see themselves are rejecting outdated beliefs and obsolete ideas, overturning established orders and discarding traditions established by superstitious and ignorant forebears who weren't as enlightened as we are. Conservatives, in their minds, are runaway cultural super-egos, always wagging their fingers about individual responsibility, dismissing excuses, reminding people that they always can't do what they want because of the consequences to themselves and to others.

Conservatism, they suspect, will leave you in a marriage that doesn't satisfy you, burden you with children you don't want, repress your passions and trap you in a empty, boring and unfulfilled life, with no hand of government able to help....

...In her opponents' minds, Palin's made all the wrong choices, and cannot, they insist, be very bright. Yet she's happy and successful. She is an anomaly that invalidates their worldview, and for that, they attempt to immiserate her — regardless of whether she wishes to run for national office again....

"An anomaly that invalidates their worldview." That's for sure. And few things have validated my suspicions that most of what's happening in our world are battles over symbols more than the lefty reaction to Sarah Palin. The crazy thing was that Sarah has never been a "values conservative" in her practical political life. Her issues have always been good government and economic development, especially energy policy. She's never fought in the culture war, she's never mounted any attacks on liberalism or secularism!

But that didn't make any difference. Symbolically, she proclaims that the way to happiness and fulfilment is exactly the opposite of what liberal theory says it is.

"..Liberals believe their ideas, philosophy, worldview and policies liberate its believers..." That stuff is not "liberating," it's slavery.

A little quote for you...

Roger L. Simon:

All of a sudden... well, not quite all of a sudden, but recently...I have noticed my liberal friends (except for the most extreme and knee-jerk) are not very interested in discussing man-made global warming. The subject rarely comes up and, when it does, it is passed over quickly, given only a nod. It's as if that was last year's — or last decade's — fad, at the very moment the House of Representatives has been browbeaten by LaPelosita into voting for a cap-and-trade bill no known person has read, let alone understood....

It often happens that ideas are defended most furiously just before they collapse. My guess is that AGW is pretty close to the point where a loud noise can start the avalanche.

But what interests me, as always, is the larger question of whether people can or will re-think. My guess is that most leftish types will be able to flip effortlessly to supporting the Kyoto Global-Cooling Treaty, without a moment of self-doubt. They don't dare think or probe.

(Tangentially, I was bothered as a child when my Dad told me that if you throw a ball up, and then it falls down, there is a brief moment when it is stationary. I still find that hard to swallow. I think it's either going up, or going down.)

"Have their justice glands been removed in a complicated surgical procedure?"

This is kind of belaboring the obvious, but my little blog is the only means I have to express the vast disgust I feel about all our lefty "pacifists" and Quakers-so-called and all the other "activist" frauds...

And observations of this sort are why I'm totally NOT impressed by declarations that Obama has been doing exactly the right thing by not "meddling" in Iran, and how DARE you suggest he is not eager to see the Iranians gain freedom, you horrid neo-con! Piffle. He is doing exactly what most of the world's leftists are doing. Being not happy to see the little people rebelling against their elite masters.

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Where Are All the Demonstrators?:

...Ma'ariv (Monday, June 22, 09) by Ben Caspit and Ben-Dror Yemini (opinion) –

Tell us, where is everyone? Where did all the people who demonstrated against Israel's brutality in Operation Cast Lead, in the Second Lebanon War, in Operation Defensive Shield, or even in The Hague, when we were dragged there unwillingly after daring to build a separation barrier between us and the suicide bombers, disappear to? We see demonstrations here and there, but these are mainly Iranian exiles. Europe, in principle, is peaceful and calm. So is the United States.

Here and there a few dozens, here and there a few hundreds. Have they evaporated because it is Tehran and not here?

All the peace-loving and justice-loving Europeans, British professors in search of freedom and equality, the friends filling the newspapers, magazines and various academic journals with various demands for boycotting Israel, defaming Zionism and blaming us and it for all the ills and woes of the world—could it be that they have taken a long summer vacation? Now of all times, when the Basij hooligans have begun to slaughter innocent civilians in the city squares of Tehran? Aren't they connected to the Internet? Don't they have YouTube? Has a terrible virus struck down their computer? Have their justice glands been removed in a complicated surgical procedure (to be re-implanted successfully for the next confrontation in Gaza)? How can it be that when a Jew kills a Muslim, the entire world boils, and when extremist Islam slaughters its citizens, whose sole sin is the aspiration to freedom, the world is silent?

Imagine that this were not happening now in Tehran, but rather here. Let's say in Nablus. Spontaneous demonstrations of Palestinians turning into an ongoing bloodbath. Border Policemen armed with knives, on motorcycles, butchering demonstrators. A young woman downed by a sniper in midday, dying before the cameras. Actually, why imagine? We can just recall what happened with the child Mohammed a-Dura. How the affair (which was very harsh, admittedly) swept the world from one end to another. The fact that a later independent investigative report raised tough questions as to the identity of the weapon from which a-Dura was shot, did not make a difference to anyone. The Zionists were to blame, and that was that....

Doggie diplomacy...

Hoy. Funny, but kinda misses the point...

Another bit that came out of today's press conference was President Obama's refusal to rescind invitations to Iran's diplomats across the globe to July 4 celebrations at U.S. embassies — aptly described as "weenie diplomacy."

All of this, of course, raises a major issue: Are the hot dogs real, American-style hot dogs which are typically made with — pork!? If the embassies are serving all-beef hot dogs, are they Oscar Meyer or are they Hebrew National? Would an Iranian theocrat diplomat eat a Hebrew National hot dog?

Has the White House thought through this very important issue?...

We could be roasting babies in our various embassy gardens, and everybody would understand that that's what leaders need to do to appease the swining masses so they can get on with the real business of running the world.

[Link]

I think this is about right..

Andy McCarthy Understanding Obama on Iran:

...The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society. In this he is no different from his allies like the Congressional Black Caucus and Bill Ayers, who have shown themselves perfectly comfortable with Castro and Chàvez. Indeed, he is the product of a hard-Left tradition that apologized for Stalin and was more comfortable with the Soviets than the anti-Communists (and that, in Soros parlance, saw George Bush as a bigger terrorist than bin Laden).

Because of obvious divergences (inequality for women and non-Muslims, hatred of homosexuals) radical Islam and radical Leftism are commonly mistaken to be incompatible. In fact, they have much more in common than not, especially when it comes to suppression of freedom, intrusiveness in all aspects of life, notions of "social justice," and their economic programs. (On this, as in so many other things, Anthony Daniels should be required reading — see his incisive New English Review essay, "There Is No God but Politics", comparing Marx and Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb.) The divergences between radical Islam and radical Leftism are much overrated — "equal rights" and "social justice" are always more rally-cry propaganda than real goals for totalitarians, and hatred of certain groups is always a feature of their societies.

The key to understanding Obama, on Iran as on other matters, is that he is a power-politician of the hard Left : He is steeped in Leftist ideology, fueled in anger and resentment over what he chooses to see in America's history, but a "pragmatist" in the sense that where ideology and power collide (as they are apt to do when your ideology becomes less popular the more people understand it), Obama will always give ground on ideology (as little as circumstances allow) in order to maintain his grip on power....

Test case: Becoming liberal damages the cognitive functions...

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan:

Will The Neocons Never Learn? Here's Wehner:

How President Obama deals with this matter — whether he takes actions that show tangible support for the forces of liberation or whether he sits passively by as events unfold, nervous to offend cruel regimes — will tell us a lot about him and his core commitments.

Oh, yes, obviously Obama wants the uprising to fail. Jesus, these people are shameless....

That's not even remotely an argument. Just a sneer. Wehner's point is just common sense: what Obama does will tell us a lot about him. Well, duh! Sullivan twists this into a straw-man in a way that is pathetic.

And my memory is that Sullivan never argued poorly when he was a conservative. [link, link, link, link (on neo-cons)]

I've seen this before. Someone moves to the liberal side of the aisle, and becomes stupid. And slippery and imprecise. It is very interesting, or would be if one could study the phenomenon dispassionately, instead of wondering when the self-induced lobotomies will let enough water into the Titanic called Western Civilization to send her to the bottom...

How we miss W.

Jennifer Rubin: Don't Iranians Deserve "Hope and Change" Too?:

The Iranian election has given the world a jolt of reality. For those confused about the nature of the Iranian regime, its true colors are now revealed. But it has also been a clarifying event in America.

It has been obvious for some time that the American Left has given up on democracy and human rights as fundamental tenets of American foreign policy. But never before has it been so clear just how ruthless and indifferent they are to the aspirations of those who would be crushed by the boot of despotic regimes. And never before have we seen how Herculean a task it is to deny and obfuscate the nature of these sorts of regimes in order to pursue a policy devoted to stability, engagement, and process as goals in and of themselves (rather than as means to some greater ends).

The Iranian election and its aftermath demonstrate just how vast is the difference in approach between the Obama administration, which has embodied the Left's total embrace of realpolitik, and its conservative critics....

"Realpolitic." "Realism." "stability, engagement, and process as goals in and of themselves." I spit upon such leftist depravities with the utmost contempt.

Hello? "Democrats?"

Any Dems reading this?

Right this moment hundreds of thousands of people are battling a brutal terror-supporting regime. They are fighting and dying in Iran for freedom and democracy.

And your fearless leaders have said nothing. Fake-liberal Mr Obama has said nothing. Fake-liberal Hillary has said nothing. They have given them not the slightest shred of encouragement or moral support.

How can you live with this? How can you look at yourselves in the mirror in the morning?

How can you all be such worms?

Update: In fairness, lots of liberals really are liberal, and their hearts are in the right place right now. Especially, kudos to Andrew Sullivan, who I normally loath, for covering Iran non-stop...

Worth reading:

Dr. Sanity: The Left Legitimizes Anti-Semitism Every Day:

Anthony Watts: Suggestions of "strong negative cloud feedbacks" in a warmer climate

Edgelings.com---The Obama Surprise:

...Be careful what you wish for. No segment of American industry did more than high tech to elect Barack Obama as President of the United States....

...The first surprise to many Valleyites is how innately anti-entrepreneurial the new Administration has turned out to be....

All those who harshly criticized Bush for issuing "signing statements..."

You are, are you not, going to criticize Obama now that he's doing the same thing?

Hmmm? I'm waiting..........

(And Clinton too, of course. Somehow people never got around to that one.)

"Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader."

From a don't-miss piece by Jonah Goldberg, You want a more 'progressive' America? Careful what you wish for: (Thanks to Rand)

....Wilson, like the bulk of progressive intellectuals in fin-de-siécle America, was deeply influenced by three strands of thought: philosophical Pragmatism, Hegelianism, and Darwinism. This heady intellectual cocktail produced a drunken arrogance and the conviction that the old rules no longer applied.

The classical liberalism of the Founders — free markets, individualism, property rights, etc. — had been eclipsed by a new "experimental" age. Horace Kallen, a protégé of Pragmatism exponent William James, denounced fixed philosophical dogmas as mere rationalizations of the status quo. Sounding much like today's critical theorists, Mr. Kallen lamented that "Men have invented philosophy precisely because they find change, chance, and process too much for them, and desire infallible security and certainty."

The old conception of absolute truths and immutable laws had been replaced by a "Darwinian" vision of organic change.

Hence Wilson argued that the old "Newtonian" vision — fixed rules enshrined in the Constitution and laws — had to give way to the "Darwinian" view of "living constitutions" and the like.

"Government," Wilson wrote approvingly in his magnum opus, "The State," "does now whatever experience permits or the times demand." "No doubt," he wrote elsewhere, taking dead aim at the Declaration of Independence, "a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle."

In his 1890 essay, "Leaders of Men," Wilson explained that a "true leader" uses the masses like "tools." He must inflame their passions with little heed for the facts. "Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader."

Wilson once told a black delegation, that "segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen." But his racism wasn't just a product of his Southern roots; it was often of a piece with the reigning progressive obsession with eugenics, the pseudoscience that strove to perfect society through better breeding.....

You can slot-in to the above Lenin or Hillary or Hitler or Obama or Alinsky. Or any random sociology prof at your local community college...

What is the intellectual problem with this statement: "The old conception of absolute truths and immutable laws had been replaced by a "Darwinian" vision of organic change..."   What's wrong is that there isn't any "solid ground." No truth that can be used to measure or define anything else.

A "Pragmatist" would say that "what works" is the measure, but there is in his philosophy no absolute standard of "what works." "What works" means whatever you want it to mean. If Wilson had had the power, he probably would have done to inferior races exactly what Hitler did. (He did have the power to introduce Jim Crow laws into the District of Columbia, and proceeded to do so.) And if you accept his philosophy, he would have been perfectly justified in a Final Solution to the negro problem. Eugenics seemed to be "what works" at that moment in time, and Progressives had abandoned any absolute standard that Eugenics might be measured against.

Once you abandon the Truths handed down from our ancestors, then the only "truth" is the intellectual fashion of the moment. Now, kind hearted reader, you may imagine that today's progressives are "nice" people who would not do the horrid things done by Twentieth Century tyrants. Yes? You may believe they would never kill millions of people for the sake of an idea, right? Kill for an intellectual fad? No no no. Impossible.

Well, if you think that, you are wrong. Millions are dying at this moment because a "Progressive" intellectual fad was imposed on hapless people. Read about it in my post here. If you are a leftist, read. Think!

"Equidistant Position"

David Frum is very good Obama's speech... (Thanks to Hugh Hewitt.)

...The president's Cairo speech: worse than feared. Let's itemize the ways.

President Obama likes to position himself as an intermediary, explaining two conflicting parties each to the other. He did so in his race speech in Philadelphia, he did so when he spoke about abortion at Notre Dame

In Cairo, he took a similar position between the United States and the Islamic world. He urged Americans to take a positive view of Islam, and urged Muslims to take a positive view of the United States.

But whereas in Philadelphia and Notre Dame Obama was explaining two groups of Americans to each other, in Cairo he exhibited the amazing spectacle of an American president taking an equidistant position between the country he leads and its detractors and enemies. It is as if he saw himself as a judge in some legal dispute, People of the Islamic World v. United States. But the job to which he was elected was not that of impartial judge, but that of leader and champion of the American nation...

There's plenty more worth reading.

Of course that "equidistant position" is exactly how leftists like Obama talk. I hear it here in San Francisco. "Americans are... militaristic/racist/crude/Walmart/greedy...whatever" Said as if the speaker is not part of that horrid crowd.

Once the poison is in the system...

Wall Street Journal: Islamists Lose Ground in the Middle East:

...The results of Kuwait's elections last month -- in which Islamists were rebuffed and four women were elected to parliament -- will likely reinvigorate the movement for greater democracy in the region that has stalled since the hopeful "Arab spring" of 2005...

Well, it didn't just "stall." When our "Democrats" undermined their own country in war-time, they were also undermining all the good things that were flowing from our efforts.

...It also puts pressure on the Obama administration to end its deafening silence on democracy promotion....

Yeah, like they care...

...Although ruled by a hereditary monarch, Kuwait is the most democratic of the Arab countries. The press is relatively free, parliament has real power, and politicians are chosen in legitimate elections. However, Kuwait is a part of the Persian Gulf, where the subordination of women is traditionally most severe. Historically, Kuwait's political process was for males only. But in 2005 parliament yielded to female activists and approved a bill giving women the right to vote and hold office.

In 2006 and 2008, several women ran for parliament, though none won. The women that captured four of the 50 seats last month weren't aided by quotas; they won on their own merits. Their success will undoubtedly inspire a new wave of women's activism in nearby countries.

So, "feminist" organizations and leaders. You're going to support this, right? Ha ha.

...Almost as significant as the women's gains were the Islamist losses. The archconservative Salafist Movement's campaign for a boycott of female candidates obviously fell flat, and the number of seats held by Sunni Islamists fell sharply.

Thus continues a string of defeats for Islamists over the last year and a half from west to east...

President George W. Bush knew exactly what he was doing when he injected his democracy juice right into the arteries of Islamic despotism. And our "Democrats" and "pacifists" and "feminists" and all the other fake-leftists knew exactly what they were doing when they fought him every inch of the way. Their aim is tyranny.

(I have no good reason to put this picture in, save to remind us of happier times, and perhaps irritate some prune-faced fake-liberals...)

John Ashcroft we hardly knew ye....

Dafydd: The Double-Standard Gauntlet Is Thrown:

...So far as I've heard, every single pro-life organization and a great many pro-life individuals denounced and condemned this murder as despicable, cowardly, and a violation of the entire thrust of the pro-life community. And they did so the very day it happened, Sunday, May 31st, 2009.

But I have yet to hear or read a single radical leftist anti-war organization, politician, or blogger condemning the assassination of Private William Long, United States Army, and the attempted assassination of Private Quinton Ezeagwula, United States Army. As of the timestamp of this post, not a word on the website of International ANSWER; nary a peep from the chicks at Code Pink....

'cause they're on the other side...

U kan take it from de Tocqueville...

Charlene recommends this video by Andrew Klavan, aimed at kids graduating from college: Why Are Conservatives So Mean?

I can't embed it like a YouTube, but it's really good, and fun. Please take a look...

If three nice people are in love...

...Who could object to their marriage? ...except those insufferable theocrats...

Mr. and Mrs. and Mrs...or Whatever, by Chuck Colson:

...Earlier this month, Maine became the fifth state—and the fourth in New England—to legalize same-sex "marriage". Five thousand miles away in Hawaii, Sasha and Janet Lessin are hoping to build on New England's example.

If they are successful, no one can seriously claim to be surprised.

Writer Abby Ellin described how the Lessins gathered with friends and held what was dubbed a "commitment ceremony." The "commitment" being celebrated wasn't a renewal of their marriage vows—it was the incorporation of a third party, "Shivaya," into their so-called "triad."...

Triads. How could we possibly deny them their "constitutional rights?" It's like the Civil Rights Movement, right? We can't turn certain people into second class citizens, can we? We can't go back to the days of 'back-alley triads," can we?

Of course we won't get an honest debate about whatever the next innovation might be. Leftists and libertarians will ignore the possibility, and scoff at anyone who brings up the subject, until the moment when it becomes a fad, at which point they will consider it a fait accompli, and pretend that conservatives are unreasonably blocking what is "obviously" right and just.

And they will say that anyone who objects has "moved to the right!"

Another thought for Memorial Day...

Alan Sullivan:

At 3 PM, President Obama was playing golf very privately at Fort Belvoir, outside of Washington. So much for his ballyhooed "moment of national unity." That is for the God and guns crowd.

I want to dedicate this Memorial Day not only to those who have died in past conflicts, but to those who are going to die because the nation elected this supremely fatuous man to its highest office.

Well, it is probably true.

Think of how many have died because of the fatuousness and weakness of Jimmy Carter. Imagine if he had not ignored a year of warnings about the possibility of a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? Imagine if he had taken a strong stand in the Iranian hostage crisis? (We now know that the hostage-takers only planned to hold our people for a few days. It was purely Carter's criminal weakness that ended up pinning a "kick me" sign on the USA.) Carter deserves to be called one of history's great mass-murderers.

What I loath most of all is Carter's claiming to be a "Christian," (personally I think he's no Christian at all) with "Christian" meaning being weak in the face of evil, and letting monsters kill and enslave millions of people. Not real people, you understand, just niggers in countries nobody's ever heard of, like Afgnanistan. What could go wrong? (To our "liberals" and "pacifists" the world is similar to that famous New Yorker cover, with a huge Manhattan, and everything else small and obscure.)

...Calvin, too, looks at the soldier as an agent of God's love. As he argues: "Paul meant to refer the precept of respecting power of magistrates to the law of love." The soldier is thus as much an agent of God's love as he is of God's wrath, for the two characteristics are harmonious in God. Calvin argues in this way because he holds that to soldier justly—to restrain evil out of love for neighbor—is a God-like act. It is God-like because God restrains evil out of love for His creatures. None of this is to say that we fully imitate God or Christ when we use force justly, for the just soldier's acts can never be redemptive acts—acts that have a saving quality for those who are targets of the acts of force (except, of course, in the sense that the just soldier "saves" the unjust neighbor from more unjust acts). Yet the just soldier who cultivates the military virtues in such a way as to harness and direct them toward his final end—beatitude with God—may nevertheless be said to be one who, as the Reformers liked to say, follows Christ at a distance.

How can we follow Christ—even at a distance—while fighting and killing? Calvin gives us an indication by pointing out that Christ's pacific nature (his willingness to suffer violence at the hands of Jewish and Roman authorities) is grounded in the priestly office of reconciliation and intercession that is reserved for him alone. Christ's pacific nature is thus inextricably tied to his role as redeemer and cannot be intended as a model for Christian behavior. No Christian can or should try to act as a redeemer, but all can and should follow Christ in obeying the commands of the Father. And the Father commands the just use of force...

I notice that Cole has a book on this subject. I plan to read it soon...

I notice Glenn Reynolds writes:

"Is Obama Another Jimmy Carter?" Actually, I'm beginning to think that's a best-case situation.

Update: The SF Public Library is part of a system called LinkPlus, that gives us access to the books of scores of libraries in this region. It is really rare that I can't find a book I want in one of them. But none of them have a copy of Cole's book: When God Says War Is Right. Gee, I wonder why that might be?

I just ordered a copy from amazon.com for $9. I thought immediately of how Milton Friedman wrote about how most of the segregation and racism of the old South was instituted by government, and how the marketplace tended to color-blind!

Update: Keep in mind that it's the publisher who gets to chose a title for the book. I'd guess that the in-your-face title was not Mr Cole's idea.

Of course they won't apologize--he's "the neocon's neocon"...

William A. Jacobson: Will The Left Apologize To Bolton?:

Will The Left Apologize To Bolton? On May 20, 2009, John Bolton wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal titled "Get Ready for Another North Korean Nuke Test" in which he noted that the complacency of the Obama administration about North Korea's nuclear ambitions (and Iran's) was misplaced:

"The curtain is about to rise again on the long-running nuclear tragicomedy, "North Korea Outwits the United States." Despite Kim Jong Il's explicit threats of another nuclear test, U.S. Special Envoy Stephen Bosworth said last week that the Obama administration is "relatively relaxed" and that "there is not a sense of crisis." They're certainly smiling in Pyongyang."

As usual, the Left lashed out at Bolton, who may be third after George Bush and Dick Cheney in being portrayed as crazy and paranoid. Bolton has been derided as "the neocon's neocon" who "laps up the hosannas of fellow knuckle-draggers." ...

Me, I'm proud to be a knuckle-dragger.

Apologize to Bolton? Well, wake us up when that happens. The animals won't, you may feel confident, even apologize to the human race after NK nukes Japan, or Iran nukes Israel.

Reasoning with "liberal Jews" is probably a waste of time...

...But the thought of my Jewish friends still holding warm fuzzy thoughts for the "international community" (and of course opposing the horrid cowboy "unilateralism" of President Bush) ... and maybe donating money to UNESCO... and praising the United Nations? Ugh. How sick and suicidal can people be? How STUPID, to make the same STUPID mistakes decade after decade?

Bernard-Henri Lévy: UNESCO: The Shame of a Disaster Foretold:

...Who declared in April 2001: "Israel has never contributed to Civilization in any era, for it has only ever appropriated the contributions of others" -- and added almost two months later: "the Israeli culture is an inhumane culture; it is an aggressive, racist, pretentious culture based on one simple principle: steal what does not belong to in order to then claim its appropriation"?

Who explained in 1997, and has repeated it since in every way possible, that he was the "archenemy" of all attempts to normalize his country's relations with Israel?

Or who, as recently as 2008, responded to a deputy of the Egyptian parliament who was alarmed that Israeli books could be introduced into the Alexandria Library: "Burn these books; if there are any there, I will myself burn them in front of you"?

Who said in 2001 in the newspaper Ruz-al-Yusuf that Israel was "aided" in its dark intrigues by "the infiltration of Jews into the international media" and by their diabolical ability to "spread lies"?...

Who? Why, an honored leader of the "international community," of course...

It take self-induced stupidity for smart people to continue to act stupidly and not see reality right in front of them. And to persist in delusion for lifetimes...

"The state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood..."

Mark Steyn, writing in Imprimis. And saying the same sort of things I say. But of course saying them far better, so I'm glad he's copying me...

...My book America Alone is often assumed to be about radical Islam, firebreathing imams, the excitable young men jumping up and down in the street doing the old "Death to the Great Satan" dance. It's not. It's about us. It's about a possibly terminal manifestation of an old civilizational temptation: Indolence, as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a republic. When I ran into trouble with the so-called "human rights" commissions up in Canada, it seemed bizarre to find the progressive left making common cause with radical Islam. One half of the alliance profess to be pro-gay, pro-feminist secularists; the other half are homophobic, misogynist theocrats. Even as the cheap bus 'n' truck road-tour version of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, it made no sense. But in fact what they have in common overrides their superficially more obvious incompatibilities: Both the secular Big Government progressives and political Islam recoil from the concept of the citizen, of the free individual entrusted to operate within his own societal space, assume his responsibilities, and exploit his potential.

In most of the developed world, the state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood—health care, child care, care of the elderly—to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct. Hillary Rodham Clinton said it takes a village to raise a child. It's supposedly an African proverb—there is no record of anyone in Africa ever using this proverb, but let that pass. P.J. O'Rourke summed up that book superbly: It takes a village to raise a child. The government is the village, and you're the child. Oh, and by the way, even if it did take a village to raise a child, I wouldn't want it to be an African village. If you fly over West Africa at night, the lights form one giant coastal megalopolis: Not even Africans regard the African village as a useful societal model. But nor is the European village. Europe's addiction to big government, unaffordable entitlements, cradle-to-grave welfare, and a dependence on mass immigration needed to sustain it has become an existential threat to some of the oldest nation-states in the world.

And now the last holdout, the United States, is embarking on the same grim path...

The Insanity Only Grows #12,963...

Imagine a long-ago (say in the 1960's) conservative who declares that this new thing called "affirmative action" is wicked folly. Of course he's a racist! A bigot! He hates blacks, right?

And suppose he says that "affirmative action" is a bad idea because once it starts, it will just grow like a cancer, metastasizing into every crevice of life, putting more and more decisions into the hands of bureaucrats who will pick and choose life's winners according to the leftist fashion of the moment. Obviously he's CRAZY, right? That couldn't possibly happen, right? There's no such thing as a "slippery slope," right?

Trolley Driver May Get Hit With Charges - ABC News

...The office of Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley made the statement a day after ABCNews.com revealed that Aiden Quinn was hired in 2007 from a lottery that consisted of minority candidates. Quinn's status at that time was female-to-male transgender, and sources told ABC News that status was what qualified him as a minority....

What I find more important is, that if that 1960's conservative had told a liberal friend that someday people would be selected for "preferred minority" status because they were having sex-change operations, the liberal would not only have thought that that was impossible, he would have considered the impossibility as a rock-like certainty that he could have confidence in!

That is, if you told him that his liberal pilgrimage was taking him into a realm where there was no certainty, where every idea or belief could morph and shift, where nothing is dependable... He would not believe it. He would assume that some things will never change.

And what makes me want to scream is that if you encountered that same liberal today, he will still not THINK. Even though heaps of things he once considered settled and trustworthy have been swept away like sand-castles by the tide, he still believes that whatever exists at the moment is secure. He does not DARE to think.

It's like pointing out to a liberal that the same arguments he accepts now for "gay marriage," would (and will) work just as well to "justify" man-boy marriage or human-animal marriage or group marriage. He won't give you any clear answer, won't even take the point. He assumes that won't happen, that "they" won't let it happen. And when the next outrage comes along, he will just drift like jellyfish with the current, and accept the new thing: "You're a bigot to say my daughter shouldn't be able to marry the pony she loves. You are denying her EQUALITY! It's her constitutional right!"

OR, maybe the liberal will "draw the line" at that point, and say no. On what grounds, you might ask? Why, traditional morality of course!

"Bake sales against genocide"

Michael, re Obama's view of the Holocaust:

Those numbers can be our future, our fellow citizens of the world showing us how to make the journey from oppression to survival, from witness to resistance and ultimately to reconciliation. That is what we mean when we say "never again."

I take your point that "it may be what he means by 'never again,' but most everybody else means 'we're going to act to throttle the next would-be Hitler.'" But I'm not sure everybody else does mean that, not anymore.

The French thinker (if you'll pardon the expression) Alain Finkielkraut says that "Never again" to a European means "Never again power politics. Never again nationalism. Never again Auschwitz" — which sounds like a slightly different order of priorities from yours. And over the decades the revulsion against any kind of "power politics" has come to trump whatever revulsion post-Auschwitz Europe might feel about mass murder. That's why in the early Nineties the EU let hundreds of thousands die on its borders in the Balkans rather than act to prevent it. Indeed, they "acted" only to prevent the Americans coming in and doing something about it, because they found it easier to tolerate the murder of their fellow Europeans than the idea of American military action to stop it.

It's interesting how easily the Obama definition of "Never again" fits that kind of passivity. Two of the three "causes for hope" the president cites — Rwanda, Sudan — are textbook "Never again" scenarios that roll around again and again and again. In fact, Darfur is still ongoing, so to congratulate yourself merely because some American high-schoolers have formed "Save Darfur" chapters looks at best like moral preening and at worst like the kind of feeble passivity that enabled the Holocaust first time round. It's grand to be a member of the Grade Ten "Save Darfur" campaign, not so good to be back in Darfur wondering when the actual saving's going to start. If "Never again" now means "Bake sales against genocide," we're all doomed.

"Bake sales against genocide." Mr Steyn hits on the right phrase as usual.

How I despise liberals who talk abut Hitler in self-congratulatory terms, as a great liberal victory. Them liberals are long gone. Just imagine the situation of, say, 1936 were to exist today, and President George W Bush was urging Americans to go to war and stop this menace while it could still be done with relatively small loss of life! Do you have any doubt that our 'liberals" and fake-pacifists would happily let the Jews fry?

Government health care. Disaster. So, why do it?

Mark Steyn, on the Hugh Hewitt show... (emphasis added)

...HH: Everywhere you try it, you just mentioned Bulgaria, Great Britain and Canada, it is a disaster. Why do they want to do it?

MS: Well, what is does is, if you're a Democrat, what it does is it changes the relationship between the citizen and the state. It alters the equation. If you provide government health care, then suddenly all the elections, they're not thought about war and foreign policy, or even big economic questions. They're suddenly fought about government services, and the level of government services, and that's all they're about, because once you get government health care, the citizens' dependency on government as provider is so fundamentally changed that in effect, every election is fought on left wing terms. And for the Democratic Party, that is a huge, transformative advantage.

HH: Oh, that's very interesting. Now in Canada, though, don't people get mad at their quality of health care? Don't they throw the bums out and perhaps urge a return to American style medicine?

MS: No, because the strange thing is that when people, even when people have really bad experiences, you see this in the British press all the time whenever they have one of these horror stories about someone who goes in because they've got a bad case of, they've got a case of pneumonia, and they wake up and find their left leg's been amputated because the wrong memo went around. All those horror stories are always followed two days later by someone writing a fawningly, groveling letter about having received mediocre, third world care, but being eternally grateful for it. It really does, government health care is really the ditch you want to fight in, because once you surrender that, I think it's very difficult to have genuine self-reliant citizenry every again. It really fundamentally changes the equation.

HH: Then where's the AMA?  Where is business? Why hasn't this battle been joined even as the ink is getting very dry on the big Obama rewrite of American medicine?

MS: Well, because I think most of the spokesmen for the conservative argument in Washington do not make the case. And they don't understand that once you've got a government system, it becomes like any other government program. On Friday, you have to pay the doctor, you have to pay the nurse, you have to pay the janitor. So your only way of controlling the cost is to restrict access to the patient, to the customer. And that's why once you've got a government health care system, everything is about waiting lists and waiting time. It's about waiting two years for a hip operation. It's about waiting 9 months for an MRI. It's about waiting, waiting, waiting....

Some other thoughts by Alan Sullivan here.

"Small "t" torture"...

TigerHawk:

...Jon Stewart had to call Truman a war criminal over Hiroshima-Nagasaki, else he'd have lost the debate. QED.

A similar tactic from the left is to force debate over whether waterboarding is or isn't torture. If you admit it is, then waterboarding gets lumped in with far worse tortures -- you lose the debate. But by saying it isn't, you look disingenuous or worse.

I'm convinced waterboarding keeps coming up, because the left enjoys playing this rhetorical game. Waterboarding is a small sideshow in the scheme of things -- it's small "t" torture, didn't happen a lot, and many of us would wish far worse things upon guys like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Obama has dredged it up to make himself look good -- especially with his base -- and as a distraction from more momentous things that are going on.

Exactly. It's a rhetorical game, defining "torture." We always lose.

But more important is not to let the real context of the debate be denied. The US ended torture and cruelty in Iraq and Afghanistan that were millions of times worse than anything we've even been accused of. But this "debate" is one the Left has moved onto it's own ground, where nothing happens unless the US (or Israel) is present. A world where only the US is real. We should not let Lefty psycho-dramas set the terms of debate.

Yer toast, Jews...

Roger L. Simon:

...Did Rahm Emanuel just put the screws to his own people? Quite possibly, although all we have at present is a second hand report of what he told 300 big donors to AIPAC in a private meeting. According to the Jerusalem Post: Thwarting Iran's nuclear program is conditional on progress in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. [bold mine]

Great, Rahm. What a guy you are for spelling this out. But before you do anything, would you please explain the word "progress"? When last we saw serious negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians (Bill Clinton and then Taba), the Palestinians, led by Arafat, walked out and began Intifada II. Would you have blamed Israel for that lack of "progress" and allowed Iran to get the bomb? Could it just be that the Palestinians (Hamas and Fatah) don't really want a two-state solution? Has the occurred to you after all this time? What if that turns out to be true? Think about that, Rahm. This isn't a Hollywood negotiation that your brother might conduct between Warner Brothers and Universal. People die here, big time. As Ayatollah Rafsanjani has told us, the Iranians don't fear a nuclear war with Israel because there are hundreds of more millions of Muslims than there are Jews.

One last question, Rahm. How do you sleep?...

Israel better look to itself. The White House is running on the Jeremiah Wright worldview, and Jews are definitely expendable. Israel should pull out all the stops to bolster its alliances with the other friends of America that Obam is now abandoning in favor of tyrants. You know, horrid oppressor countries like India and Turkey and Indonesia and Japan. And she should take out Iran's nukes NOW.

And still American Jews will support Obama. It's part of their religion, which is liberalism. Suicidal liberalism. And if Tel Aviv gets turned to green glass, it will be a "tragedy," and they will STILL vote Democrat. And if they or their loved ones get their heads sawed off with rusty knives, they will STILL not vote for Republicans--why, of course not, that would be tacky!

And the whole business of linking Middle East peace to "progress" in "peace negotiations" between Israel and the Palestinians has always been an utter fraud and sham. It's just an excuse to do nothing, since there will never be peace with a sick death-cult that wants to destroy all the Jews. It's an excuse to leave tyrants in power in the interests of "peace." The peace of death for all the victims of tyranny and anti-Semitism.

"Infusions of legitimacy"

... Americans who are apt to argue that U.S. foreign policy needs constant infusions of legitimacy from the approbation of European governments are also apt to deplore, in the domestic culture wars, Eurocentrism in academic curricula. Such Americans resist the cultural products of Europe's centuries of vitality, but defer to the politics of Europe in its decadence.

Why? Perhaps because yesterday's European culture helped make America what it is, and today's European politics expresses resentment and distrust of what America is. Both sensibilities arise from the distaste of some Americans for America...

    -- George Will

We are what government says we are...

William C. Duncan - The Corner on National Review Online:

The New Hampshire Senate has just voted 13-11 in favor of a bill that would redefine marriage in the state. This was an amended version of a same-sex marriage bill already approved by the House, so it must now go back to the House for approval before going to the governor. The "concessions" in the Senate version distinguish civil and religious marriages (was that a question?) and allow married couples to choose to be designated as "bride," "groom," or "spouse." One senator is quoted as saying this generosity is "respectful to both sides of the debate" although bill opponents might be forgiven for sensing a patronizing note in this.

One of the many aspects of "gay marriage" that no one seems to care about is that it is a huge expansion of government power. Government never had this power in the past; it has always merely adumbrated the common traditional ideas. One would think that "libertarians" would be concerned, but I haven't seen it.

If I might adapt a common phrase, "The power to define is the power to destroy." Allowing the state to define marriage—and thus implicitely to define almost any personal matter—is a far greater step towards tyranny than the nationalizing of banks or auto companies. Why? Because those economic experiments will probably be given up in the future when their failure becomes evident. But we can never go back to the original state of things where no one even imagined the state could change what marriage or families or personal relationships should be. Or what "grooms" or "spouses" are.

Even to politically fight against gay marriage is to implicitly agree that we are what government says we are.

I don't expect leftists to be able to think clearly, but the acquiescent stupidity of "libertarians" just stupefies me. The same people who—rightly—decry government intervention in the marketplace, and point out that this will inevitably tend to grow and become oppressive, sit supinely while government decides what a family is. And they imagine that this is making them more free.

Equally stupid is the common assumption that of course no one will go any farther in defining stuff. This is the end of the project! This is the only change that will be made! Fools. (One might ponder this: Toppling the last taboo: Is incest merely a relic of a decrepit moral system?) Well, I'm telling you now, they will be back for another redefinition of marriage soon enough. Don't come bleating to me like sheep saying, "I didn't expect this to happen!"

Update: Underlying the disastrous idea of government defining us is the deeper folly of thinking we can define ourselves. That seems like freedom on the face of it, but the problem is that we then define ourselves according to the common ideas of the moment. We subject ourselves to the tyranny of the crowd. There is no objective standard, no baseline, and so we are soon trapped in a labyrinth of fun-house mirrors. The distorted image becomes the definition of what is "real," and then the next mirror distorts reality in another direction, and that becomes what's "real," and then another...

Then I tear my hair out saying, "Can't you SEE that you've become Gumby! (And people look at me like I'm some kind of nut.)

Something to save for next year...

I'm late with this, but it might be worth a look. Pretty funny. (And pretty mendacious, since I doubt any of these people have apologized, and most of them are still spouting any BS that helps the Left, science be damned. Notice the last "prediction.") Earth Day predictions of 1970: (Thanks to Alan. 1970 was the first "Earth Day")

"We have about five more years at the outside to do something."
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist

"Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind."
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist

"We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation."
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

"Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction."
• New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

"Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years."
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

"By...[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s."
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

"It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,"
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

"Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine."
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

"Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half…."
• Life Magazine, January 1970

"At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable."
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

"Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone."
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

"We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones."
• Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

"By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’"
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

"Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct."
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson

"The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age."
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Yet another comment on a comment....

I started to comment on a comment by my friend Dave T, at this post, but it grew longer and longer, and I decided to make it a stand-alone post because I don't want to waste electrons on Earth Day:

What Dave's given here won't lead to an honest debate [on so-called torture]. There is something askew, something missing.

Think about the recent Israeli incursion into Gaza. Put aside the question of who was right or wrong, and think about the fact that the whole Western world was riveted by the conflict. Why? It was tiny on a global scale, yet it was treated like the biggest of things. Treated as a much bigger deal than, say, the death of a million people in Rawanda. Why? The Middle East has multitudes of oppressions and attacks, but no one cares if Turks kill a bunch of Kurds, or Iranians oppress the Ghashghai. Why is Israel important? It is weird, yet everyone takes it for granted.

I won't keep you in suspense. The reason is that there are only two countries that are real to the average Western Leftist. The USA, and Israel. To most liberals, this planet is like some vast dark warehouse where the only lights are America and Israel. All the other places are only seen if one of us two comes near. Only exist at that moment.

I could cite hundreds of examples, but I'll just give you two. (Extrapolate! You can do it.)

Example: The French are much rougher on terror suspects than we are. Gitmo is a playpen compared to their jails, but no one cares. (This is not just a matter of us Americans giving priority to our own supposed sins; European Lefties obsess over Guantanamo just as much as we do.) Also the French have made numerous military incursions into Africa in the post-colonial period, but no one asks them to obey "international law," or ask permission of the UN. Why? Why do no "pacifists" protest? No one pays the least attention. The US is real, from a Left perspective, and France is not. Why?

Example: In 1992 30,000 Palestinians were kicked out of their homes and sent into exile. Quick, how many of you reading this can name the country that did the deed? Hmmm? And for bonus points, describe the protests that convulsed the globe as liberals and "pacifists" took to the streets demanding justice, and calling on the UN to take action. Well, you can't describe the protests because there weren't any. All those Libs who say they "care" about the Palestinians? They are liars.

Yet....not exactly liars. To them there is no lie, because only Israel is real. Nothing happened to the Palestinians in 1992 because they were not hurt by Israel. Kuwait does not exist to them! It's not real!

We see this stuff all the time, but we don't notice it. I feel like that obnoxious kid pointing out that the Emperor is naked.

Look at the quote by "IOZ" that Dave posted. It is, to put it bluntly, delusional. Crazy. It paints a world where nothing moves except the United States. No one else acts, or speaks, or has any effect on anything. The entire rest of the human race is just a deer in the headlights.

And Dave's own comments assume that the US is the only moral actor that can be considered. The only one that exists. I've followed Dave's writing for many a year, and he has never subjected other countries to intense moral scrutiny. Oh wait, I'm wrong! Actually, it did happen, just once. The country was......Israel! He once heaped harsh moral censure on Israel for striking back against a terror bomber by bulldozing a house. SO, get this, terrorists turn women and children into shredded meat, Israel responds without killing or injuring any person....and who does our supposed pacifist condemn? I've been shaking my head at the sheer craziness of that one for years.

Trying to reason with such a worldview is a waste of time. It's like telling a paranoiac that nobody's trying to get them. The simple fact is that America, which would really like to stay home and enjoy the good life, has been forced into the position of being the decent cop in a rough neighborhood. Of course we slap some wise-guys around, but it's necessary if hoodlums are to be kept from taking over and making things a million times worse.

We water-boarded a few people (and do so routinely to our own troops such as Navy SEALS in training) in the course of fighting against people who interrogate using electric drills to drill into people's heads and knees. That's the context that somehow goes missing when you try to debate with leftists. If poor brown-skinned fellows get tortured or massacred in distant corners of the globe, they don't care. They posture all the time about how "caring" they are, but they. DO. NOT. CARE. It's not even real to them. Therefore what America is doing in the WoT is not real.

Actually they don't even care about the real living breathing America or Israel! These are only important to them as symbols. Remember your college psych class? Symbols, right? Important, psychologically. And spiritually. (Actually in the Catholic worldview symbols can actually "come alive" and be real! Awesome life-changing stuff, but that's for another day.)

So what's going on, symbolically speaking? Well, you have to understand first that liberals are not liberals any more. (Sorry if you've heard this already.) Once upon a time liberalism was a philosophy that people believed in, would fight for. (Imagine Harry Truman or JFK being asked if it's morally right to fight to topple a fascist dictator, and bring democracy to oppressed people! They would have laughed to think one would even need to ask such a question.) Liberalism was a sort of religion, in the sense that it was bigger than the individual.

But that belief has drained away, and left nothing inside. Nothing but self-worship. Nihilism. NOTHING. Now people like IOZ or Dave are wearing liberalism as a kind of disguise.

But if you put yourself in the center, if you make yourself god, then you will hate and fear rival gods. Countries of course are not normally anything like gods. BUT, there are two countries (guess which) on this planet that are something analogous to gods, in the sense that they are really ideas, ideas that demand our service and belief. They are the only two countries you can easily join by accepting their idea. If you dig it, if you "get" the constitution and the Declaration and the Federalist Papers and similar things, then you are an American. Even if you never set foot on US flag territory! (And here's an interesting piece on becoming an Israeli.)

But the nihilist hates and fears belief. He is always against God (sometimes cloaking this in a religious disguise) because being a Christian or a Jew means being a "servant of the Word," or "bearing the yoke of Torah." If you worship yourself you can't be no servant! And on a much lower, but analogous, plane, being an American or an Israeli means being the servant of an idea. It means putting yourself second.

When Leftists rant interminably about the sins of Israel and America, (ignoring everything else in the world) what they are really saying is, "Don't you dare make a claim on me! Don't you dare suggest that anything could be more important than ME! I'm never going to be a servant!" They scrabble endlessly to find excuses to avoid duty, hence the way they savor any mistakes made by... you know who.

This is, I more and more suspect, a very unhappy state of existence. But the empty soul doesn't realize he's unhappy. Why? Because he's like that paranoid, who also doesn't think he's unhappy. He thinks everything would be FINE if only those people weren't trying to kill him! WE know that he's unhappy. He's obviously deeply unhappy. But he can't see it himself.

And the biggest pity is that it's all so unnecessary. People imagine that being a servant to things greater than the self is a kind of death. That it will be a misery. But it is just the opposite. It's hard to demonstrate this point when you look at the big ideas, but the cosmos works by analogies, and there is a small-scale analog close at hand that most people can understand. That is the family. You could look at me as a wretched slave to my wife and children, and in a way I am. But while I've lost big-time as an autonomous individual, I've gained enormous dignity and respect-worthiness as a member—a servant—of my little family. And gained far more than I've lost in richness of life. (And of course we see a lot of people who look on the family in the way Lefties look at America. And call abortion a "blessing," and being unattached "freedom.")

And all the other analogous things work just the same way, up and down the ladder of importance. They look like death to the self, but they are really where the self can be what it wants to be, and was always intended to be, the servant of greater things. Poor IOZ, he thinks he's declaring truths, but he looks to me like some poor ragged wretch walking down the street screaming paranoid fantasies.

Just for the record...

You might keep in mind this article from the Washington Post, December 9, 2007, Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002. (From a good piece by Hugh Hewitt.)

This is similar to the abu Ghraib scandal, in which members of Congress knew of the problem months before it hit the news, knew it was being corrected and the guilty were due to be punished...then, when those pictures surfaced, they suddenly discovered that betraying their country with fake outrage would be a big partisan winner.

Same with "torture." Democrat leaders never gave a damn about waterboarding. Not until America was in difficulties. Then the dirty turncoats jumped-ship to what looked like the winning side—al Qaeda.. Leftist fake outrage about torture is treason pure and simple.

And any talk or action now about prosecuting Bush administration officials for things Congress was in agreement with at the time, and declined to make illegal....is not only vile injustice, but treason.

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

Congressional leaders from both parties would later seize on waterboarding as a symbol of the worst excesses of the Bush administration's counterterrorism effort. ...


...Yet long before "waterboarding" entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.

With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).

Individual lawmakers' recollections of the early briefings varied dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support. "Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing," said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. "And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement...

"Questions better batted down than answered"

Byron York, in the Washington Times, on the hysterical reactions to the tea party protests: In Time of Victory, Why Is The Left So Angry?

...Then there is the question of self-image. Watching Garofalo and Olbermann discuss the tea parties, it was impossible to avoid the sense that they saw themselves as two good people talking about many bad people. "One of the things about narcissism is that it looks like people who are just proud of themselves and smug, but in fact narcissism is a very brittle and unstable state," Anderson told me. "People who are deeply invested in narcissism spend an awful lot of energy trying to maintain the illusion they have of themselves as being powerful and good, and they are exquisitely sensitive to anything that might prick that balloon."

Again, the tea parties could represent a threat. What if the protesters weren't racists, weren't violent, weren't mentally defective? What if their point was legitimate, or even partly legitimate? Those are questions better batted down than answered....

"Narcissism is a very brittle and unstable state." That sure fits with what I'm seeing around here in Pelosiville. Psychologically it is much wiser and less stressful to believe in Original Sin, and acknowledge that your group and you yourself are prone to error and failure, and that paradise on Earth is not achievable.

Think of the liberals who imagine themselves as still riding the wave of transformative energy of the 1960's and the civil rights movement. They may tell themselves things are going great, but of course nothing has actually gone according to the hopes raised at that period. (I was there—I know.) So the poor liberal has to repress.

And it's the same with the Obama regime. Vast clouds of nebulous hope have been frothed-up in front of us, but it's already clear that reality is not going to fit the vague dreams and schemes. It reminds me of a recollection I read by someone who was in the JFK administration, right at the beginning. Apparently they were worried about what they would do in the second term, after they had solved all the country's problems!

Commenting on a comment...

I am not clear on this subject at all but are you saying that rough work works so it is OK to do it now and then?.

Mark Shea I don't think radiates any partisan hatred or venom. He is consistent: anything that deviates from Church preaching is to be rejected.

Had the Catholics consistently followed this principle, a lot of past trouble eg World Wars might have been avoided.

Maybe you will object, that this goes against Prudence and thus Catholic States never applied such standard to themselves. But perhaps USA needs to set higher standards for itself.

The virtue of Prudence is crucial for Moral Reasoning. (For all people, not just Christians. Moral law exists objectively, applies to all of us, and can be apprehended by reason.) Prudence is not optional. It is not a "lower standard." It is not some sort of fudge-factor added on so that people can compromise with the strict demands of doing what is just. ALL good deeds and good things can be bad if done at the wrong time or place or situation. The beautiful poverty and service of St Francis would have been an evil thing if he had left a wife and children to starve to death!

There is NO situation—either personal or societal—to which one can simply "apply Church teachings" without considering Prudence.

And therefore there is no complex situation where one can simply take one small aspect and demand that people do the moral thing, without considering the whole. Prudence demands looking at the whole picture.

Therefore, if a moralist is going to try to influence people on how we should fight the "War on Terror," then he or she must consider the situation as a whole, and think through things. Think about questions like how, in general, this new kind of war can best be fought. And how those tactics and strategies fit in with moral principles.

As an example, people need to ponder how Christian "Just War" thinking should be applied to a new sort of war Aquinas never imagined. Another example: one needs to think about how our words and actions will be seen by others, and what behavior they will elicit. Are we tempting people to wrong-doing? (I'd say that Mr Shea is broadcasting messages that encourage terrorism.)

There are lots of similar things that need to be considered to decide what the moral way to deal with our world situation is. I don't follow everything Shea writes, so I may be doing him an injustice, but, it looks to me like he has cherry-picked those issues he happens to be interested in, and opines on them without ever articulating a philosophy of how the situation as a whole should be seen, and how dealt with. This is morally wrong; it is a failure to exercise Prudence.

In fact he not only has the duty to think through the whole situation, he also has the duty to encourage criticism and discourse. The way he sneers at those who disagree with him is itself a moral failure—it is doubling-down on his basic failure of Prudence. I wouldn't even consider challenging Shea's ideas at his blog, because I've never heard of him making reasoned responses like this one I'm trying to write. (Bisaal is doing me a favor by criticizing me, by prodding my reasoning, and I'm grateful.)

And I think Shea is partisan because his attitudes and the issues he in interested seem to match precisely those of far-left political activists. You can SEE this. The issues that make his cheeks glow and his eyes sparkle match up closely with groups like moveon.org or Code Pink. And he never seems (I don't read everything he writes, so I may be mistaken) to work up a sweat over the victims of terrorism, or over the war crimes that groups like al-Qaeda commit every day.

Who are the REAL Christians today? Well, I've blogged my opinion on one that often enough. Try this post. Or this....

(photo by Michael Yon, of a child deliberately slaughtered by terrorist madmen.)

(And now I've really got to get to work, and I haven't even addressed torture specifically. Oh well, another day)

A Quote for you...

Charlene liked this quote, from a great piece by Kathy Shaidle:

...The Left is very concerned about something they like to call "social justice", which I define as the stubborn application of unworkable solutions to imaginary problems. ...

I call them heroes...

John Hinderaker at Power Line, About Those "Torture Memos":

...You can read the memos here. If you do, you will see that DOJ's lawyers grappled carefully and fairly with issues that are, by their nature, both difficult and distasteful. I find much to agree with in the memos and little, if anything, with which I disagree from a legal standpoint. Several things about the memos are striking: the concern that is shown for the health and well-being of the detainees; the very limited circumstances under harsh interrogation techniques were used (only when the CIA had reason to believe that the detainee had knowledge about pending terrorist attacks, among other limitations), and confirmation of the fact that thousands of American servicemen have been waterboarded and subjected to the other techniques in question, as part of their training--a practice that continued at least up to the dates of the memos.

I think the opinions were correct in substance; in any event, CIA officials were obviously justified in relying on them. In this context, the Obama administration's announcement that it will not prosecute the CIA personnel involved is evidently grandstanding. Of course they won't be prosecuted: to do so would be a double-cross of the worst sort, and the likelihood of getting a conviction would be nil. The fact is that the CIA officials who extracted valuable information from captured al Qaeda leaders--information that we have every reason to believe prevented successful terrorist attacks--are heroes. Their task was a thankless one, but, based on all the information we have, including the newly-released DOJ memos, they performed it well....

They are heroes. Exactly. They do the rough work necessary to protect us, while the fake-liberals who sneer and stab at them continue to luxuriate in the safety we have. And would howl in outrage if any danger actually approached them. Frauds. Pigs.

And none of the "anti-torture" crowd acknowledges that the US and Coalition militaries ended (at a painful sacrifice in dead and wounded) torture by the Saddam regime that was a million times worse than even what America is accused of. None of them ever said "thank you" for our ending (while "liberals" sat fat and safe, and never lifted a finger to help the suffering) the mass-production torture that was going on in Iraq. They are frauds, all of them. Their "concern" about torture is pure enmity against America and Bush. (I especially despise Mark Shea in this, since he is a well-known Catholic writer who just radiates partisan hatred and venom. What a twisted disgrace to our faith.)

Update: [link] "Most prominent among those briefed on waterboarding was Nancy Pelosi. According to the Post’s interviews, members of the Congressional oversight committees understood that they had to weigh the limits of inhumane treatment of people known to have Al Qaeda connections against the threat of new attacks. They believed that these techniques struck the right balance in the circumstances. Yet I haven't heard of any serious call for prosecuting Speaker Pelosi or any of her colleagues for complicity in torture."

Emma Sky

Nibras Kazimi, at his blog Talisman Gate:

...The "Sky" I'm referring to is Emma Sky. I've been watching her rise for some time, and couldn't tell whether this was a remarkably deft penetration of the American decision-making process courtesy of the 'cousins' across the pond, or that it was just an accident of history when mediocre characters, thrust into the eye of history, begin making irresponsible and ill-conceived choices. I'm still wavering between the two.

Sky has maneuvered herself into becoming General Ray Odierno's brain.

Sky has been recently quoted as saying:

"It is a fascinating society," she said of Iraq. "They have got things here that we have totally lost in the West: the appreciation of each other, whether it is the family, the clan or the tribe; values that aren't capitalist."

How foolish is that? What toxic mix of cluelessness and self-righteousness is necessary to allow someone to string together these words? Is Emma Sky arguing for a pre-capitalistic society for Iraq? Wheres the sense of irony here?

But I'll hand it to her, she has been quite clever in rallying the ranks of her fellow travelers among the western media (think Tom Ricks), as well as the left-leaning think-tankers. She's managed to manipulate them into adhering to a disciplined message about Iraq, one that is heavily colored by her politics....

"..Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class," Parrington insisted, referring to both democracy and capitalism, "and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to be respected..."

Sky doesn't really care about "the family, the clan or the tribe;" what's important is that these people are still poor and unsophisticated (and "colorful"), and therefore may be amenable to being guided by people like Ms. Sky. As soon as they start to attain self-confident middle-class status she will drop them.

(Much like our own intelligentsia used to dote on poor wretches in Appalachia, and gourmandised on their folk music and folk art. And congratulated themselves on being caring (with the taxpayers' $'s) and on being cool and "genuine" while listening to recordings of some old granny singing hymns of a faith they in fact despise. And of course once those people managed to escape from dire poverty, they were "rednecks," they were "spoiled by capitalism," and deserved to be sneered-at or ignored.)

It goes without saying that Sky hates "Zionists," and is not fond of Kurds. "..toxic mix of cluelessness and self-righteousness..." Well put.

What us schlubs need is "inspired tutelage..."

Fred Siegel, in FrontPage Magazine, has a very worth-reading history of the origins of American liberalism...

...The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s. "Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class," Parrington insisted, referring to both democracy and capitalism, "and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to be respected." Alienated from middle-class American life, liberalism drew on an idealized image of both organic pre-modern folkways and the harmony to come when it would re-establish the proper hierarchy of virtue in a post-bourgeois, post-democratic world....

....Croly, said literary critic Edmund Wilson memorializing him, "was a kind of saint." In another age he might have become the "founder of a religious order." Instead he founded The New Republic, which became the primary political organ of the new liberalism. Croly, whose sanctimony was sometimes mocked as "Crolier than thou," told Edmund Wilson that "he saw his culture as mainly French." He was the first child in the United States whose parents christened him, so to speak, into the mid-nineteenth-century French intellectual August Comte's "Religion of Humanity." Comte's concoction was designed to create a scientific, progressive, and comparably hierarchical alternative to Catholicism.

To attain that "religion of humanity," Croly called for a Rousseau-like "reconstruction" of American ideals "on a platform of possible human perfectibility." "What a democratic nation must do is not to accept human nature as it is, but to move it in the direction of improvement." The people in this picture "are not sovereign . . . even when united in a majority." His hope, however was that under inspired tutelage they can "become sovereign . . . in so far as they succeed on reaching and expressing a collective purpose," and that purpose was a strong unified nation in which religion and politics were melded into "the religion of humanity," which would be "a religion based not on conjecture but fact." The famous closing lines of The Promise read: "The common citizen can become something of a saint and something of a hero" if "his exceptional fellow-countrymen" are able to "offer acceptable examples of heroism and saintliness."....

Do read it. And when I write, as I often do, that "liberals" aren't liberals any more, this is the kind of thing I'm referring to. (And I'm sure you can already guess that I think that every morsel of the above quoted ideas are profoundly evil and dangerous. I don't need to spell it all out, right?)

Ha ha. I got under somebody's skin...

As I mentioned here, I have an "I miss W." bumper sticker on my truck.

I left my vehicle in a parking lot this morning, and came back to find a note stuck in the door, which read:

Dear GOP
(Grand Old Pedophiles)
Thank you for supporting "W."
We Liberals LOVE it!

Feelin' a little nervous, pal?

(I suspect this is just a morsel more confirmation of my theory that liberals hate Bush because he is a real liberal, and exposes them as being fake liberals. But whatever it is, I bugged somebody!)

Worst-case view...

The admirable Caroline Glick at the Jerusalem Post, Surviving in a post-American world:

...Like it or not, the United States of America is no longer the world's policeman. This was the message of Barack Obama's presidential journey to Britain, France, the Czech Republic, Turkey and Iraq this past week.

Somewhere between apologizing for American history - both distant and recent; genuflecting before the unelected, bigoted king of Saudi Arabia; announcing that he will slash the US's nuclear arsenal, scrap much of America's missile defense programs and emasculate the US Navy; leaving Japan to face North Korea and China alone; telling the Czechs, Poles and their fellow former Soviet colonies, "Don't worry, be happy," as he leaves them to Moscow's tender mercies; humiliating Iraq's leaders while kowtowing to Iran; preparing for an open confrontation with Israel; and thanking Islam for its great contribution to American history, President Obama made clear to the world's aggressors that America will not be confronting them for the foreseeable future.

Whether they are aggressors like Russia, proliferators like North Korea, terror exporters like nuclear-armed Pakistan or would-be genocidal-terror-supporting nuclear states like Iran, today, under the new administration, none of them has any reason to fear Washington.

This news is music to the ears of the American Left and their friends in Europe. Obama's supporters like billionaire George Soros couldn't be more excited at the self-induced demise of the American superpower. CNN's former (anti-)Israel bureau chief Walter Rodgers wrote ecstatically in the Christian Science Monitor on Wednesday, "America's... superpower status, is being downgraded as rapidly as its economy."....

If someone has a good argument against this, I've yet to hear it. We saw this kind of thing under Carter. Jay Nordlinger called Carter "the first anti-American president," and I think that was the simple truth. And now we have the second one. The good news is that the Left has to rely on sneakiness to gain power in America. (Carter's disguise was "Christian southerner;" Obama's is "post-partisan post-racial hopey-changy smoke-screen." Neither guy would have been elected if his real views were known.) The bad news is that Obama was more clearly a Leftist, and still got elected.

Leftists are almost always anti-American. (For reasons I've blogged often, and will repeat if anyone needs me to.) The huge question is, is America becoming anti-American?

Glick suggests that those countries who have been our friends and relied on our support should get off the dime and start working with each other to fill the void....

...THE RISKS that the newly inaugurated post-American world pose for America's threatened friends are clear. But viable opportunities for survival do exist, and Israel can and must play a central role in developing them. Specifically, Israel must move swiftly to develop active strategic alliances with Japan, Iraq, Poland, and the Czech Republic and it must expand its alliance with India....

...For the past 16 years, successive Israeli governments have wrongly believed that politics trump strategic interests. The notion that informed Israel's decision-makers - not unlike the notion that now informs the Obama administration - was that Israel's strategic interests would be secured as a consequence of its efforts to appease its enemies by weakening itself. Appreciative of Israel's sacrifices for peace, the nations of the world - and particularly the US, the Arabs and Europe - would come to Israel's defense in its hour of need. Now that the hour of need has arrived, Israel's political strategy for securing itself has been exposed as a complete fiasco.

The good news is that no doubt sooner rather than later, Obama's similarly disastrous bid to denude the US of its military power under the naive assumption that it will be able to use its new stature as a morally pure strategic weakling to win its enemies over to its side will fail spectacularly and America's foreign policy will revert to strategic rationality.

But to survive the current period of American strategic madness, Israel and the US's other unwanted allies must build alliances with one another - covertly if need be - to contain their adversaries in the absence of America. If they do so successfully, then the damage to global security induced by Obama's emasculation of his country will be limited. If on the other hand, they fail, then America's eventual return to its senses will likely come too late for its allies - if not for America itself....

She's dead right. But I'm not too optimistic. Another way of putting the above is that India and Israel (especially) and Japan, Iraq, Poland, and the Czech Republic should.....grow up! But asking democracies to do that? It doesn't happen very often.

I would normally just blast the squalid hypocrisy of the Obamanoid's, but...

...even more aggravating is the STUPIDITY of the general population of the world who took the attacks on Guantanamo seriously. If you fight a war, you will have to lock up prisoners, right? Unless you want to just shoot them on the battlefield, right? And you know who to lock up, and how long, only if your enemy follows the LAWS OF WAR, and does things like wearing uniforms, and having ranks and serial numbers, and keeping combat away from civilians.

If an enemy like al-Qaeda does not do such things, then they are committing war crimes. And if we lock up people without being perfectly sure that they are in fact combatants, it is because of al-Qaeda's war crimes. Not because we are doing anything wrong, but because we've been forced into doing things in an imperfect way.

The leftists who heaped criticism on the Bush Administration for Gitmo committed a vile injustice. Which they are now compounding by following—as logic demands—the very same policies. There's nothing I can do about it, except express my utmost contempt for the horrid lefty worms who took part in such a loathsome betrayal of decent Americans. And did so not out of conviction, but to gain political power.

Likewise, it is not our fault if the detention is of indefinite duration. Imagine if our enemies in WWII had been almost impossible to clearly defeat, because they could magically disappear whole armies, and then emerge in a year or two in a distant place to start fighting again. What would have been the fate of any prisoners we held? They would have been kept in indefinite detention, right? Am I right?

Now think of the above fantasy, and imagine that the Republicans orchestrated a huge clamor against Presidents Roosevelt or Truman. Enough so that they seriously hindered the Allied war effort, and forced the administration to release prisoners. Who subsequently returned to the fight and killed American soldiers. What would that be called? What's the word we are groping for???

Obama Administration Will Appeal Court Ruling Which Allows Habeas Petitions for Certain Captives in Afghanistan:

...The Obama administration has announced that it will appeal a recent Federal District Court decision, which held that three captives at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan could challenge their status as "enemy combatants" in United States courts. The District Court held that the Supreme Court's ruling in Boumediene v. Bush, which allows Guantanamo Bay detainees to file habeas corpus petitions, also gives Bagram detainees access to United States courts. The Obama administration opposes the petitions and has announced that it will appeal the District Court's ruling.

Civil liberties advocates blasted the Bush administration for subjecting Guantanamo Bay captives to indefinite detention and for denying them access to federal courts. The outrage over Guantanamo Bay among President Obama's liberal base and among the populations of certain United States allies (particularly in Europe) probably explains why President Obama's first set of executive orders included a provision directing the closure of the controversial detention facility.

The Obama administration, however, has taken the position that Supreme Court's reasoning in Boumediene does not confer habeas rights to Bagram detainees. This is the same argument that the Bush administration made.

This logic, however, could support the capture and transfer of individuals to Bagram, where they could face prolonged and indefinite detention and denial of access to United States courts. Bagram could become the functional equivalent of Guantanamo Bay....

Kick a "journalist" today...

The curious case of 200 nearly identical MSM headlines:

The following headlines have appeared in newspapers within the last 24 hours. This is not an inclusive list....

...There are more. I just stopped listing them because I grew weary -- so weary -- of the physical labor associated with cutting and pasting.

All of the stories were marketed by a liberal "advocacy group" called Families USA .

According to Discover the Networks, Families USA is a member of the "Progressive States Network", which works closely with (you guessed it) ACORN and the SEIU. These ultra-partisan groups have truly one agenda: big government.

During his presidential campaign, then-Senator Obama spoke to a conference of Family USA activists and promised, "I am absolutely determined that by the end of the first term of the next president, we should have universal health care in this country."

Data from the Census Bureau debunks the lie continually promoted by the mainstream media of the legendary 47 million uninsured Americans:...

The Left doesn't care about gays...they're just cannon fodder in the real war

Dafydd asks a great question. There are surely far more homosexuals affected by the ban on their openly serving in the military than there are gays who really want to get married. And far less justification for a ban. So, where is the Left? Why are no "liberals" clamoring for lifting the ban?

...At a guess, I believe that at least a hundred times as many gays serve (more or less secretly) in the military as want to get married to members of the same gender, and an even larger number are veterans or would like to serve in the future. At a guess, if about five million legal American residents are homosexual (loosely defined -- say 2% of men and 1% of women), easily as many as a million could be directly adversely affected by the policy. (I cannot imagine that anywhere near ten thousand gays and lesbians seriously intend to get married.)

And Congress or the president could enact that change right this very minute; I don't think Republicans could possibly muster 41 votes to filibuster a bill to lift the restriction, even if they wanted to -- and assuming congressional action is even required; it's possible that all it would take is an Executive Order from the Commander in Chief.

The Left could do it in a snap, even against unified Republican opposition (which I doubt could be mustered anyway). So why don't they?

Well, I didn't plan to leave that hanging as a rhetorical question. As anybody who has read more of this blog than just the seven paragraphs above knows, I ask because I think I know the answer -- which is simply this...

Democrats and liberals couldn't care less about gays, lesbians, transsexuals, transvestites, or any other such subgroup. They only champion the gay (or blacktivist, or feminist) agenda when a particular policy serves the larger agenda of the hard Left: the destruction of traditional Western culture and its replacement by secular humanism.

Simply and brutally put, destroying traditional marriage advances that liberal agenda, so liberal Democrats pursue it with a passion; but allowing gays to serve openly in the military does not advance that vile agenda -- so liberal Democrats truly could not care less...

There is really only One War. The only thing different now is the openness of the fight. (And yes, you are choosing sides even when you think you are neutral.)

World turned upside down...

Mark Steyn - The Corner on National Review Online:

...The North Korean test, about which our new president has issued the feeblest of rote protests, is the flip side of the post below. The western world has no will. So we approach a state in which the planet's wealthiest jurisdictions, from Norway to New Zealand, lack any capacity to defend their borders, and the planet's basket-cases, from North Korea to Sudan, will be nuclear powers.

We'll see how that arrangement works out.

It's deeper than just "lack of will." Even those without the will to act should be able to see an insane situation when it is right in front of their nose, and at least feebly bleat that someone ought to do something. It's not lack of will, but intentional blindness. They don't want to SEE. The implications are too disturbing...

Another day, another lie...

JustOneMinute: We Get Pensive On Pensions:

...Inspired by a Boston Globe story and aroused by the indignant yet underinformed Josh Marshall, lefties are aghast that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation switched "much of" (per the Globe) or "most" (per the unflappable Josh Marshall) of its portfolio from safe bonds to risky stocks last February, prior to the stock market wipe-out (see "FEEL THE RAGE", below). However, our friends on the left are so intent on bashing Bush and his appointees that they have overlooked some good news, which I will bury for a while....

In fact it was just a proposal; nothing was done about it. The whole story is bullshit.

But you can depend on it that you will be hearing the lie decades from now as an example of the abhorrent horridness of the Bush Administration. (And of course if the PBGC had done something smart, something that increased their portfolio, that would have nothing to do with Bush and his greedy minions. In that case the agency would have been independent!)

There was another President who embraced evil at Notre Dame...

Here's a historical note on the beginnings of the situation we are now in. (Short version: pacifism kills.)

Jeffrey Lord in American Spectator: Jimmy Carter's Spirit of Notre Dame:

...Perhaps more importantly than Carter's personal political fate the speech signaled his decision to abandon his party's identification with the policies of military strength and American exceptionalism championed by Democrats from FDR to JFK and LBJ. Instead, Carter chose to move the country towards the more left-leaning foreign and defense policies advocated by 1972 nominee Senator George McGovern. The results were decidedly not approved of by the American public....

...The most notable single sentence in Carter's Notre Dame speech was this one:

We are now free of that inordinate fear of Communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in our fear.

Carter went on to insist that it was time to govern with a "wider framework of international cooperation" because "the world today is in the midst of the most profound and rapid transformation in its entire history." He also added this about the American approach to the Soviet Union in the Carter era: "Our goal is to be fair to both sides, to produce reciprocal stability, parity, and security." In other words, in Carter's view, a view widely held among leftward-leaning elites, both the United States and the Soviet Union had genuinely competing claims. They were morally equal to each other.

The speech was the lead story in the news the next day. By the time Carter left the White House after four years of promoting moral equivalence, the world was in murderous chaos....

"Murderous chaos." That's for sure. And we are still in it. Read the whole thing.

And by the way, not that any leftist would care in the slightest about mere human beings, but the policy sneered at as "embracing any dictator" has proved to be the correct one. The countries where "right-wing" dictators held back Communism are now mostly prosperous and democratic. Where Communism took hold there is unending poverty and tyranny, and the border guards keep people in, not out. Compare Cuba and Chile. Or North and South Korea. Or Taiwan and China.

And both the Notre Dame outrages are really about the same issue. Human beings are to be sacrificed to leftist theories.

Don't turn the lights off!

I've heard that some environmentalist flakes are promoting an "Earth Hour," where people are supposed to turn off their lights for an hour and sit in the dark and meditate on how horrible they are for breathing out CO2, and maybe lay some plans to save the planet by killing their children before they are even born. As I'm sure you can guess, I have nothing but contempt for such twisted atheist malarky.

(And it's not even smart on its own terms; it won't make any environmental difference at all. But Leftism is about feeling good, not about actually accomplishing anything.)

As an alternative, there's Human Achievement Hour! The video below is so-so, but I don't have time to make my own. Celebrating human achievements with rock music has gotta be this week's worst idea. Bach, it should have been

Two Obamas...

neo-neocon: What's behind Obama's Teleprompter addiction? (thanks to Rand):

...The late great Dean Barnett was one of the first to not only notice this but to understand what it might signify besides a simple desire for fluency. Writing in February 2008 about a speech Obama had made a few days earlier, Barnett shrewdly observed [emphasis mine]:

....But...[w]ith no Teleprompter signaling the prepared text, Obama failed to deliver the speech in his characteristically flawless fashion. He had to rely on notes. And his memory. And he improvised...

Virtually every time Obama deviated from the text, he expressed the partisan anger that has so poisoned the Democratic party. His spontaneous comments eschewed the conciliatory and optimistic tone that has made the Obama campaign such a phenomenon...[T]his different Obama was a far less attractive one...

Barnett noticed—as many had, even at the time—the enormous difference in articulateness between Teleprompter-Obama and Obama unplugged (the latter is the title of Barnett’s article). That was the easy part. The more discriminating observation Barnett made was between the message of Teleprompter Obama and the message of ad-lib Obama. The two were not just different in degree—they were profoundly opposite in tone and essence. Ad-lib Obama was far more angry and more radical—indeed, although Barnett doesn't mention it, this Obama resembled the angrier and more radical Michelle Obama, in her earlier campaign remarks that drew so much controversy.

Obama is addicted to his Teleprompter not only because he knows he sounds better—smoother and smarter—with it than without. The deeper reason for his reliance on it may just be that he differs so profoundly from the persona he wishes to convey that he quite literally cannot trust himself to speak without it....

Until recently it was a given that the Dems could not elect a Northern liberal president. They've only succeeded with Southerners since JFK (who wasn't very liberal by today's standards). And Obama was only elected by sneakiness—if America had known what he was really like he wouldn't have stood a chance.

It's not just being liberal that's the problem, it's that most liberals don't interact with conservatives. They stay in their lefty comfort-zones and talk to each other. And get their comfort-news from the NYT. But if you are going to be a Democrat governor of Arkansas or Georgia, then you need to be able to work with conservatives and Christians. You need to know what they are thinking, even if you don't agree.

Poor Barack is just clueless. He's spent his entire life in big-city Lefty cocoons. He doesn't know stuff.

We "are called to the same most high dignity"

Pope Leo XIII on Socialism...

For, indeed, although the socialists, stealing the very Gospel itself with a view to deceive more easily the unwary, have been accustomed to distort it so as to suit their own purposes, nevertheless so great is the difference between their depraved teachings and the most pure doctrine of Christ that none greater could exist: "for what participation hath justice with injustice or what fellowship hath light with darkness?"

Their habit, as we have intimated, is always to maintain that nature has made all men equal, and that, therefore, neither honor nor respect is due to majesty, nor obedience to laws, unless, perhaps, to those sanctioned by their own good pleasure. But, on the contrary, in accordance with the teachings of the Gospel, the equality of men consists in this: that all, having inherited the same nature, are called to the same most high dignity of the sons of God, and that, as one and the same end is set before all, each one is to be judged by the same law and will receive punishment or reward according to his deserts. The inequality of rights and of power proceeds from the very Author of nature, "from whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named."...

...For, while the socialists would destroy the "right" of property, alleging it to be a human invention altogether opposed to the inborn equality of man, and, claiming a community of goods, argue that poverty should not be peaceably endured, and that the property and privileges of the rich may be rightly invaded, the Church, with much greater wisdom and good sense, recognizes the inequality among men, who are born with different powers of body and mind, inequality in actual possession, also, and holds that the right of property and of ownership, which springs from nature itself, must not be touched and stands inviolate. For she knows that stealing and robbery were forbidden in so special a manner by God, the Author and Defender of right, that He would not allow man even to desire what belonged to another, and that thieves and despoilers, no less than adulterers and idolaters, are shut out from the Kingdom of Heaven...
      -- Pope Leo XIII, Quod Apostolici Muneris

Leo XIII is a favorite of mine for various reasons, including that it was he who made John Henry Newman a Cardinal.

And he was the first Pope to have his voice recorded, and to be in a motion picture....in 1903!! (It doesn't sound like much--he was close to death at the time. But it's still a cool thing.)

Retroactive admiration...

Dr. Weevil: Prediction:

...I don't expect anyone except John Weidner and Orrin Judd to agree with me, but I want to put this on record, so I can gloat if it comes true:

If President Obama does not pull himself together and start acting like a president very soon -- and I doubt that he is capable of it -- retroactive admiration for the decency and (relative) competence of George W. Bush may spread so far and fast that Jeb Bush will have a real chance to be nominated and elected president in 2012. In what will surely be a crowded field, I would not put his chances of winning the nomination higher than 5% or 6%, but that's up from .001% in 2008, when it would have taken a meteor shower wiping out all the other candidates to outweigh pandemic Bush fatigue. I do think that whoever wins the Republican nomination in 2012 has at least a 75% chance of winning the election, and that Bush fatigue and even Bush hatred may (note: may) melt away, leaving only a slight, though extraordinarily foul, odor, like a very small piece of Limburger, or the spot on the road where a dead skunk lay before the highway department or a helpful vulture dragged it away....

Sounds good to me. Charlene and I just bought some   I  miss  W.    bumper-stickers (link). And, if Jeb were President, I would not have to add a new post category; I could just keep "President Bush!"

Of course I'd probably have the same frustrations with Jeb as I did with the President. I mean, the task of explaining things really shouldn't fall to me. Why do I have to give the world a list of 14 reasons to invade Iraq? I'm proud that those who read RJ are among the few who actually know what's happening in the world, but still....It does try my patience.

My guess is that Bush-hatred by the real lefties will never die. Sort of like Nixon-hatred. Come to think of it, there's a real parallel. Let me suggest that leftists hate Nixon because he was right about communists, and because he won the Vietnam War. Watergate was just seized upon ex post facto, to personalize the hatred.

Actually, there's a deeper parallel. Nixon was in many ways a liberal. Us conservatives were deeply unhappy with him on many issues. (remember FAP, wage-and-price controls, end of the gold standard? Probably few of you do--I alone have lived to tell thee!) And of course Bush too is in some ways a liberal. Especially in regards to that classic liberal project, overthrowing a fascist dictator and bringing democracy to oppressed people. They will never forgive him for that.

To a considerable extent my championing of George W Bush was only done because nobody else was presenting the positive side, so it fell to me. I could easily have been a much harsher critic from the right, if conservatives had been supporting the president as they should. But people were not being just. Leftists are unjust by nature of course, but many Republicans and conservatives were failing in this regard too.

What I would really like is a Sarah Palin who could articulate a conservative philosophy. But I doubt if she will hire me to get her up to speed....

Today's joke...

I just saw a bumper sticker on the car of one of our liberal neighbors (very nice folks, by the way. Nothin' personal): "Unjust War. Unending Debt. The Bush Legacy Continues." Pretty hilarious, seeing that Iraq's now a democracy and safer than many big American cities, and Obam's busy tripling the National debt.

It should be repeated frequently: the Iraq Campaign was a splendid, successful and idealistic liberal project by a great liberal president. That's why nihilists-pretending-to-be-liberals hate it. It exposes them as the frauds they are...

"We are Socialists. We don't pretend to be Christians"

On Charity, by James V. Schall, S.J.

Bruce Fingerhut, the good director of St. Augustine's Press, sent me the other day the following amusing, but provocative citation: "Bertrand Russell, who, when asked why he did not give to charity, replied: "I'm afraid you've got it all wrong. We are Socialists. We don't pretend to be Christians.'" Needless to say, that witty retort contains a whole theology and a philosophy that deserve to be spelled out. The logic of classic socialism makes Christianity not only superfluous—everyone has everything by rights—but impossible—no one has anything to give.

Russell is right, of course. In a socialist world, no charity can exist because there can be no need that is unfulfilled by the commonality's duty. It is a world in which there can be no gratitude. I can thank someone for giving me what is really his. I cannot thank him for giving me what is by rights already mine. And if everything belongs to the community, how can I give it away? Or if I do give it away, how can it be anything but stealing from the commons on my part and receiving illicit booty on the receiver's part?...

I remember an incident, maybe back in the 70's? The king of Sweden donated a large sum of money to charity. And Swedish leftists were outraged, and there was a big flap about it! It was treated as an insult to Sweden's socialistic state!

I'd guess that the recent proposal by the Obama administration to limit the deduction for charitable donations was not an accident. Charity is an area where any socialist will want to start squeezing out the private sector and gathering all "charity" into the hands of government...

Nudging the data...

Alan Sullivan pointed to this blog post, Kafka at Albany, about the investigation--or rather, non-investigation--of what looks like academic fraud. Fraud involving--you will be so surprised--climate-change and big federal grants.

I suspect there is a lot more of this than we will ever know. We won't know because most of it will be more subtle. Nudging the data rather than fudging. Quite probably much of it is unconscious--very few of us would not be influenced by knowing that finding one kind of data means we remain a "star professor" with a lab full of hot post-docs.....and coming up with a certain other sort of data means academic obscurity and possibly ostracization.

And there's this other thing going on. There is, I think, a lot of incentive towards slanting science due to the personal politics of the people involved. When certain science topics come up, everyone gets twitchy because we know the issues have political implications. One of my sisters is a scientist (smart, honest as they come, not involved in any controversial research) and a liberal. We normally don't mention politics! But climate science came up once in a e-mail exchange, and she made some complaint about Bush/Cheney... and I pointed out that she had in fact instantly turned the science into a political weapon. That ended that conversation pronto, but it's stuck in my mind.

...Last June I reported on the allegations of academic fraud levelled by a British mathematician, Doug Keenan, against Professor Wei-Chyung Wang of New York State University at Albany.

Dr Keenan alleged that in work that has come to be widely cited in climate studies, work that included the collation of data from temperature measuring stations in China, Professor Wang made statements that "cannot be true and could not be in error by accident. The statements are fabricated."

In August 2007, Dr Keenan submitted a report (pdf) of his allegations to the Vice President for Research at Wang's university and an inquiry was initiated. In February 2008 this was escalated into a full investigation by the Inquiry Committee.

All this was summarised in my earlier post, together with quotations from Dr Keenan's allegation....

An even worse snub to a friend of America....

Big Lizard writes that before Obama's snubs to Gordon Brown, he had treated the PM of Japan even worse...

From a Japanes story on Prime Minister Taro Aso's visit. (Which I bet you didn't even know happened--I didn't.)

...It was unprecedented that there was no state lunch or joint press conference [sound familar?].

There was no private one-on-one meeting, which is what is needed to meet the requirement of a "summit."

Just before the meeting, President Obama talked about the importance of the U.S.-Japan friendship and strengthening the alliance for east-Asian security. However, Mr. Obama did not take any action to publicize the message.

Mr. Obama gave his first speech to Congress that same night. The U.S. government, public, and media attention were all on that speech; they paid little to no attention to the prime minister's visit.

This meeting reminded Japanese of Prime Minister Tomiichi Murakami's visit to the U.S. in January of 1995. However, even during that visit, Murayama was allowed to stay at Blair House, the official guest house. But not Aso; he was forced to stay in a hotel in a Washington DC suburb. The duration of the visit was less than half of Murakami's....

This is insane. Or rather, it is if you think of Obama as a normal president. If you visualize him as a lefty activist-type who would at most make a good president of a state university, THEN it makes perfect sense. Imagine the lefties you know--how many of them would have been pleased to learn that President Bush had strengthened our alliance with Japan? Or with India, which is a far more important accomplishment of the Bush Administration? I'd lay money that the PM of India would be treated the same way, if he visited now. Lefties are anti-American, and Obama is running true-to-form.

More and more I'm coming around to Rush Limbaugh's view. I was originally guessing that Obama would aim to be another Bill Clinton, leftish by inclination but aware that that is not what America wants. Therefore I would support his more sensible moves (similar to my support of NAFTA and welfare reform under Clinton) and argue against his unwise ideas. Now he's looking more like one of those horrid cowardly sneaks trained by Saul Alinsky to pretend to be moderate so they can infiltrate institutions, and then seize power for marxist ends. (If any "Alinsky-ites are reading, I spit upon you with the utmost detestation! Sneaks! Termites!..... Hermaphrodites!)

But it doesn't look like that's what Obama is going to be. So, it is the moral and sensible thing to hope he fails. If anyone is interested, that what I'm feeling at the moment. I hope he fails even worse than Carter, which is saying a lot!. Then at least a few people will wake up from their stupor.

[I put up this picture of Rush so as to be unambiguous about how I'm feeling. Since I'm not a moral coward like 98% of leftists are, I write clearly what I think, and if I change my mind, or turn out to be wrong, I will just say so.]

Parody--is it even possible any more?

Drudge Report: Chavez calls on Obama to follow path of socialism:

...Caracas - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Friday called upon US President Barack Obama to follow the path to socialism, which he termed as the "only" way out of the global recession. "Come with us, align yourself, come with us on the road to socialism. This is the only path. Imagine a socialist revolution in the United States," Chavez told a group of workers in the southern Venezuelan state of Bolivar....

...."Nothing is impossible. Who would have thought in the 1980s that the Soviet Union would disappear? No one," he said. ...

(Thanks to Richard Fernandez)

Same now as the year I was born.

From a piece by Thomas Sowell, "Not One of Us":

...Governor Palin's candidacy for the vice presidency was what galvanized grass roots Republicans in a way that John McCain never did. But there was something about her that turned even some conservative intellectuals against her and provoked visceral anger and hatred from liberal intellectuals.

Perhaps the best way to try to understand these reactions is to recall what Eleanor Roosevelt said when she first saw Whittaker Chambers, who had accused Alger Hiss of being a spy for the Soviet Union. Upon seeing the slouching, overweight and disheveled Chambers, she said, "He's not one of us."

The trim, erect and impeccably dressed Alger Hiss, with his Ivy League and New Deal pedigree, clearly was "one of us." As it turned out, he was also a liar and a spy for the Soviet Union. Not only did a jury decide that at the time, the opening of the secret files of the Soviet Union in its last days added more evidence of his guilt.

The Hiss-Chambers confrontation of more than half a century ago produced the same kind of visceral polarization that Governor Sarah Palin provokes today.

Before the first trial of Alger Hiss began, reporters who gathered at the courthouse informally sounded each other out as to which of them they believed, before any evidence had been presented. Most believed that Hiss was telling the truth and that it was Chambers who was lying.

More important, those reporters who believed that Chambers was telling the truth were immediately ostracized. None of this could have been based on the evidence for either side, for that evidence had not yet been presented in court....

The causes and people morph and change, but lefties are still working for Stalin. Same as the year I was born, when the guilty verdict was handed down in the Hiss trial. And I used to think that Whittaker Chambers' book Witness was sort of a period piece. Now I think of it in conjunction with Tolkien's words: "...and together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat."

Witness remains one of the great American books.

They're rich liberals...what do they care if pickaninnies suffer?

NY'S SENATORS REFUSE TO 'VOUCH' FOR PUPILS - New York Post:

...New York's two US Democratic senators yesterday said they will vote against an amendment that would preserve a Washington, DC, school-voucher program that helps lower-income students attend private schools....

Why there aren't any barbers anymore...

Riehl World View: Of Plumbers And Barbers:

...In the 70's and 80's many states merged their Barber and Cosmetology Boards into one. Suddenly a young man who could make a decent living as a Barber couldn't do a partly paid apprenticeship, taking just months to learn a career that could serve him for life. He had to pay to attend a Community College or private tech education program that could last two years, while making him learn a variety of skills he'd never employ. And he, or she was also taught to charge much more for the service.

And that doesn't include the regulation side, which went on to require every Barbershop to meet the standards of the largest women's Salon in terms of specialized sinks and facilities a traditional Barber would never need.

In states where this took place a career once dominated by men became a women's forte - which is fine, though many never have learned how to give a good Men's haircut. Costs of a haircut more than doubled, you could forget getting a nice shave if you wanted it. And businesses saw their overhead costs rise dramatically. And all because the government was just looking out for you....

I'd guess this is just another example of people being destroyed to advance leftist theory. It's a humble example, to be sure, but no different in kind from the many examples of whole countries destroyed, and millions slain. (Like this recent example.)

I don't know any details of how these decisions were made, but one would have to be blind not to realize that the barbershop would be an irritant to "feminists" and the general run of girly-men bureaucrats and academics. Think of it--a bunch of guys sitting around a totally male place, laughing and joking, talking about the game, or listening to Rush..... How the vegetarian-pacifist types must have hated it.

And it was so American...the striped pole, the big chairs, the piles of Sports Illustrated and Playboy. To relaxed shabbiness, and total disinterest in trendy decor and style. I'm sure the faculty lounge crowd recoiled in disgust. You know that.

So they destroyed it. In the same way, though on a miniature scale, that Stalin sent annoying tribes to Siberia, or Castro sends writers to labor camps.

They destroyed it, and we never got a vote. The last thing "Democrats" want is democracy. The nihilists will win in the end, because they are tireless ant-workers, always chewing away at all things tough and meaningful. The decisions are made in obscure bureaucratic corridors, and the battle is lost before the public even realizes there was a battle. And every augmentation of government power and size--you know, the ones done to "help people"--is really about moving more decisions out of private hands, and out of any possibility of people voting on the issues.

My sons will never know that old American institution, the barber shop. And so they will be a little less masculine, a little less confident in this brave new world where real existence is found in cubicles staring at computer monitors. They will have a little less fun--masculine fun. A sick irony; my son the singer knows barbershop quartets... but has probably never been in a barbershop! The barber shop will just be something old guys talk about, before time's river carries them away. Something grandpa bores you by going on about, like patriotism or the Federalist Papers, or the Bataan Death March.

And women will wonder, in the vague ineffectual way proper to their sex, why men are becoming somehow less satisfying, less interesting. Of course they won't wonder enough to actually DO anything, or re-think the crap they have been indoctrinated with--that sort of thinking is upsetting and can make one feel uncomfortable on Facebook!

If this was an influential blog, I might have to keep a civil tone, so as not to alienate readers and make dialog impossible. Since I'm just a very minor blogger, I can say what I like. Say what's true. Liberalism is evil. Leftism is evil. If you are a "Democrat," you are, at the very least, up to your waist in foul evil and nihilism and the destruction of all things good and true. I look on you worms with the utmost contempt!

Update: Charlene adds that black hair braiding salons are now under pressure to adopt the same (utterly un-needed) "cosmetology" standards . But somehow this is an "institution" that liberals have some sympathy for preserving! I wonda why?

I hope he fails too....if he's doing what it looks like he's doing....

Peter Wehner, at the Corner...

I have a few thoughts on the "controversy" about Rush Limbaugh saying he hopes Barack Obama fails -- a claim that, based on the lead in to his show last night, left CNN's Anderson Cooper (among a slew of other media commentators) aghast.

The argument Limbaugh is making is fairly simple to follow: Pres. Obama is proposing plans Limbaugh believes (with justification, in my view) will hurt our economy and hurt our country. If Obama fails in getting his plans through Congress, we will be better off. ...

....But those in the MSM are pretending that those who hope Obama's plans fail are really rooting against America. That is nonsense. Limbaugh wants America to succeed; as a conservative, he hopes Obama's astonishing liberal power-grab fails. It's really not all that complicated to understand.

What I wonder, though, is where Anderson Cooper and his colleagues were during the Iraq debate, when the surge was clearly beginning to work -- yet leading Democrats, one after another, said it was failing. This was a situation in which America was engaged in a war of enormous consequences and, if we had lost, it would have been a geo-political and humanitarian catastrophe. Yet anti-war critics -- including Senator Barack Obama -- insisted on promoting the narrative of America's failure in Iraq when the evidence was the opposite.

Where was the outrage then, I wonder?....

Yeah, and how about some outrage over leftists wanting Bush's plan to save Social Security to fail? (Of course they had an important reason to want it to fail---what could be worse for a Lefty than to have the little people become investors, and perhaps lose their dependency on their betters?)

" the conscious atmosphere of corruption and payoff..."

From Maimon Schwarzschild, Not the Spirit of the New Deal:

....There are different streams of ideas on today's politcal left than there were in the 1930s. There is the idea that prosperity and growth are bad: bad for the "planet", hostile to the environment, vulgar, and linked to immoral individualism. There is the idea that a humbler, poorer, less powerful America would be a good thing. These are fundamentally pessimistic ideas, pessimistic about America at least: very different from the buoyant and self-confident (if sometimes, or often, misguided) outlook of FDR and the liberals and leftists who made the New Deal (and who went on to fight the Second World War.)

The spirit of the Obama-Pelosi "stimulus", and the conscious atmosphere of corruption and payoff that surrounds it, is consistent with today's negative, if not sour, leftist worldview. The New Dealers believed they were building a more "scientific" and much more prosperous world. There was a great deal of genuine idealism among them. Today's triumphant political class does not seriously imagine that it will promote economic growth and prosperity. The political class is, at best, ambivalent about whether it even wants such things. What today's political class wants is a massive transfer of power and money to itself. This is what the "stimulus", and much else that will follow, is openly intended to do. If there were a spirit of optimism and generosity and idealism about it, as there was among the New Dealers, there would at least be reason to hope that things wouldn't quickly degenerate into corruption. It seems to me that there is little such spirit, or none at all, today. ..
(Thanks to Chicagoboyz)

SO, are these people, in fact, liberals at all? I'd say Schwarzschild is missing the interesting part of the story, though he's right on the edge of it.

"the liberals and leftists who made the New Deal (and who went on to fight the Second World War.)" Right. They led a great war to overthrow fascist dictators, end genocide, and bring freedom and democracy to oppressed peoples. Today's leftists had an opportunity to do the very same thing. And what happened? They HATED it! Hated it even when things were going well, and millions of Iraqis were braving terrorism to vote in elections. Hated the man in charge (who was the real liberal).

I'd say what we see is NOT merely a "pessimistic outlook." It is nihilism. (Tune out if you've already heard me on this subject.) Leftists are like a church that keeps reciting the Creed every Sunday, even though all faith and belief has leaked away. "Liberals" are NOT liberals, and our world will not make sense as long as you keep thinking they are.

Former enemies

Mike Plaiss sent me a link to this Bloomberg piece, Former Iraq Enemies Share Raids as America Prepares to Withdraw. It's interesting to me for several reasons. One is that I think this is the analog, on the level of nations, of the Christian command to love ones enemy. Our contemporary fake-pacifists try to play Christianity as justifying their appeasement of tyrants. But the problem is, they are loving someone else's enemy--and looking on with ice-hearted indifference as the poor someone-else gets shredded like a piñata..

Another piece of crap that stories like this give the lie to is the despicable falsehood spread by America-hating toads that we are fighting the War on Terror for revenge.

Feb. 24 -- Capt. John Bradley, patrol leader of a U.S. field-artillery unit, sat with Col. Mohammed, an Iraqi Army officer, sharing tea and ambitions to wipe out rebels.

Mohammed explained how they would raid a roadside-bomb factory together in Mosul. Bradley offered computer discs of city maps to help.

It was a military love-in a long time coming. After the U.S. led an invasion of Iraq in 2003, American administrators disbanded Saddam Hussein's troops as an incorrigible remnant of dictatorship. Now, Mohammed, a Hussein-era vet who asked that only his first name be used for security, was planning forays with a solicitous American counterpart. "We’re here to back you up," Bradley said.

The performance of Iraq's army, rebuilt in the past five years into a force of 210,000 strong, is fundamental to the country's stability. U.S. soldiers, which number 140,000, are scheduled to withdraw from cities by the end of June and from the whole country by late 2011. President Barack Obama is pondering Pentagon proposals to pull out earlier: perhaps 23 months from now or even by mid-2010.

As the clock runs down, the U.S. is shifting responsibility for counterinsurgency to Iraqis, replacing Americans with recent enemies as the vanguard of pacification.

Officers who served under Hussein have quietly enlisted in the army, and on Feb. 15, Iraqi leaders invited more to return from exile and join up. Former Sunni Muslim rebels have been recruited to police troubled neighborhoods in Baghdad and towns in western Iraq. Desert tribes that once blew up oil pipelines to undermine the American occupation now guard them....

Flaily flaily...

Reader Becky M. notes a climate change ... change:

I was forced to have lunch with two repulsive and rabid environmentalists the other day.

A most unpleasant experience, but I did learn something.

The correct terminology for the phenomenon formerly known as global warming and later as climate change is now to be referred to as "climate disruption." By using "climate disruption," one effectively blocks the "knuckleheads who point to headlines about 'record cold,' etc."

They've already ditched "climate crisis", then. And extreme weather. Can't these clowns make a brand stick? Perhaps we should offer a superior, enduring title -- "weather" might work -- in comments. Otherwise we're going to be hit with New Coke versions of global warming until the End of Days.

"Climate disruption." I'm all agog to see what will happen when it really starts to sink in the the planet is cooling. (Yes, yes, of course the current decade-long cooling trend could reverse. I'll take your bet, if you want to put money on that.)

On the one hand, the chomskies have a lot of credit invested in global warming, so cooling could hit them hard. On the other hand, they don't think or reason (and have no character or honesty) so they will surely try to flip to "Global Cooling Hysteria" without any intervening moment when things are considered OK.

Really, I'm not just being snarky; this very much interests me.

Misses the real question....

Randy Barnett:

...Fair enough. But even with this admonition in mind, I will modify my claim only slightly: No avowedly creationist Republican candidate will be elected President of the United States. Not. Gonna. Happen. And if that creationist Republican candidate is far superior with respect to governing philosophy and executive experience and skills, as he or she may well be, it will be so much the worse for the country. Sorry Bobby, Tim & Mark. Republicans: Do NOT try this electoral experiment. Please!...

(Thanks to Glenn)

My guess is that Randy is off the mark here. The real issue has little to do with science*. (I am by the way a Catholic, and I think Creationism is quite silly. Darwinian evolution is the best model of biological science we have so far, and is not in conflict with Christian faith.)

The real issue is that natural science is commonly used--in a way that has nothing scientific about it--to attack Christian and Jewish faith. We absorb from the culture around us a vague idea that science (or history) has already answered the questions, and have clearly shown that there is no god, etc. Of course science doesn't say anything of the sort.

And this should be of concern even to, say, non-believing libertarians, because the same bogus methods are used to attack things like our civil liberties. Or our belief in our own Western civilization. How so? These things have always been supported by a quasi-religious assumption that they have authority, as things handed down from revered ancestors.

If you say that rights are "inalienable," for instance, you are expressing something analogous to religious faith. Something that can be destroyed by pushing the fraudulent idea that "science" has already debunked all those old fuddy-duddy notions, and that "experts" should be given a free hand to improve and bring-up-to-date. (Experts connected with government, of course.)

A Creationist is attacking an important problem with the wrong weapon. But I would gladly vote for a Creationist if the alternative were someone who vaguely implies that science has rendered things like nations and free speech and human dignity and economic freedom obsolete.

[*As an example of the sort of misuse of science I'm thinking of, I recently read some conservative secularist declare something like "we have no need of improbable events like virgin births..." But an action by God is inherently outside the realm of things we can assign probabilities to. The statement is absurd and meaningless, but many people will take it as good sense.]

Of course it's improper to critique a book just from a review....

...but liberal thinking just doesn't compute, and I'm willing to bet money this stuff wouldn't make more sense if I read the whole thing...

Beliefs - The New Atheism, and Something More - NYTimes.com:

...Mr. Aronson proposed that neither it nor the other [atheist] books under review provided "the most urgent need" for secularists today: "a coherent popular philosophy that answers vital questions about how to live one's life." [It can't be done. You've been trying for several centuries now.]

A "new atheism must absorb the experience of the 20th century and the issues of the 21st," he wrote. "It must answer questions about living without God, face issues concerning forces beyond our control as well as our own responsibility, find a satisfying way of thinking about what we may know and what we cannot know, affirm a secular basis for morality, point to ways of coming to terms with death and explore what hope might mean today." [Tall order! You've rejected authority, so if you succeed, what authority will validate your success? It will just be a theory, competing with ten-thousand other theories.]

"Living Without God" (Counterpoint, 2008) is now the title of Mr. Aronson's own effort to provide such a popular philosophy. It is meant to take up, he writes, where books like "The End of Faith" leave off.

Mr. Aronson makes a good argument that Americans are far more secular -- or at least less religious -- than is often recognized. But, he says, contemporary secularism has lost the buoyant confidence it once gained from "its essential link to the idea of Progress, which promised so much and came to such grief during the 20th century." [Nuh uh, pal. Secularism and "Progress" caused the grief of the 20th century. YOU killed a hundred-million or two people in pursuit of various secular paradises. It doesn't work to pretend that these things just happened out of the blue. The blood is on your hands.]

"To live comfortably without God today," he says, "means doing what has not yet been done -- namely, rethinking the secular worldview after the eclipse of modern optimism." [That optimism was itself a transference of the HABIT of Christian Hope to the secular realm. But the habit's wearing off. Now you are realizing you are bankrupt. ]

Indeed, "religion is not really the issue, but rather the incompleteness or tentativeness, the thinness or emptiness [couldn't have described it better myself], of today's atheism, agnosticism and secularism. Living without God means turning toward something." [Well fancy that! Let me just guess--it's going to be a very amorphous "something." Characterized by... incompleteness or tentativeness, thinness, emptiness... Right? C'mon pal, surprise me! Invent a secular worldview that has even one one-hundredth of the gritty REALNESS of the Church Catholic.]

For Mr. Aronson, that "something" is not the ideal of an autonomous individual striding confidently into the dawning future but the drama [drama??] of an interdependent humankind embedded in complex systems of forces, knit into networks of natural environment, historical legacies, social institutions and personal relations. [What a load of galumpfh. "Embedded in complex systems of forces." What does that MEAN? Embedded like bees in a hive? Like raisins in a cookie? If you have complex systems, then decisions need to be made. Who makes them? How do people set priorities and goals?

What if your priority involves my being eliminated for the good of the whole? Hmmm? What if people don't WANT to be knit into networks? Every revolution starts with wooly-headed intellectuals sketching vague paradises of happy embeds. But the kulaks prefer not to be embedded in the collective farm. So then the ruthless rise to the top, and start forcing people into the mold. And probably sending guys like Aronson on that long march to nowhere.]

From this larger story of interdependency, he draws a ground, not surprisingly, for responsibility and morality: a recognizable left-of-center commitment to collective struggle against "domination, inequality and oppression, rooted in scarcity." [This one sentence has enough lunacy to write a whole essay on. To take just one, morality requires drawing lines. Saying X is immoral, and it is wrong to do it. Period. But just proposing your own morality gives no authority to draw hard and fast rules. How can you? What justifies your rule over someone elses?

And, importantly, who DEFINES things? Liberal morality tends to say "I can do what I want if I don't hurt someone." BUT, it's the liberal himself who is defining what "hurt" is. And who is a "someone." So they can define an unborn baby as "not human," and murder it. Or define the entrepreneurs who provide society's wealth as "parasites" and zeks, and expropriate them, or send them to the camps.]

More originally, he argues that this interdependence should summon gratitude -- gratitude "for," even if not "to." Giving thanks, he recognizes, has been central to religion, and secular culture needs to be enriched with an equivalent.... [There is no equivalent. Gratitude is, in its essence, humble. You can't be grateful for something you think you deserve; you are grateful for a gift. You must acknowledge something bigger and better than oneself. But that's a religious attitude. No one's ever going to feel gratitude to "complex systems of forces."]

I suspect that the recent spate of atheist books is not because atheists think they are winning, nor that, as some have suggested, they think they are losing. I think we are at the moment that Guardini predicted, back in the 1950's. (link) They are staring into the abyss. They are finally realizing what it's like to live without God, or without anything greater than the self.

Remember "Bush epic fail?"

I remember well the foul dishonesty with which lefty-bloggers and "journalists" used Hurricane Katrina as a club to beat President Bush. Now we see how much they really believed what they wrote, as Obama gets a disaster of his own.

I'd say it is time for a lot of people on the Left to apologize. But that would be what adults do; we can't expect it from "liberals." The Anchoress puts things well:

More Ice storm & More | The Anchoress:

...The severe ice storm that has crippled parts of the midwest and devastated Kentucky is getting a little more attention from the press than it has since last Tuesday, when the storm hit. This is the Monday after. Time Magazine writes a professional-sounding piece that is completely devoid of emotion, mentions President Obama exactly once (in passive voice) and never ever strays into unfair wonderings such as "why isn't more being done," or "where is the President, why isn't he present here," or "how can the president stay warm, eat steak and watch football when scores have died, half a million remain cold and helpless, without power, water, heat and sometimes without food?" No one is asking why there are no pictures of bodies for the press to print. Wolf Blitzer, who famously (and terribly) cried of the Katrina displaced, "they are so poor, and so black," is not standing in teeth-chattering frost declaring, "these people are so cold, and so white..."

That would also be a terrible thing to say, and I think playing the racism card is stupid, but the point is, when Katrina hit, the press pulled out every stop they possibly could - including the racism canard - to identify that disaster with a "Bush epic fail." They ignored his early pleadings to Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco to evacuate. They ignored his declaring NOLA and surrounding areas as Disaster Areas even before Katrina hit, so the fed could immediately get to work. They ignored the proper jurisdiction of emergencies (local, then state, then fed) and the extreme incompetence of the Louisiana leadership and made Katrina all about "what Bush did or didn't do." By contrast, the press seems to be going out of its way to insure that Obama is not associated with this week-long drama at all.

We"ve heard that "Bush ate cake", while people suffered. (Obama ate steak and watched the Super Bowl). Bush did not quickly enough go to the disaster area to survey it and hug people and cry. (Obama - like the derided Bush - is wisely staying away so as not to impede relief efforts, but he remains un-derided). Bush dared to praise FEMA, even though FEMA was late because flood conditions and Gov. Blanco prevented them from doing much at first. Obama...hasn't said much of anything....

The main responsibility for disaster response is always local. That should be obvious. My criticism of Bush is that he should have used to mandate of 9/11 to make FEMA more of a goad to improve local response capability, rather than trying to place more responsibility at the federal level.

It's the "anti-torture" crowd that is promoting torture...

Apparently the Obama Administration is banning "harsh interrogation techniques," but preserving the option of rendition!

The twisted logic of this just stupefies me. It's like chopping off a painfully injured limb to avoid the danger of becoming addicted to painkillers.

The simple fact is that waterboarding someone is a thousand times more humane than shipping them off to Jordan to be tortured. Am I right? Any liberals reading this, am I not right? Hmmm? People undergo waterboarding voluntarily. We use it on our own troops in training.

But "liberalism" is about making liberals feel good, not about actually helping human beings.

LAT: Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool The role of the CIA's controversial prisoner-transfer program may expand, intelligence experts say.

The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba.

But even while dismantling these programs, President Obama left intact an equally controversial counter-terrorism tool.

Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism -- aside from Predator missile strikes -- for taking suspected terrorists off the street...

"...taking suspected terrorists off the street." Jeeez. That's what Guantanamo was for. Gitmo is in fact a far more humane facility than ordinary American prisons. European penologists have visited it and reported that it is better than anything they have back home. A thousand times better than what a prisoner will get if shipped to Egypt. But since the evil Bush started it, it has to go. And who cares how much people suffer. Not liberals.

And liberals care nothing about the suffering of the victims of terrorism. In Iraq al-Qaeda has set off powerful bombs in pet markets, where people take children to see the animals. Think about it, you leftists who despise America for extracting information that can stop terror attacks.

New Cabinet post: Department of People-elimination,

The American Spectator: Nancy Pelosi's Modest Proposal:

..."It will reduces costs," Nancy Pelosi said on This Week, in reference to the "stimulus" rationale for sending millions of dollars to the states for "family planning."

What would once have been considered an astonishingly chilly and incomprehensible stretch is now blandly stated liberal policy.

The full title of Jonathan Swift's work, A Modest Proposal, was, For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public. Change a few of the words and it could be a Democratic Party policy paper. Swift suggested that 18th-century Ireland stimulate its economy by turning children into food for the wealthy. Pelosi proposes stimulating the U.S. economy by eliminating them....

...Pelosi has helpfully if dimly blurted out what's often implicit in many of the left's schemes for human improvement: that, after all the rhetorical bells and whistles have fallen silent, the final solution concealed within the schemes is to eliminate people.

Alan Weisman's The World Without Us isn't a horrifying thesis to the liberal elite but enjoyable beach reading. Al Gore lists population control as the first solution to global warming and they nod and give him a Nobel Prize.

They name awards after eugenicists like Margaret Sanger. "Unwanted" children are immediately seen as an unspeakable burden. Pregnancy is a punishment, and fertility is little more than a disease. Pelosi's gaffe illustrates the extent to which eugenics and economics merge in the liberal utilitarian mind. Malthus lives.

Hillary Clinton's State Department will soon treat people-elimination, in one form or another, as "development."...

The Lefist obsession with reducing population doesn't make sense if you think of it as "liberalism." But it makes perfect sense if you realize that most leftists (you've heard this from me before--sorry) are really self-worshippers, who care for no cause higher than themselves. I can easily slip into that frame of mind myself, and then it seems obvious that a lot of people should just vanish. Think how much less crowded the freeways would be!

All this is a good example of how there is terrible moral danger in a vague "do-gooder" attitude. What's that Google motto? "Don't be evil"? Something like that. That kind of thinking is a road that leads to....being evil. Morality isn't something you can just take for granted. Your conscience has to be educated. And it has to be exercised. If it isn't you just drift into the path of least resistance, a la Pelosi, and start thinking what a better world it would be if those icky poor people would just stop being born...

Thise is what "Democrats" were (and are) against...

BBC NEWS, Iraqis vote in landmark elections:

...The turnout is expected to be strong even in Sunni areas. The head of the Iraqi electoral commission in Anbar province - a centre of the Sunni resistance to the US occupation - said he was expecting a 60% turnout.

Fewer than 2% voted in the 2005 election, with the result that Shia and Kurdish parties took control of parliament. Some Sunnis, like Khaled al-Azemi, said the boycott last time had been a mistake. "We lost a lot because we didn't vote and we saw the result - sectarian violence" he told the BBC. "That's why we want to vote now to avoid the mistakes of the past." The drawing of alienated Sunnis back into the political arena is one of the big changes these elections will crystallise, the BBC's Jim Muir reports from Baghdad.

On the Shia side, the results will also be closely watched amid signs that many voters intend to turn away from the big religious factions and towards nationalist or secular ones....

Thank you President Bush, for standing up for freedom and democracy, even for the "inferior races" that leftists despise. Democracy in Iraq may fail in the future, and it will certainly be more rough and trouble-plagued than ours. (But that's true of all of the poorer democracies.)

But it is still a million times better than what life was like under Saddam. Or under al-Qaeda, as they discovered in places like al Anbar. It was and is something worth fighting for.

It's a pity we no longer have a liberal in the White House...

Hugh Hewitt: A lot of people have missed the Obama appeal to Arabiya, and the fact that he didn't bring up its gender apartheid, Christopher Hitchens calls it. It's where gays are executed. And he made no rebuke to these societies. I found it astonishing, Mark Steyn. What did you think?

Mark Steyn: Well, you don't have to be gay, an oppressed homosexual about to be executed. You don't have to be a woman who's being sold to an arranged child marriage. You just have to be a moderate, centrist Arab intellectual in, say, Cairo or Amman, and you listen to Obama sucking up to these creeps, and there's nothing for you in it. What he's doing is he says, he's saying to hell with the Bush freedom agenda. We just want to get back to schmoozing the feted Arab dictatorships and the mullahs in Tehran all over again. And so if you're a gay or a woman, you're out of there. And as I said, if you're a moderate Arab who just would like to have a free society in Cairo or Amman or wherever, you're out of it, too. You're on the Obama horizon. It was a pathetic, disgraceful Jimmy Carter speech.

Hugh Hewitt: I agree with this, and he did it on the day that the Iranians arrested those horrible criminals in Tehran who allowed the women soccer players to play with the men soccer players....

Mark Steyn: ....I think in fact, on that al-Arabiya interview, he just sounded basically way out of his league. And I hope someone brings him up to speed soon, because going around giving those interviews, as I said, he was talking about getting us back to thirty years ago. Well, thirty years ago, they were taking Americans hostage in Tehran. Thirty years ago, Jimmy Carter was communicating weakness to the world, and the Ayatollah rightly concluded these Americans are pushovers. And Obama shouldn't be doing that message all over again. [Transcript of the whole interview here.]

"A pathetic, disgraceful Jimmy Carter speech." Exactly.

It's important to remember how strongly Bush was pressuring the Middle East tyrants towards democracy and human rights, before the Democrat/al-Qaeda Alliance cut the ground from under him. Now we get a "Democrat" sucking up to dictators in the true Carter style.

I'm sure glad I'm not a part of such an evil party.

It's no longer just that the inmates are running the asylum...

...It's that they elect those among themselves who are mentally retarded to provide leadership.

Berkeley departments skirmish over 3M contract:

...Berkeley's public library will face a showdown with the city's Peace and Justice Commission tonight over whether a service contract for the book check-out system violates the city's nuclear-free ordinance. The dispute centers on a five-year, $63,000 contract the library wants to sign with 3M, an international technology company based in Minnesota, to service five scanner machines library patrons use to check out books.

But 3M, a company with operations in 60 countries, refused to sign Berkeley's nuclear-free disclosure form as required by the Nuclear Free Berkeley Act passed by voters in 1986.

As a result, the library's self-checkout machines have not been serviced in about six months. Library officials say 3M is the only company authorized by the manufacturer to fix the machines, which were purchased in 2004.

The library asked the Peace and Justice Commission for a waiver, but at its Jan. 5 meeting the commission voted 7-1, with two abstentions, to reject the request. The library is now appealing the decision to the City Council...

....The Peace and Justice Commission does not see it that way. Commissioners said the library should try harder to find a company that complies with the Nuclear Free Berkeley Act. "We really mean it when we say we don't want to be part of the nuclear machinery," said commission member George Lippman. "The act is meant to be a blow against nuclear war. We're serious about upholding that."...

It's not a "blow against nuclear war." None of those fake-pacifists care about nuclear weapons in Russia or China or Pakistan. None of them gave any encouragement or support to President Bush in his efforts to diplomatically halt nuclear weapons development in Iran or North Korea.

And they are perfectly happy to be protected by the US military, nukes and all. But in the style of snotty teenagers who accept support from their parents as their due, while pretending to be independent and special.

(Via Mark Steyn)

I'm proud to say I've never read Updike...

John Updike's Dead: Do We Still Have To Pretend To Like His Books?:

...Updike was a novelist, not an economist. But the politics with which he infected his craft made him a star.

The media loved Updike because Updike was unsparingly critical of the United States. He castigated it for its greed, its stupidity, its xenophobia. He saw Americans as a group of know-nothing conservatives consumed with money-lust and more typical lust. He saw everyday Americans as hypocrites who thumped both Bibles and the minister's wife.

Updike has been hailed as one of the great American writers. When it comes to American writers, no one surpasses Mark Twain. In his famously brilliant essay, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," Twain took James Fenimore Cooper, author of "The Last of the Mohicans," to the woodshed. His words fairly describe Updike:

"A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are -- oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language. Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.

Long before I was even starting to think clearly about such things, I've had an aversion to all those literary globbits that we are required to like. Supposed to like. You know, supposed to like them because our betters who live in New York tell us to. Fatuous people who write for the New York/er/Times/Review of Books.

"He saw Americans as a group of know-nothing conservatives consumed with money-lust and more typical lust. He saw everyday Americans as hypocrites who thumped both Bibles and the minister's wife." And how did he find that out? From other liberals in Manhattan!

I know how this shit works--I live in San Francisco. Everybody can imitate the accent and asininity of a red-neck southern fundamentalist. How? From the movies, or learned from liberal culture. No liberal I've ever heard of would try to actually get to know small-town or conservative Americans. They already know what to think.

Beyond tacky...

Jay Nordlinger - The Corner on National Review Online:

When I read that the crowd today booed President Bush -- and then saw a video of it -- I thought of a quip my friend Eddie made, not long ago: "When the Left asks for a classless society, now I know what they mean."

So, when will we hear from the torture crowd?

'Hamas torturing Fatah members in Gaza' -- Jerusalem Post:

...A Fatah official in Ramallah told the Post that at least 100 of his men had been killed or wounded as a result of the massive Hamas crackdown. Some had been brutally tortured, he added.

The official said that the perpetrators belonged to Hamas's armed wing, Izaddin Kassam, and to the movement's Internal Security Force.

According to the official, at least three of the detainees had their eyes put out by their interrogators, who accused them of providing Israel with wartime information about the location of Hamas militiamen and officials.

A number of Hamas leaders and spokesmen have claimed in the past few days that Fatah members in the Gaza Strip had been spying on their movement and passing the information to Israel....

So here's our chance to see if those people who have been howling about waterboarding etc. are really what they claim to be, or if they just hate America...

Oh, and those westerners who claim they care SO much about the Palestinians....are they gonna care about these Palestinians?

Summoned to a great cause, "liberals" have failed the test...

This is a bit of a piece that Orrin Judd has re-posted.

...Even setting aside the dependence of a healthy liberal democracy on a morality that only Judeo-Christianity can supply -- an issue you can probably never convince most secularists of -- it is unarguable that to the extent that you diminish the central role of religious institutions in society you create a vacuum which government fills and in the process cause people to be more dependent on government. Thus does secularism, which usually casts itself as a liberating movement, instead lead inexorably to an ever more powerful and intrusive state. The resulting State has no purpose other than its own continuance, a purpose which is obviously abetted by exactly that dependence which its very rise fosters, in a brilliant kind of recursive loop.

We can not be surprised then when our former liberal democratic allies in Europe prove incapable of being summoned to a higher cause--like liberalizing the Islamic world--their only cause is themselves. Though folk have been slow to accept the fact, it is simply the case that we longer share a common culture with them...

We don't have to look so far to find people "incapable of being summoned to a higher cause." That's the American Left in a nutshell. George W Bush summoned them to a noble and liberal cause, and they have failed the test.

Now we get to hear people gassing endlessly about the Civil Rights Movement, with the implication that they--liberals--are still the same people. That things are the same now as way back then, and we can continue to bask in the light of MLK forever. In fact today's leftists are solidly aligned with tyrants and big government, while the captives groan unheard. (Including minority children trapped in failing public schools--that's the civil rights cause of our time.)

And leftists jabber on and on about Hitler, as if "anti-fascist" is still what they are. But Saddam Hussein was the Hitler of our time, and 99% of "liberals" desperately wanted him to be left in power...because they knew a summons to greatness would reveal their utter emptiness. And they try to cover up by pretending to be "pacifists." Frauds.

"Real" truth and the "state" truth

Bookworm, Can't fight group think:

Several years ago, I read one of Natan Sharansky's books in which he described his life as a refusenik in the former Soviet Union. One of the points he made that struck me with incredible force was the way in which citizens in totalitarian regimes develop an internal life entirely separate from the external forces against them. For example, Soviet citizens were forced in public to accept that their economy was a miracle of Communist exceptionalism, even as their logical brains figured out that this propaganda bore no relationship to the truth. Their brains developed a binary quality, processing the "real" truth and the "state" truth, creating an exceptional level of intellectual and emotional stress.

I was rather brutally reminded of that yesterday, when my husband and I had the opportunity to listen to our children speak to third parties about the upcoming inauguration. Both of them, using almost precisely the same words, stated that they were very excited about the inauguration because Obama is the first African-American president, which makes him special.

Later, Mr. Bookworm said to the kids that it sounded a bit funny to him them saying the same thing, and asked if they really meant that. Both assured him that they did not. That is, they didn't bear any hostility to Obama because of his race. They simply didn't care. However, both earnestly explained that, if they didn't say this rote line about Obama's historica importance, they would be ostracized....

A side effect seen in totalitarian states (you could call SF, and Bookworm's Marin County, sort of "honorary totalitarian states") is that those pushing the "state truth" are intellectually weakened, and that they become fearful. Liberals around here are often angry and defensive, and push the "state truth" stridently and insistently. They are afraid. They are living in fear, exactly like a tyrant who does not know who might be plotting against him.

Another irony is that Obama's election has been robbed of most of its "historic meaning" precisely because he ran as someone who was going to be "historic." That's sort of like letting all your friends know you would like a surprise birthday party. The affirmation that you are loved and valued lacks a certain indefinable something...

Progressives, Unite Against The Jews!

Charlene recommends this video, How To Effectively Boycott Israel...

Thanks to israellycool

Now us reality-based conservatives get to laugh at you...

This is NOT an important post--just my chance to "answer back" to a poor fellow who has enough sense to dimly percieve that something's wrong, but can't connect the dots...

Why the anti-war movement is lost, By John Bruhns:

AS INAUGURATION Day approaches, the anti-war movement is working hard to stay politically relevant. President-elect Barack Obama, the anti-war candidate [Nope. Obama is the Obama candidate.] has been empowered by a frustrated electorate demanding exactly what he promised in his campaign: change. [There were all sorts of "changes" hoped for, and each group of suckers lied to itself and "hoped" Obama agreed with them. Now us reality-based conservatives get to laugh at you.]

But the anti-war movement isn't buying the "change" Obama is selling. [Actually, we still don't know what he's selling.] Instead, they've crafted unrealistic demands for the next president, and should he not kowtow, they'll undoubtedly convince themselves he's no different from George W. Bush. Perhaps they already have. [And nobody will care.]

Most Americans agree that the war in Iraq has been a catastrophe financially and militarily. [In fact, compared to other occasions when America has liberated people from fascist tyranny, this one's been cheap and easy.] Some have strictly advocated against the war from a position of philanthropy for the Iraqi people and our service-people killed in action. Whatever the gripe, all aspects have legitimacy. [They are all just covers for nihilism.]

But many fail to realize that the war isn't something that can be easily corrected, because it's festered for far too long. [Festered? Wake up, mush-brain. The Iraq Campaign's been WON, and you are irrelevant.] And since day one, a bipartisan majority of Congress has repeatedly voted to give the Bush administration every tool needed to continue the war - even members of Congress who receive the anti-war vote. [As they say, never give a sucker an even break.]

In the summer of 2007, I had a meeting with Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) and his senior military adviser. Davis, former chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, struck me as a concerned moderate looking for a practical and realistic solution to the mess in Iraq. [We found one. It's called "victory." Your al-Qaeda pals have been crushed in battle, and the poor people of Iraq have at least a chance at the freedom you despise.]

DAVIS UNDERSTOOD my frustration with the war and said, "We have to be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in." I would hear Obama echo the exact same sentiment repeatedly on the campaign trail. [Ya can't be too careful. We're still in Germany and Japan 60 years later. Why don't we round the number up, and plan for a hundred years?]

Later, I and two other vets met with Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.). He listened for more than an hour. At the end, Castle agreed we needed to get out of Iraq. But he had no concrete solution - and neither did we. [How unfair. Al-Qaeda and the Ba'athists slaughtered tens-of-thousands of civilians for YOU, but some days you just can't get a break.]

As you can see, Republicans are not so different from Democrats on the war issue. [Nah, we're a million miles apart. Republicans love America and work for democracy and freedom. Democrats........]

The main contrast I saw in my years of anti-Iraq war advocacy was that while members of both parties voted the same way, the Democrats griped about their votes. They acknowledge that they were against what they were voting for. [Just when talking to you, sucker.] So what's the alternative? Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney aren't getting elected to anything anytime soon.

And here's what we have to look forward to. On March 19, many anti-war groups will assemble a tumultuous crowd at the post-Bush Pentagon. They'll scream for the immediate withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan and Iraq while jumping up and down in opposition to the military industrial complex. [It's all about making themselves feel good.]

They'll demand that legal action be taken against Bush for ordering the invasion of Iraq. [They hate Bush because he's a liberal, in the old sense of Truman and JFK. He shows what phonies they are.]

But the Defense Department doesn't decide whether or not we go to war - that's up to the president and Congress. The military HQ is the wrong venue. [They hate our military because it is symbolic of believing in something enough to fight for it---nihilists hate belief.]

Some Iraq vets will join this protest out of a feeling of nostalgia for a time before they were even born. But it's no longer the Vietnam war, civil-rights, military draft '60s. Sporting a grungy military uniform is a tactic that the real policymakers can dismiss as a non-threat to their political viability. Even John Kerry quit that gig more than 30 years ago. [Well put. It was phony all along.]

Over the life of the recent anti-war movement, the attempted revival of the '60s was destined for failure from the beginning. [The 60's were a stupid tacky failure from the beginning--except for the birth of the conservative movement. That was the one success.]

Too many other issues were dragged into the effort. What middle-of-the-road Americans would attend a demonstration against the war if they knew they'd be standing in a mob of Che Guevara T-shirts listening to chants of 'Free Mumia!'? [A tautology. If they are comfortable with leftist lunacy, they are not "middle-of-the-road."]

I support people protesting what they think are injustices, but all issues aren't linked. It's not a good tactic to force people to stand under an umbrella of issues, all of which that they may not support. [Clue-up, dolt. The "anti-war" movement was always and only about the internal psycho-drama of nihilist whack-jobs. They hate America and Israel, and anything else that is symbolic of allegiance to a higher cause.]

In a democracy, strength is in numbers. This anti-establishment and absolutist view of the political process is likely to be the real cause of their implosion. [Kooks are kooks. Can't get around that.]

As someone who's been fighting for years for an end to the war in Iraq, I find this tragic because we need the voices of millions to put pressure on our elected officials to end the conflict and fix the many problems facing our country. But those voices have to be credible to be taken seriously, and circus acts never are. [A question for you, friend. Suppose America pulls out of Iraq. Would you define that as "the end of the conflict," even if fighting goes on for years and millions die subsequently? Hmmm? That's what the Vietnam protestors did. They "ended" the war, and then patted themselves on the back even as MILLIONS were being killed, or put into concentration camps. Is that OK with you? Look at yourself in the mirror when you shave, and ask yourself if you are that kind of person.]

But the truth is that the 'real' anti-war movement has become far too radical to be effective. [It never cared about actual people.]

They've pushed themselves into a corner where there's no possibility of meeting an opposing side halfway. If they ever hope to regroup into a force capable of generating a strong political will, they'll need to accept that it's 2009, not 1969 - and be more tolerant of other opinions. [I beg you, friend, re-think. You take notice of all this craziness and futility--now ask yourself some questions. You are working with people who would flush the entire population of Iraq down the toilet just to feel self-rightous. You are complicit in their evil. Do you think the same way? If America leaves Iraq, will Iraq drop off your radar? Or do you actually care about that land?]

Today's bit of leftlunacy...

The Secularist Church must have come down hard on Ms. Huffington! Think of the cocktail parties she must have been about to be disinvited to, for daring to suggest that there might be two sides to a certain issue...

NewsBusters.org: Huffington: 'I Would Not Have Posted' Article Asking Gore To Apologize:

....The associate blog editor published the post. It was an error in judgment. I would not have posted it. Although HuffPost welcomes a vigorous debate on many subjects, I am a firm believer that there are not two sides to every issue, and that on some issues the jury is no longer out. The climate crisis is one of these issues...

Pretty funny. Think about how she must have choked when she discovered that she had published heresy! Here's a link to the article...

Harold Ambler: Mr. Gore: Apology Accepted:

....Mr. Gore has stated, regarding climate change, that 'the science is in.' Well, he is absolutely right about that, except for one tiny thing. It is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind.

What is wrong with the statement? A brief list:....

Update: Perhaps I'm too harsh in criticizing "liberals" for having no principles. I'd guess a lot of them are firm believers that the "climate crisis" must not be debated. There's a bedrock principle for you! They will bravely nail their thesis to the door: "There are NOT two sides to every issue."

Suddenly we're all interested in the morality of war...

Jeffrey Goldberg, The World's Pornographic Interest in Jewish Moral Failure :

...Okay, yesterday I was depressed. Today, I'm just pissed off. It's absolutely astonishing to me how interested the world is in Israel's failings. This is the source of a bitter but hilarious observation I once heard a Kurdish leader make: He was complaining to me that his people were cursed, and I asked him what he meant: Cursed by geography, cursed by their proximity to Kurd-hating Arabs, what? He said the Kurds were cursed because they didn't have Jewish enemies. Only with Jewish enemies would the world pay attention to their plight...

I'm pissed too. Hamas has been shooting rockets into Israel for what? Three years now? And where were all the moral geniuses then? Where were the "pacifists?" The "anti-war activists?" Where was the Vatican, and "religious leaders?" Where were the "progressives?" What a bunch of phonies.

But let Israel start to fight back, and people start furrowing their brows and pondering ponderously. Suddenly morality is really a big deal. Mostly Jewish morality...

...One more thing, speaking of pornography -- we've all seen endless pictures of dead Palestinian children now. It's a terrible, ghastly, horrible thing, the deaths of children, and for the parents it doesn't matter if they were killed by accident or by mistake. But ask yourselves this: Why are these pictures so omnipresent? I'll tell you why, again from firsthand, and repeated, experience: Hamas (and the Aksa Brigades, and Islamic Jihad, the whole bunch) prevents the burial, or even preparation of the bodies for burial, until the bodies are used as props in the Palestinian Passion Play. Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble -- and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed. It was one of the more horrible things I've seen in my life. And it's typical of Hamas. If reporters would probe deeper, they'd learn the awful truth of Hamas. But Palestinian moral failings are not of great interest to many people...

The "reporters" won't probe; they are on the other side.

Puzzling things...

Madoff the Jew: The Media's Hypocritical Obsession With the Fraudster's Faith, by Phyllis Chesler:

...Most Jews do not recognize themselves in what Madoff did; they still expect to be judged on their own merits. I doubt this will happen. I think  Jews will be judged as if we are all guilty, whether or not we are innocent or poor, and whether or not we fight for justice for Palestinians or for justice for murdered Chabadniks in Mumbai. Here's one reason why.

For days now,  I have been following the media coverage of the Madoff scandal. I could not help but note that the New York Times kept emphasizing that he is Jewish and moved in monied, Jewish circles; not once, but time and again, in the same article, and in article after article. 'Tis true,  alas, 'tis true, the rogue is a Jew: But how exactly is Madoff's religion more relevant than Rod Blagojevich's religion?  The Times has not described Blagojevich  (or Kenneth Lay of Enron) as "Christians," nor do they describe the Arab or south Asian Muslim terrorists as "Muslims."....[Thanks to Bookworm]

That last sentence is misleading. If there was some way to link Ken Lay with real Christianity, they would have leaped at it. Imagine if he had been a pro-life activist!

Still, the kind of Jew-hatred the Times is showing is strange. It is exceedingly likely that most of the Jews touched by the Madoff mess are not very Jewish, except as a cultural holdover. For most American Jews, their real "religion" is liberalism, and the percentage of them who read the NYT is probably far higher than the general population. Yet we se leftist anti-Semitism all the time, especially in the truly insane hatred of the state of Israel. Think how crazy it is--Israel is a tolerant democratic society where Muslim MP's can heckle the Prime Minister, who might well be a woman. Israel is a place that has "gay pride" parades--and yet the Left invariably prefers Muslims who oppress women and gays.

Equally puzzling is why American Jews continue to put up with this. Perhaps they have just transferred their stubborn religious faithfulness to the new faith of liberalism, and are refusing to be detered by persecution!

Also puzzling is the philo-Semitism of so many of us on the Right. We sure don't gain any tangible benefits! One of the oddest things I read this year was this piece about President Bush's speech to the Israeli Knesset on the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel. The Israelis were quite embarrassed to be lauded as Zionists and the Chosen People. Not to mention those references to that quaint old thing, the Bible!

It's almost like nobody believes the current "non-Jewishness" of so many Jews is real. Like any day now they will pull off the mask and be the People of the Book again...

An excerpt from the article:

....nd most embarrassingly of all, what President Bush believes about the Jews is something that nearly all Jews once believed about themselves. It's aggravating to be reminded of the you you once were and would like to forget. Remember the time back in high school when you had great ambitions and thought you had a God-given talent that the world would hear about some day? Not really, because now, decades later, you've done everything you can to banish it from your mind -- which is why you cringe when you run into an old classmate who recognizes you and exclaims with a slap on the back, "Hey, it's you! I'll never forget the impression you made on me."

For many Jews, President Bush is like that classmate. They wish he hadn't recognized them.

The president, it was observed rather ruefully in Israel, gave a Zionist speech such as hasn't been heard from mainstream Israeli politicians for many years. If by that is meant that he invoked the Bible, rather than the Oslo "peace process" or his own "road map," this is certainly true. The Bible has long ceased to be bon ton in Israeli intellectual life. It has become politically incorrect for Israelis to think that just because some possibly imaginary progenitors of theirs had religious fantasies about God's pledging them a country, their contemporary thinking needs to take this into account. If an American president feels comfortable with such fairy tales, that's no reason why they should.

President Bush clearly believes the Jews are central to history in a way most Jews themselves no longer do. They find such thinking primitive. The only problem is that history itself shows signs of agreeing with the president.

This, really, is the astonishing thing about the country Mr. Bush addressed last week when he said, "Citizens of Israel: Masada shall never fall again and America will be at your side": How central to everything it is. A tiny place with a population that wouldn't fill any of the world's ten largest cities, it finds itself in the middle of all the great conflicts of our times: The battle for democracy, the war against terror, the fight against Islamic fundamentalism, the campaign against nuclear proliferation. Practically every scenario for a nuclear Armageddon, ranging from that of the most wild-eyed preacher of the Gospel to that of the most cool-headed political scientist, revolves around Israel.

Perhaps it really is primitive to believe, as President Bush does, that this has something to do with the Jews being the people of the Bible. Certainly, most Jews themselves would like to think that it has to do with other things. They would rather not be at the center of anything. It makes them nervous when someone reminds them that, despite their best efforts, that's where they still are. The role of being a chosen people is big on them.

The president of the United States disagrees. That's part of the reason why many Jews will be relieved to see him leave office next January. It's not just stem-cell research, or even the war in Iraq. The man thinks too much of us. That's something we're not prepared to put up with...

Zombies. They're back again. Can't kill 'em....

I don't know why I bother to repeat this kind of thing...it is about as inevitable as anything can be that Leftists are going to love a regime that hates America and promises to nuke some Jews. What an intoxicating thrill for our "pacifists!" (And they get the added frisson of betraying their supposed feminism and homo-philia. I suspect a lot of lefties get an almost sexual kick from doing these things that are so deliciously wicked and perverse.)

Anyway, read all about it. Code Pink Hearts Iran's Mullahs:

....Benjamin and Evans wrote daily accounts of their trip to Tehran on their blog — and wasted not a word on poor Fatemeh or on the tragedy of women's rights in Iran under the mullahs and their Sharia laws. Benjamin and Evans portray a rosy and unrealistic situation, where Iranians of all social classes and political persuasions welcome them enthusiastically, share their anti-war sentiments, and desire for peaceful and loving relations with the U.S. and all nations. Medea Benjamin, who lived for seven years in Cuba calling the Castro dictatorship "a paradise on earth," notices that in Tehran "public transportation is priced right -- 20 cents for the subway and 2 cents for the bus." She fails to mention that the Iranian currency sustained 700 percent devaluation since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and that inflation is at 23% according to governmental statistics and significantly higher than that according to World Bank estimates. Income per capita in Iran is $300 per year, a pittance when compared to other oil-rich nations in the Persian Gulf, like Kuwait ($26,000), United Arab Emirates ($25,000), or Saudi Arabia ($12,400).

Recently, an Iranian parliamentarian blurted out that almost 50% of Iran, the fourth most oil-rich country in the world, is living on or under $1 a day. This means there are some who are not able to satisfy their basic needs for food, clothing, and housing, let alone transportation, even if the public transportation ticket does "only" cost 20 cents of a toman, the Iranian currency....

By the way, while those limousine radicals were in Iran, a woman was executed there for the crime of killing her husband to prevent him raping their 14-year old daughter. Hung from the neck until dead. Let's all just hold our breaths, waiting for our anti-death-penalty "activists" to raise their voices in protest...

Essential reading for the serious person in our time...

Macklin Horton has an important post, on reading the book Witness, by Whittaker Chambers.

I haven't quite finished Whittaker Chambers' Witness, but I'm ready to declare that it's essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the 20th century and the spiritual battle being waged in the modern world generally—meaning, by "modern," roughly "post-Enlightenment"...

...At the end of The Lord of the Rings Sauron is defeated and destroyed. But we are given to understand—I can't remember whether it's in the book or in some remark of Tolkien's elsewhere—that his evil does not cease to exist, but rather spreads as a sort of vapor, dispersing itself throughout the world; from this time on, evil will not be so concentrated and easy to identify, but will work subtly and obscurely.

Something like that is the situation we're in after the fall of the great totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, communism and fascism. Of the two, the evil of fascism has generally been easier to recognize, or at any rate more widely recognized, principally because of the Holocaust but also because its mythos is in general less appealing, especially to those who set the terms and tone of opinion in our society. Communism had a deeper and wider appeal, in part because it spoke, superficially at least, to more benevolent motives. But if it's possible to say that one is worse than the other, I would say that communism takes the prize, in part because it was more successful and thus able to murder more people, and partly because it was more consciously and systematically an assault on God. Communism involved a cold intention to remove from the universe any moral authority external to man, to seize that authority for man—for the handful of men worthy of it, on behalf of all the rest—and to exercise it for the purpose of creating heaven in the only place where it could possibly exist, in this life. (Fascism, in contrast, seems to have been less coherent.)...

...Like the cloud that was Sauron, communism as an all-explanatory philosophy and an all-encompassing program of action, both directed against God, has been dispersed. There is no single ideology or mass movement with both its coherence and its popularity at work today. But the basic idea—there is no God, and we're glad there isn't, because now we can get on with the business of solving our problems without interference from superstition—is everywhere. The intellectual and spiritual presuppositions of much of our political and social discourse are the same as those of communism...

The "debonair nihilism" of our age does not produce the titanic struggles that were going on when I was a boy, though the battle is just as deadly. Now the "vapor of evil" is everywhere and nowhere, as hard to fight against as blowing leaves. The story Chambers tells is a kind of analog of our own story...

I quoted a little bit from Witness here

Looks like being in the Loyal Opposition is going to be a lot of laffs...

There are so many funny things lately. I keep finding myself staring at the screen with a big grin. This one sounds like a classic dirty trick played on some Euro-nihilist terror-appeasers who really deserve it...

SPIEGEL ONLINE: US Military Praise 'Ludicrous': Steinmeier Rejects Doubts about Agents in Iraq :

...The parliamentary investigative committee had been meeting for hours by the time daylight began fading in the middle of the afternoon on Thursday in Berlin. But right at 3:24 p.m., Germany's normally unflappable Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier lost his temper. He had said a number of times throughout the day that his patience was growing thin. This time, though, he pounded loudly on the table.

Few were surprised by the display of frustration. Anticipation of Steinmeier's appearance before the committee has been growing all week -- ever since SPIEGEL published US military praise for the help provided by two German intelligence agents stationed in Baghdad in the run-up to the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. At the time, Steinmeier was chief of staff under then Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who had staked his political reputation on his opposition to the war. Now, he is the Social Democrat candidate for the Chancellery in next year's elections. Should the investigative committee find that Germany assisted the US invasion, it could seriously harm Steinmeier's credibility.

All of which helps explain Steinmeier's vehement rejection of the new claims that German intelligence played an important role in the Iraq War. Repeatedly, he called the investigative committee "naïve" for believing that the new US military comments weren't politically motivated. He called US comments 'ludicrous' and 'outlandish.' He said that the military praise of German intelligence was 'poisoned.'

The comments Steinmeier was referring to, though, are difficult to brush aside. General Tommy Franks, who led 'Operation Iraqi Freedom,' told SPIEGEL that 'it would be a huge mistake to underestimate the value of information provided by the Germans. These guys were invaluable.'

General James Marks, who was in charge of pre-invasion reconnaissance, told SPIEGEL that the two German agents from the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, were 'heroes' who had helped save American lives. He said 'we trusted the Germans more than we trusted the CIA.'

Marc Garlasco, who was head of High Value Targeting at the Pentagon during the Iraq invasion, told SPIEGEL that 'it is rewriting history to deny that the BND helped us in US military and combat operations during the war.' He also said 'German (human intelligence) was far more robust and ever present than any of the garbage we got from CIA sources. The Germans were reliable, professional military people...

I think W should give the guy a medal. That would fix his wagon!

"...the military praise of German intelligence was 'poisoned.'" Well yeah.

Well, Wright's a prophet, doncha know...

Mary Katharine Ham, Liberal Logic: Wright vs. Warren

Let me get this straight:

A 20-year association with a radically leftist, anti-American, racist preacher whom Obama referred to as a spiritual adviser meant absolutely nothing about Obama's judgment or philosophy, and illustrated only the bigotry of those who dared criticize it.

A 20-minute association with one of the country's most well-liked, mainstream evangelical preachers who happens to support traditional marriage cannot be countenanced and illustrates only the bigotry of those who would dare allow it.

Got it.

How many Progressives does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

We had dinner with a crowd of liberals last night, which provided me with one moment of bliss. A guy told me, with great seriousness, that while the departure of Bush and Sarah Palin from the public scene was good for the country, it was going to be bad for comedians, who will not have anything to poke fun at anymore....

"One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing . "

The Phoenix, Take Back Barack:

.....Millions of us stood up and shouted, handed out fliers, talked to our neighbors, donated hard-earned money, and drove people to the polls for Change. We screamed, hugged, kissed, and cried when we learned Change had come to America. We knew Change wouldn't come overnight, that it would take time, but we were excited that we had elected a man who was open to Change, who said he wanted to consider real people's needs while in the Oval Office. We eagerly awaited the first hints of Change, as the president-elect's transition developed.

And now, we have reason to worry that Change is not coming to America after all. For nearly two years we were encouraged to 'Be the Change you want to see in America.' It is now obvious that we have a ways to go toward Being that Change. And so does President-elect Barack Obama. And that, above all else, needs to Change....(Thanks to Orrin Judd.)

I suppose I ought to feel pity for the starry-eyed who swooned over Obam, and worked hard for "Change," but the fact is, they are so STUPID they deserve to be winnowed out of the gene-pool by Darwinian selection. If a person has reached the age of 46 years, then you can see what sort of person they are. If they are one of the rare people who changes things, then they will have already changed something! Accomplished something.

Obama and "change" is like a person who has been a shy introvert all their life announcing that, if elected, they will be an effervescent extrovert. C'mon now, how likely is that? How STUPID would a person have to be to believe that?

Actually, I don't think they are intrinsically stupid. They are rendered stupid by bad ideas.

You can't call them Nazis...they have a clinic!

This piece by the "Public Editor" of the NYT, Separating the Terror and the Terrorists, is about the reluctance of the Times to use the word "terrorist."

The namby-pamby-ism is just amazin'. I could write a long thoughtful screed on why obvious terrorists are not called terrorists, but really all it takes is a sentence. The Times, and most of our lefty "journalists," are like the isolationists before WWII trying to write about Nazi Germany. If you tell the truth (then or now) you are lining up for war alongside the United States and the Jews.

....The issue comes up most often in connection with the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and to the dismay of supporters of Israel--and sometimes supporters of the other side, denouncing Israeli military actions--The Times is sparing in its use of 'terrorist' when reporting on that complex struggle.

The reluctance carried over when the Mumbai attacks began. Graham Bowley, who was writing for a Times blog, The Lede, said, "I'm aware very much of the sensitivity around the word, so I knew they had to be 'attackers' " until the paper knew more. One of his editors, Andrea Kannapell, told me she was much more focused in the early hours on who the people were and what they were doing than on what to call them.

Readers like 'Bill' were having none of it, and as Jim Roberts, the editor of the Web site, read their comments, he began to think they had a point. 'Indiscriminately shooting civilians seems on its very face to be an act of terror,' he said. How, Roberts wondered, could you separate the act from the actor?

He conferred with Kannapell, Paul Winfield, the news editor, and Phil Corbett, Winfield's deputy. Winfield talked with Ian Fisher, a deputy foreign editor. 'Terrorist' became an acceptable term in the Mumbai story. 'We jointly decided we didn't need to be throwing the word around flagrantly, but we didn't need to run away from it, either,' Roberts said.

Ilsa and Lisa Klinghoffer, whose father, Leon, was shot and thrown from a cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists in 1985, wrote a letter to the editor asking why The Times was referring to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the shadowy group that apparently orchestrated the Mumbai attacks, as a 'militant group.' "When people kill innocent civilians for political gain, they should be called 'terrorists,' " the sisters said.

Susan Chira, the foreign editor, said The Times may eventually put that label on Lashkar, but reporters are still trying to learn more about it. 'Our instinct is to proceed with caution, not rushing to label any group with the word terrorist before we have a deeper understanding of its full dimensions,' she said.

To the consternation of many, The Times does not call Hamas a terrorist organization, though it sponsors acts of terror against Israel. Hamas was elected to govern Gaza. It provides social services and operates charities, hospitals and clinics. Corbett said: 'You get to the question: Somebody works in a Hamas clinic — is that person a terrorist? We don't want to go there.' I think that is right.....

My advice to Lashkar-e-Taiba: open a clinic. That will give the Times cover for its appeasement.

The future belongs to those who will fight for it...

I found this piece from The Australian, Obama May Have To Keep Neo-con Ideals, very revealing. For the obvious irony of course, but more for the underlying dilemma of the left--which won't go away because a lefty is in the White House... (I point the problem out in paragraph three.)

Ian Buruma writes:

WITH George W. Bush's presidency about to end, what will happen to the neo-conservatives? Rarely in the history of US politics has a small number of bookish intellectuals had so much influence on foreign policy as the neo-cons had under Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney, neither of whom is noted for his deep intellectual interests. [They are both of them deeper thinkers than the press wants us to know. But more importantly, the job of a leader is NOT to be a clever intellectual, but to have the wisdom to chose the right policies. A wise leader uses intellectuals such as the neo-cons, none of whom should ever be president.]

Most presidents hope to attach some special meaning to their time in office. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, gave neo-con intellectuals the chance to lend their brand of revolutionary idealism to the Bush-Cheney enterprise. [Note how the author insunuates motives here--but he will not present any evidence for the sneer. The neo-cons had been saying for decades that our policies were failing, and we were heading for big trouble. Being right when everyone else was wrong tends to EARN one the job of cleaning up the mess.]

Writing for journals such as The Weekly Standard and using the pulpits of think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, neo-cons offered an intellectual boost to the invasion of Iraq. The logic of the US mission to spread freedom across the globe - grounded, it was argued, in American history since the founding fathers - demanded nothing less. [I'll fill you in on what's really going on. You can skip the rest of my stuff, but understand this: This "neo-con" notion of overthrowing tyrants and spreading freedom is linked in our history with certain leaders...FDR, Truman, JFK. It is the quintessential LIBERAL project. In fact it is fair to call the neo-cons Liberals, in the older sense of those who think that things and countries can be fixed.

They, and Bush, are the true liberals of our time. That's why they are hated by the Left. Because most leftists are no longer liberals, but are still wearing liberal garments as a disguise. Bush and the Iraq Campaign have shone a cruel spotlight on leftists, and revealed them as the nihilists they have become. You will never understand current politics until you grasp that liberals aren't liberal anymore. Baruma is tiptoeing around the problem in this piece.]

Objections from European and Asian allies were brushed away as old-fashioned, unimaginative, cowardly reactions to the dawn of a new age of worldwide democracy, [Which they were.] enforced by unassailable US military power. [The neo-cons never said any such thing. Rather, that democracy was something that would grow and take root if our power cleared it some space. Since this has happened many times in the post-WWII world, it's not an unreasonable proposal.]

The neo-cons will not be missed by many. [I'd bet money you are wrong.] They made their last stand in the presidential election campaign of Republican John McCain, whose foreign policy advisers included some prominent members of the fraternity. (Most were men.) None, so far, seems to have found much favour in the ranks of Barack Obama's consultants.  [Wait'll he actually decides to accomplish something. He'll need to find some thinkers who still believe that things can be fixed. Nihilists and "realists" won't cut it.]

Such clout as the neo-cons wielded under Bush is unusual in the political culture of the US, which is noted for its scepticism towards intellectual experiments. [And yet with a straight face Leftists will say that Bush is "anti-intellectual."]

A certain degree of philistinism in politics is not a bad thing. Intellectuals, usually powerless themselves outside the rarefied preserves of think tanks and universities, are sometimes too easily attracted to powerful leaders in the hope that such leaders may carry out their ideas.

But wise leaders are necessarily pragmatic because messy reality demands compromise and accommodation. Only zealots want ideas to be pushed to their logical extremes. The combination of powerful leaders with an authoritarian bent and intellectual idealists often results in bad policies. [Baruma's so close, but can't make the leap. The Iraq Campaign was extremely pragmatic. You can read my reasons here.]

This is what happened when Bush and Cheney took up the ideas promoted by the neo-cons. Both previously had been pragmatic men. Bush first ran for office as a cautious conservative, prepared to be moderate at home and humble abroad. Cheney was better known as a ruthless bureaucratic operator than a man of bold ideas. But he was obsessed with the notion of expanding the executive powers of the president. [He was, wisely, concerned to reverse the post-Watergate erosion of Presidential power. It was not an expansion. And each of our major wars has required the amplification of executive power. Bush has done nothing compared to Lincoln or Wilson or FDR.]

The combustible mix of autocratic ambition and misguided idealism took hold soon after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Even if, by some miracle, Iraq were to evolve into a stable, harmonious, liberal democratic state, the price already paid in (mostly Iraqi) blood and (mostly American) treasure is already too high to justify the kind of revolutionary military intervention promoted by the neo-cons. [ Nonsense. The price has been TRIFLING compared to our other experiments in freeing countries and helping them become democratic. About one tenth of the price for South Korea for instance---does the author think that was a mistake? Would he care to compare North and South Korea, and then apply the same standard to Truman that he does to Bush?]

Another casualty of neo-conservative hubris may be the idea of spreading democracy. The word, when voiced by US government spokesmen, has become tainted by neo-imperialist connotations. [The connotations exist only in the heads of lefty nihilists. To the oppressed peoples of the earth the dream is as sweet as ever. As witness the ENVY being expressed in Third World countries because here in America a corrupt governor has been arrested!]

Similar things have happened before, of course. The idealism of Japanese intellectuals in the 1930s and early '40s was partly responsible for Japan's catastrophic war to liberate Asia from Western imperialism. [What pernicious nonsense. This is the usual "moral equivalence" malarky of people desperate to deny that there are high ideals that impose a DUTY on them. ]

The ideal of pan-Asian solidarity in a common struggle for independence was not a bad one; it was commendable. [That "ideal" was never Japanese policy. Our ideals ARE policy.] But the idea that it could be enforced by the imperial Japanese army running amok through China and Southeast Asia was disastrous. [There is no comparison. We have not "run amok;" we have liberated just two countries, and helped them form elected constitutional governments. ]

Socialism, too, was a brave and necessary corrective to the social inequalities that emerged from laissez-faire capitalism. Watered down by the compromises without which liberal democracies cannot thrive, socialism did a great deal of good in western Europe. [Europe is DYING, you fool. Dying of socialism before our eyes. Every European country is in demographic collapse. Europe is bankrupt and decadent, no longer leading in ANY realm except bureaucratic regulation. Not in religion, nor ideas, nor movements, nor economic growth, nor innovation, nor the arts. No one goes to Europe for the exciting new trends. (Except to Vatican City.) Socialism has failed, always and everywhere.] But attempts to implement socialist or communist ideals through force ended in oppression and mass murder.

This is why many central and eastern Europeans view even social democracy with suspicion. Even as Obama is worshipped in western Europe, many Poles, Czechs and Hungarians think he is some kind of socialist. [They KNOW! They know the beast.]

The neo-cons, despite their name, were not really conservatives at all. They were radical opponents of the pragmatic approach to foreign strongmen espoused by people who called themselves realists. Even though the arch-realist Henry Kissinger endorsed the war in Iraq, his brand of realpolitik was the primary target of neo-con intellectuals. [To oppose "realism" does not mean you are not a conservative.]

They believed that aggressive promotion of democracy abroad was not only moral, and in the US tradition, but in the national interest as well. [They didn't just assert it, they made a case. Which leftists have never countered in any credible way. Instead they just pretend the theory has already been invalidated.]

There is a core of truth in this assertion. Liberals, too, can agree that Islamist terrorism, for instance, is linked to the lack of democracy in the Middle East. Realism, in the sense of balancing power by appeasing dictators, has its limits.

Democracy must be encouraged, wherever possible, by the most powerful democracy on earth. But revolutionary wars are not the most effective way to do this. [I've bad news for you pal. It's always going to be a bloody and messy business. Therefore it will only be done by those who still have beliefs they are willing to fight for. Therefore you Eloi are out of the game. You are useless and obsolete. The future belongs to those who will fight for it.]

What is needed is to find a less belligerent, more liberal way to promote democracy, stressing international co-operation instead of blunt military force. [It'll never happen. It's the same with nations as with individuals. Those who are willing to fight are real, all others are just fading shadows. You might notice that the "shadows"—people or nations— have at least two things in common. Lack of Christian or Jewish faith.......and socialism.]

Obama is unlikely to repeat the mistakes of the neo-cons. [He will have to folllow the template Bush has set for the WoT. But he will probably not do it as well.] But, to succeed, he will have to save some of their ideals from the ruins of their disastrous policies. [He is going to piggyback on Bush's successes, and try to claim them as his own.]

Rights become negotiable....

Charlene pointed me to these paragraphs from a piece in the Weekly Standard, Human Rights at 60:

....How did we arrive at this dismal state of affairs? The problem is not simply that human rights have become grossly politicized. The problem is that rights have been profoundly secularized--and severed from their deepest moral foundation, the concept of man as the imago Dei, the image of God.

Under the banner of 'multiculturalism,' the United Nations has produced a torrent of treaties and conventions, with ever-expanding categories of rights. In the process, the Western idea of rights as transcendent claims against a coercive state has been greatly weakened. Human rights are on the same footing as social benefits and economic aspirations. Thus, we have the spectacle of the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development inviting North Korea--a regime that sustains itself by starving its people--to become a member in good standing. We have nations such as Iran claiming an 'inalienable right' to nuclear technology, language that in fact appears in Article IV of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Where is Thomas Jefferson when you need him? When human rights are no longer considered the gift of nature and nature's God, human dignity is made more vulnerable to assault. When repressive regimes are rewarded with membership and voting privileges in U.N. bodies, the entire human rights project is debased. The political result is that fundamental rights--the right to life, freedom of speech, freedom of religion--become negotiable. In the end, they become disposable....

That rights can be negotiable is exactly what the Fathers of this country opposed. "The rights of Englishmen are derived from God, not from king or Parliament, and would be secured by the study of history, law, and tradition." -- John Adams

I despair about these and similar things. Our rights erode before our eyes because we won't think clearly about them. But of course it is always a small minority of human beings who will think clearly about ANY subject. If we are dependent on thinking we are toast, and that's always been the case.

Which is why — you liberals needn't bother reading this; you are probably too far gone to get it — which is why tradition is valuable above almost anything. Individuals don't think, but cultures slowly ruminate, with God's help, and codify wisdom in the form of tradition.

The wise person will consult tradition first, and cherish it because it will be in many ways wiser than he can ever be.

And those who wish to destroy us will attack tradition. Will sneer at it, and undermine it. For instance by inventing new "rights" to destroy the traditional Anglospheric belief that rights are inalienable, which is to say that they are bigger than us, and not something we create.

And the attacks being made on our rights and traditions are always disguised as things beneficial. Liberals today often assert that we have a "right" to health care. This is an extremely evil thing in itself (That's a subject for another post) but it is also a very insidious attack on our rights because who could dare be against health care? How could one be so cold-hearted as to be against such health? How easy it is to denigrate that person, to say they are heartless, and want people to die.!

"I should be very much obliged if you would slip your revolver into your pocket, Watson..."

Reason #339 why liberals discourage the study of history... (Thanks to Glenn R.)

If each of us carried a gun--Times Online:

....Rhetoric about standing firm against terrorists aside, in Britain we have no more legal deterrent to prevent an armed assault than did the people of Mumbai, and individually we would be just as helpless as victims. The Mumbai massacre could happen in London tomorrow; but probably it could not have happened to Londoners 100 years ago.

In January 1909 two such anarchists, lately come from an attempt to blow up the president of France, tried to commit a robbery in north London, armed with automatic pistols. Edwardian Londoners, however, shot back -- and the anarchists were pursued through the streets by a spontaneous hue-and-cry. The police, who could not find the key to their own gun cupboard, borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by, while other citizens armed with revolvers and shotguns preferred to use their weapons themselves to bring the assailants down.

Today we are probably more shocked at the idea of so many ordinary Londoners carrying guns in the street than we are at the idea of an armed robbery. But the world of Conan Doyle's Dr Watson, pocketing his revolver before he walked the London streets, was real. The arming of the populace guaranteed rather than disturbed the peace.

That armed England existed within living memory....

I've read about incidents like this in Israel, where people pull out their pistols and chase down terrorists. Terrorism isn't a new concept. what's new is our populations of hapless "protected" people, who are taught to think that nothing's worth fighting for. Also new is the twisted idea that countries can safely wage covert war by supporting terrorist groups. In the past that would have been pointless, because they would have gotten open war pronto. Just another way that pacifism causes war and bloodshed.

The article also has this quote by Ghandi, which I had not seen before:

"Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest"

Parasites...

Our letter to Amazon.com, regarding their: "Amazon Music's 12 Days of Holiday" promo... (Thanx to Mark Steyn.)

Please tell someone in charge who cares about your customers (if there are any) that we are people who spend a lot of money with you, and we are disgusted and offended by your "twelve days of holiday" promotion.

You probably have some BS line about "Christmas" being offensive to other faiths, but it isn't. It's only offensive to lefty nihilists. To YOU.

If you don't like "Christmas," why don't you have the HONESTY to stop having what are obviously Christmas promotions, from which you make a mint of money! And stop using a Christmas carol for advertising that is unwilling to use the word "Christmas."

John and Charlene Weidner

PS: Have a happy and Holy Christmas.

If the animal-rights loonies don't like it...

....It's good by me!

I was just telling Charlene there's nothing to read on the blogs, and then Andrea came through. Thanks! ...

Yes, there is a Santa Claus:

And I'll bet he eats reindeer sausage.

I don't know about you, but my estimation of Ikea just went up a little from that report. I mean, I love their cheap Swedish-designed crap assembled into flat packs by Chinese political prisoners like anyone else, but selling reindeer meat during the holidays? That takes balls. I wonder if they have any at my local store... (Probably not, I do live near Disney World after all -- God forbid some tourist decide to stop by for Swedish meatballs and see that Donder and Blitzen are shrinkwrapped and ready for snacking...)

How likely is the "accident" theory?

A prominent SF Jewish gay pro-Israel activist goes to his Arabic class--which was cancelled, but he didn't get the message--and somehow forces open the door of an out-of-order elevator and falls down the shaft and is killed. Police are calling it an "accident."

Read here.

Of course they call it an accident. THEY DON'T WANT TO KNOW! Don't want to know they're at war.

...So why are so many prominent Western media reluctant to call the perpetrators terrorists? Why did Jon Snow, one of Britain's most respected TV journalists, use the word "practitioners" when referring to the Mumbai terrorists? Was he perhaps confusing them with doctors?

Why did Britain's highly regarded Channel 4 News state that the "militants" showed a "wanton disregard for race or creed" when exactly the opposite was true: Targets and victims were very carefully selected. Why did the "experts" invited to discuss the Mumbai attacks in one show on the state-funded Radio France Internationale, the voice of France around the world, harp on about Baruch Goldstein (who carried out the Hebron shootings in 1994), virtually the sole case of a Jewish terrorist in living memory?...

Especially sickening to me is that American Jews don't want to know. Or rather, liberal Jews. They've converted to a new secularist faith, and desperately wish that the crazy uncles in their mental attics would just go away, and stop the God talk, so they can assimilate in peace, and enjoy being Eloi.

FOOLS. If you are Jewish, there are millions of people on this planet who would enjoy killing you. Personally. With their own hands. And they don't care that you've discovered flower-power and you think weakness and passivity will make war go away and everyone live as brothers-in-insipidity.

You may not be interested in war,
but war is interested in you.
    -- Leon Trotsky

ALSO: I wrote a post a couple of years back, about the way police almost always label lone-wolf jihadis as anything except......Islamic terrorists. They are always said to be mentally disturbed individuals who were upset by their purely secular personal life.....even if they put a Koran in their pocket and start killing people. I can't find the post now. Does anybody remember any key-words I can search for?

Update: Never mind, I found it. The key-word was "Bosnia." GO READ IT!
>

"Liberalism" is anti-human...

Sunday Mercury: POLITICALLY correct NHS bosses in Birmingham are battling to ban a smoking room for terminally ill patients -- forcing them to be turfed out into the cold to enjoy their final cigarettes.

The Sheldon Unit, a palliative care home for patients dying from lung cancer and other diseases, in Northfield, is one of only two health centres in the region that has escaped rigid Smoke Free legislation on 'sympathetic grounds'.

But when board members of South Birmingham Primary Care Trust, in charge of the unit, heard of plans to upgrade the smoking room with a new ventilation system, the whole scheme went up in smoke.

Bureaucrat Dr Chris Spencer-Jones, South Birmingham public health director, ranted against the renovation plans, saying he did not care if lifelong smokers were dying, he still didn't want them smoking indoors.

"It doesn't matter if patients might be terminally ill," said Dr Spencer-Jones, who also heads the British Medical Association's (BMA) national committee for public health....

He laughs, bitterly...

Michelle, on the latest from the Obama transition process, aka: Becoming Grownups In 60 Days...

...Nothing clarifies the mind like a jihadi boomerang. Never before have an administration and its followers matured so quickly in office -- and they haven't even taken office yet. While Obama paid lip service to the "Close the Gitmo gulag!" agenda on 60 Minutes over the weekend, his kitchen cabinet is proceeding more pragmatically. Believe it or not, the Obama crowd is now contemplating a preventive detention law and an alternative judicial system for the most sensitive national security cases involving the most highly classified information. Information that has no place being aired in the civilian courts for public consumption...

...Moreover, Obama transition team members have suggested to the Wall Street Journal that despite his campaign season CIA-bashing, "Obama may decide he wants to keep the road open in certain cases for the CIA to use techniques not approved by the military, but with much greater oversight."

Next thing you know, they'll start arguing that the world has been fooled by years of sob-story propaganda about the Gitmo detainees-- funded by Kuwaiti government-subsidized lawyers who cast them all as innocent potato farmers and schmucks dazed and confused on battlefields.....

The deeper issue revealed here is that the domestic opponents of our efforts in the War on Terror have been deeply dishonest and morally corrupt. Random Jottings has been arguing that since November 2001. People put on a guise of principled opposition to war, or religious opposition or pacifism or respect for "international law." But these are just camouflage for brutally expedient Leftism.

Just you watch. Once a Dem is in the White House, then a bit of roughness in dealing with terrorists will be no big deal. Laudable, even. Remember, "extraordinary rendition" was an invention of the Clinton Administration.

Leftist theory imposed on people; MILLIONS die...

....How many times have we heard that story!

...The story of Zimbabwe is one of the great tragedies of the 20th century. Once a first-world nation, Rhodesia -- and Zimbabwe during the 80s -- exported enough food to feed roughly half of Africa. Though deeply stained by the apartheid policies of the white minority government, Rhodesia still boasted the largest black middle class in Africa, had a top-tier educational system for both blacks and whites that rivaled those in Europe and the United States, a Rhodesian dollar that was nearly equal with its U.S. cousin, and unemployment that was in the low single digits.

Today, after Robert Mugabe's tyrannical 28 year reign, Zimbabwe has become one of the poorest nations in the world. Unemployment is at 80 percent and rising. Inflation is an unbelievable 2000 percent, also rising. Once the breadbasket of Africa, Zimbabwe is now reliant on Western food relief to feed its people. Refugees pour over the South African and Botswanan borders by the thousands, as AIDS (and now cholera) ravage the countryside. Life expectancy for a Rhodesian male was appx. 67 years. That number has collapsed to an unthinkable 37 years.

To this day, Carter is unrepentant for his assistance in Mugabe's rise to power...

He is unrepentant. In fact, as far as I can see, ALL leftists are unrepentant about this latest batch of millions of deaths they have caused. They don't care---their "theory" is what is real; the human beings are just cardboard figures.

If you are a "liberal," if you are part of Lefty/Progressive/Democrat/Quaker/peacenik/liberal-christian "Axis Of Fuzzy Thinking," then YOU helped destroy these people. Cholera! Cholera in the 21st Century! That's INSANE. But you don't care.

And almost worse than the ice-heartedness of leftists is that none of you will re-think.

In fact I suspect the textbooks will continue to trumpet the great "civil rights" victory of removing whites from power in Rhodesia! That's much more important than the deaths of a few niggers.

One would have thought that the great prosperity of Rhodesia would have caused people to be cautious, so as not to kill the goose whose golden eggs helped blacks as well as white ruling class. (Rhodesia was not "apartheid," by the way). It should have been obvious to anyone that the real resource behind the prosperity of Rhodesia was white people, and that preserving that capital should be the number one priority of anyone who really wanted to help blacks!

But the real priority was always feeding the smugness of "liberals."

People refer to the Gulag, or Pol Pot, or the Cultural Revolution, as mistakes of the past. But the death toll of Jimmy Carter and other liberals who helped Mugabe into power could easily top Cambodia. Jimmy Carter is our Pol Pot!

Guess where this is heading...

India Times: India, which is planning to send four more warships to the Gulf of Aden, has already conveyed to Somalia that it will use all necessary means to fight pirates who have targeted merchant ships passing through one of the world's strategic shipping lanes off the coast of Somalia.... [It's in those Anglosphere genes.]

....After the Indian offensive against the pirates, the Indian government is now considering the option of augmenting forces in the pirate-infested waters. [Ramp it up. If nothing else, you will blood the troops.] At present India has deployed INS Tabar, a stealth guided missile frigate, that has successfully defended two merchant ships against a pirate attack and ensured safe passage of many more. [Unilateralist cowboys! Advocates of violence!] The proposal is to send four more warships to the region. Naval officials also met defence minister A K Antony to discuss matters related to the continuing naval operation.

But even as the Navy takes a decision at augmenting its efforts in the Gulf of Aden, there is also consensus within the Navy and the government that the menace can only be tackled effectively if there is a coordinated international effort to take on the pirates who have managed to grab the world's attention by seizing a number of ships including Saudi owned supertanker. At the moment countries are only defending their own merchant ships. [The term you will be needing soon is "Coalition of the Willing." Try the Poles.]

India has been pushing for such an international effort and at a recent meeting of the International Maritime Organisation had revived a proposal to set up a UN peacekeeping force to take on pirates in the region. "These proposals are under consideration," said Mr Ravi, adding that a concrete proposal would emerge after consultations in the UN. [Been there, done that. Won't work.]

Mr Ravi also pointed out that were two United Nations Security Council resolutions on piracy. UN resolution 1816, which was approved on June 2, 2008, allows foreign navies to enter Somalian territorial waters to pursue pirates while resolution 1838, which was passed on October 20, 2008, authorises the use of "necessary means" to combat piracy in international waters. India can take action under these two resolutions but there is recognition that a more substantive resolution is needed for a coordinated international effort. [There were 16 "Binding UN Resolutions" against the Saddam regime. When we finally enforced them, all the world's lefty frauds said we were "violating international law." Just warning you.]

However, India is not isolated in its call for an international effort. The US and other countries have also talked about the need for an international effort against pirates. The US said that it is worked in the Security Council to pass a new resolution piracy. ["The US and other countries..." It's called the "Axis of Good." Guy named Bush started it. It means you go through the UN bullshit, then a few non-decadent countries just go ahead and do what's necessary.]

"It's an international problem. You're not going to solve this — the US is not going to solve this alone," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack was quoted as saying. [Actually, we could. But we are paralyzed by the Nihilist Party.] Similarly, an anti-piracy watchdog, which welcomed the sinking of the pirate ship, also called for an international effort. "If all warships do this, it will be a strong deterrent. But if it's just a rare case, then it won't work," Noel Choong, who heads the International Maritime Bureau's piracy reporting centre told an agency.... [In other words, the problem could be solved fairly easily if everybody did their duty. Instead the evil of pacifism will prolong the problem indefinitely, and cause rivers of blood to flow...]

(Thanks to O Judd.)

If Lenin were here he would know exactly what's going on....

One thing that keeps striking me about certain current conflicts like gay rights and abortion and infanticide rights is that, though it was all in a good cause, the American Civil Rights Movement was also one of the great calamities of our history.

Why do I say such a politically incorrect thing? One which would get me cast out of polite liberal society, had I ever been invited into polite liberal society?

Because it has imposed a template on our world. A template that says that anyone who is campaigning for any sort of imagined "civil right" is entitled to trample their opposition. To just bulldoze over them.

And to feel utterly smug and superior, and to indulge in orgies of self congratulation. To be automatically granted a kind of "secular sainthood."

And, most appealing of all, the template says you can treat your opponents with complete contempt and disrespect....because, of course, they are just "rednecks."

I was recently called a "hateful bigot" by someone who should know better. For what? For simply agreeing with what 99.9999% of human being have always considered to be true. That is, that marriage happens between men and women. Something that no one, liberal or conservative, doubted until a few years ago.

That's the "template" at work. One needs merely assert a new right, and then one can act like a pompous ass.

And the template was always intended for sinister purposes by the Lefty "activists" who organize rights campaigns from the shadows. Our current battles are examples of a type of Leftist plot that the world has seen hundreds of times over the last century. If Lenin were here he would know instantly what's going on, and approve. (And then send the gays to the Gulag when they were no longer needed.)

The scheme is always the same. Champion some "oppressed" group, lure large numbers of "useful idiots" to fight the battle, manipulate the battle to gain Leftist goals, then discard the "oppressed group" the instant they are no longer useful.

The classic example is Communists battling for labor rights, then crushing labor once they gain power. Another is the way, when I was in college, everyone talked about "the People of Vietnam." Those poor souls were instantly forgotten once the Communists were in control. (Stupid me, I thought the peaceniks really cared!) Or the black peoples of South Africa. In the 80's liberals were shedding copious tears over them. But as soon as they were no longer useful they were dropped. People in Soweto are STILL poor and STILL badly governed. Does anybody talk about them now at the Quaker Meeting? Will publishers want to publish their stories NOW? Ha ha.

Most of the supporters of gay marriage are in the "useful idiot" category. The big problem is that relentless propaganda has made the "template" a default mindset for most Americans. They never question anything, no matter how flaky, it it's packaged as a rights crusade. The useful idiots are now approaching a majority of the population!

Andrew, your analogy was really stupid. The question before us is not, "Why can't I marry whoever I want?" The question is, "What IS marriage." All Americans already have the right to marry whoever they want, within the current definition of marriage. YOU are proposing to change the definition. So YOU need to come up with good arguments why people like you know better than all the great thinkers and religious leaders of all of human history, and the common opinion of all of mankind up to very recently.

If you were HONEST, that's what you would be arguing about. But the template frees you from the requirement of honest argument---why, it would be like arguing the merits of segregation. Instead you just make assertions.

The arguments you are making could be used to support my right to marry a two-year old, or to marry three people. Or a dog, or a cute robot. Do you support those things? Do you have a good argument against them? Or for them? Of course not, you haven't done any thinking.

There are going to be lots of new "rights" crusades coming in the future. Have you thought out where you will draw the line?

(What a hateful bigot I am, to suggest that any "rights" could be over the line! I Oughta be shot. I'm just a redneck. The next thing you know I'll be coming up with oppressive hillbilly ideas such as "right and wrong." Or "God," or "morals." Just ignore me; the important thing is that rights must be protected. Especially ancient rights, like ones that are more than 6 weeks old.)

Hey Lefties, look in the mirror....

...Before election day, national media hand-wringers forged a wildly popular narrative: The Right was, in the words of New York Times" columnist Paul Krugman, gripped by "insane rage." Outbreaks of incivility (some real, but mostly imagined) were proof positive of the extremist takeover of the Republican Party. The cluck-cluckers and tut-tutters shook in fear.

But when the GOP took a beating on Nov. 4, no mass protests ensued. No nationwide boycotts erupted. Conservatives took their lumps and began the peaceful post-defeat process of self-flagellation, self-analysis, and self-autopsy. In fact, there's only one angry mob gripped by "insane rage" in the wake of campaign 2008: The mob of left-wing, same-sex marriage activists incensed at their defeat in California. Voters there approved a traditional marriage initiative, Proposition 8, by 52-48.

Instead of introspection and self-criticism, however, the sore losers who opposed Prop. 8 have responded with threats, fists, and blacklists.

That's right. Activists have published an "Anti-Gay Black List" of Prop. 8 donors on the Internet. If the tables had been turned and Prop. 8 proponents created such an enemies" list, everyone in Hollywood would be screaming "McCarthyism" faster than you can count to eight. A Los Angeles restaurant whose manager made a small donation to the Prop. 8 campaign has been besieged nightly by hordes of protesters who have disrupted the business, intimidated patrons, and brought employees there to tears. In fear for their jobs and their lives, workers at El Coyote Mexican Café pooled together $500 to pay off the bullies.

Scott Eckern, a beleaguered artistic director at the California Musical Theatre, was forced to resign over his $1,000 donation to the Prop. 8 campaign. The director of the Los Angeles Film Festival, Rich Raddon, is next on the chopping block after the anti-Prop. 8 mob discovered that he had also contributed to the Yes on 8 campaign. Calls have been pouring in for his firing.

Over the past two weeks, anti-Prop. 8 organizers have targeted Mormon, Catholic, and evangelical churches. Sentiments like this one, found on the anti-Prop.8 website "JoeMyGod," are common across the left-wing blogosphere: "Burn their f—ing churches to the ground, and then tax the charred timbers." Thousands of gay-rights demonstrators stood in front of the Mormon temple in Los Angeles shouting "Mormon scum."...

Just in case you thought the "gay marriage" push was about equal rights or something...

We get "scaled back" because we are stupid...

This piece about Obama writing to federal employees before the election is a subject where I could criticize the Dems harshly for a variety of conservative reasons. But others will do that job, no doubt. I'm in a mood to criticize... Republicans....

In wooing federal employee votes on the eve of the election, Barack Obama wrote a series of letters to workers that offer detailed descriptions of how he intends to add muscle to specific government programs, give new power to bureaucrats and roll back some Bush administration policies.

The letters, sent to employees at seven agencies, describe Obama's intention to scale back on contracts to private firms doing government work, to remove censorship from scientific research, and to champion tougher industry regulation to protect workers and the environment...

Notice the bold type above. You read in Random Jottings way back in 2002 about what Bush was doing to open federal jobs to private bidders. Link [I've been giving you the straight dope since November-2001! Has it earned me fame and fortune? Nah.]

SO, how much have you heard about this since? In particular, how much support and praise did President Bush get from Republicans? From conservatives? From the "oh-so-wise" at National Review? None, as far as I've noticed. Bush was out in front doing things conservatives should be lauding, encouraging, publicizing.

I'm sure this would have been popular with voters, if it had been publicized. It's not like ordinary Americans are fond of Federal bureaucrats. So why hasn't the party been running on things like this? Bragging about it? And conservatives, libertarians, wake up: this is the closest you are ever going to get to cutting back the Federal monster. Shrinking big government isn't going to happen--but there are a lot of things we can to to mitigate the problem. You had a chance to, and it looks like you blew it...

PS: If you think I'm surprised by anything Obama's doing, well, I notice that I was also writing in 2002 about the fact then emerging that President Carter asked the SOVIETS to help him defeat Reagan! If I write that "Democrats" are evil slime animals, it is not because I'm intemperate and uncharitable, it's because they are, obviously, evil slime animals...

Tolerant and diverse Obamanoids.....

This John Kass column doesn't surprise me a bit. Living in SF, I get to see plenty of this kind of thing, and San Francisco isn't really bad compared with--ugh! Barf!-- "affluent suburbs." You have to be somewhat tolerant to live in the City, because there's such a smorgasbord of different types and groups here. If you have a bunch of white liberal elitists living together, then you get the real bigots. (And worse than the bigotry is the way they ooze the butter of self-satisfaction from every pore. Gag me with a silver spoon!) [Thanx to Bookworm]

A liberal gal we know (one with an atypically strong self-image, and a Republican boyfriend) was telling me the other day about her bewilderment at many of her liberal friends, whose reaction to Republicans and opposing ideas was total shut-out: "I don't want to hear it!" I just nodded my head and said Ummm hmmm. That's the era we are in. The Republic is probably doomed, but at least I have the satisfaction of not being part of the idiocy.

Tolerance fails T-shirt test -- chicagotribune.com:

...Catherine Vogt, 14, is an Illinois 8th grader, the daughter of a liberal mom and a conservative dad. She wanted to conduct an experiment in political tolerance and diversity of opinion at her school in the liberal suburb of Oak Park.

She noticed that fellow students at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama for president. His campaign kept preaching 'inclusion,' and she decided to see how included she could be.

So just before the election, Catherine consulted with her history teacher, then bravely wore a unique T-shirt to school and recorded the comments of teachers and students in her journal. The T-shirt bore the simple yet quite subversive words drawn with a red marker:

'I was just really curious how they'd react to something that different, because a lot of people at my school wore Obama shirts and they are big Obama supporters,' Catherine told us. 'I just really wanted to see what their reaction would be.'

Immediately, Catherine learned she was stupid for wearing a shirt with Republican John McCain's name. Not merely stupid. Very stupid.

'People were upset. But they started saying things, calling me very stupid, telling me my shirt was stupid and I shouldn't be wearing it,' Catherine said. Then it got worse.

'One person told me to go die. It was a lot of dying. A lot of comments about how I should be killed,' Catherine said, of the tolerance in Oak Park.

But students weren't the only ones surprised that she wore a shirt supporting McCain.

'In one class, I had one teacher say she will not judge me for my choice, but that she was surprised that I supported McCain,' Catherine said.

If Catherine was shocked by such passive-aggressive threats from instructors, just wait until she goes to college.

'Later, that teacher found out about the experiment and said she was embarrassed because she knew I was writing down what she said,' Catherine said.

One student suggested that she be put up on a cross for her political beliefs.

'He said, 'You should be crucifixed.' It was kind of funny because, I was like, don't you mean 'crucified?' ' Catherine said.

Other entries in her notebook involved suggestions by classmates that she be 'burned with her shirt on' for 'being a filthy-rich Republican.'

Some said that because she supported McCain, by extension she supported a plan by deranged skinheads to kill Obama before the election. And I thought such politicized logic was confined to American newsrooms. Yet Catherine refused to argue with her peers. She didn't want to jeopardize her experiment.....

Surprise! Obama lied.....

We still know little about what sort of President Obama is going to be. But there a certain things leftists always tend towards, and we can be almost certain they will make themselves known in the coming months. One of them is hating Jews and Israel...

Today we got some concrete evidence...

...After it became known Malley was working on the campaign and the ensuing backlash, the Obama campaign immediately issued a statement saying Malley was only giving the campaign "informal advice."

Then in May, the London Times reported that Malley — who wasn't supposed to be working on the campaign — had been sacked from a post on the campaign's Middle East advisory council because he had recently held meetings with Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

Well now sources are reporting "Aides said Obama had sent senior foreign policy adviser Robert Malley to Egypt and Syria over the last few weeks to outline the Democratic candidate's policy on the Middle East."...

There's going to be lots of this kind of thing over the next four years. The new administration will be filled with leftists, and so they won't be able to help it. Politically it is just not smart to have toxic swine like Malley sucking up to tyrants and terrorists. But you watch. You will see the Obama crowd doing this over and over---and then lying like crazy to cover up their Jew-hatred...

And "liberal Jews" will be squirming and wriggling and doing everything they can to fudge the issue, even though it means helping people who would be delighted to saw their heads off with rusty knives, and then circulate the video-tape...

This makes me think about "debating" with liberals...

Plato knew about nailing jello
(from Theaetetus):

...For, in accordance with their text-books, they are always in motion; but as for dwelling upon an argument or a question, and quietly asking and answering in turn, they can no more do so than they can fly; or rather, the determination of these fellows not to have a particle of rest in them is more than the utmost powers of negation can express. If you ask any of them a question, he will produce, as from a quiver, sayings brief and dark, and shoot them at you; and if you inquire the reason of what he has said, you will be hit by some other new-fangled word, and will make no way with any of them, nor they with one another; their great care is, not to allow of any settled principle either in their arguments or in their minds, conceiving, as I imagine, that any such principle would be stationary; for they are at war with the stationary, and do what they can to drive it out everywhere...

Makes 'em feel cool...

From a follow-up by Jay Nordlinger, to that comment of his I quoted yesterday...

....But I was struck by all the e-mails that came from the left: many of them seething with hate, and many of them — surprisingly enough — defending communism. It's not that these readers thought I had defamed Barack Obama; they thought I had defamed communism. Nine decades of killing fields, and still . . . well, never mind....

That doesn't surprise me. There are tons of people around here like that. It's wierd, really. None of them will ever call themselves communists, but anything commie has a glow for them. It gives them a buzz of pleasure to say nice things about Mao or Castro. Sort of like they are fans of a rock band, who never personally endorse their sex-drugs-violence drenched suicidal life-stye, no no no.... but obviously enjoy being close to the thrilling and dirty ambience.

Does this say it all or does this say it all?

Jay Nordlinger, at The Corner:

Senator Obama said this about John McCain: "By the end of the week, he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich." That's interesting. Obama evidently thinks of communists as people who share. I think of them as people who kill.

"Who feels threatened?"

This piece, by Caroline Glick of the The Jerusalem Post, The Threat of a Jewish Army, is intensely interesting to me, because I'm obsessed with the broad movements of Western Civilization. Thanks to Richard Fernandez, who writes that Israel is the "canary in the coalmine."�

Glick writes: "The Left's vision of Israel as an atheistic, multicultural, morally relativist society holds little attraction for most Israelis." I sure hope so, since that's the Left's vision of America too. My guess is that the chomskys are going to be very disappointed in the results if their current "Manchurian Candidate" is elected He will have about as much success in advancing socialism as Clinton did. His judicial appointees will do a lot by legislating from the bench, since the vile measures of the Left rarely find favor with American voters they despise. That will be an evil thing, but he won't do any better with his version of HillaryCare than Bill did.

....Under the title "Without a Lord of (Military) Hosts," the paper demanded that IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi "put the military rabbinate in its place" and force it to limit its activities to ensuring that IDF grub is kosher and that religious soldiers have what they need to observe religious laws. Haaretz further insisted that the position of chief rabbi be cancelled and that the position of "chief religious services officer" be created in its place. As the editorial put it, "The injection of a religious dimension into the Israel Defense Forces' goals constitutes a serious internal threat."

The real question is, who feels threatened? The Haaretz editorial claimed that Israel "has a secular majority, which would be outraged if anyone tried to change its way of life through religious coercion." But this is untrue and Haaretz's editors know it.

They know it because last November Haaretz published the results of a survey conducted by the Israeli Democracy Institute regarding how Israeli Jews self-identify on the secular-religious spectrum. The results of that survey showed that only twenty percent of Israelis classify themselves as secular. Eighty percent of Israelis view themselves as either religious or traditional.

Rabbi Ronski himself is the most beloved and charismatic IDF chief rabbi since Rabbi Shmuel Goren, who served as chief rabbi during the Six-Day War. Rabbi Ronski, 56, regularly risks his life by accompanying combat units on missions. He doesn't simply show up. The soldiers ask him to join them.

The popularity of leaders like Rabbi Ronski is an unbearable affront to the Israeli Left. The enthusiasm with which young Israelis embrace their Jewish heritage is a direct assault on the Left's demand for cultural supremacy. But what the Left refuses to acknowledge is the simple fact that Israeli society has never accepted their views of what Israel is supposed to be.

Until the mid-1970s, most of today's leftists were Labor Zionists. They believed Israeli society followed them both for their Zionism and for their socialism. But Israeli society never bought into the Left's utopian social theories. Labor Zionists were the cultural avant-garde because they were Zionists.

When, in the late 1970s, the Labor Zionist movement began disavowing Zionism, it became increasingly estranged from the general public. Religious Zionists like Rabbi Ronski are followed while the leftist cultural elites are ignored because religious Zionists today are the most outspoken advocates of values shared by the vast majority of Israelis.

The Left's vision of Israel as an atheistic, multicultural, morally relativist society holds little attraction for most Israelis. So to reassert their cultural superiority, leftists have increasingly taken to bullying and intimidating the rest of the country to toe their line. The seasonal assaults on religious soldiers are simply one aspect of their larger culture war against Israeli society as a whole.

"When, in the late 1970s, the Labor Zionist movement began disavowing Zionism, it became increasingly estranged from the general public..." Substitute "Democrat Party" for Labor-Zionist, and "Christianity/Judaism" for Zionism, and you describe current American politics. I bet we will be seeing more attacks on the US military for having too many Christians...

Literati... Making my day...

The New York Observer:

It seems that the final days of the presidential campaign have made Erica Jong and her friends more than a little anxious.

A few days ago, Jong, the author and self-described feminist, gave an interview to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, the choicest bits of which were brought to my attention by the reliably sharp-eyed Christian Rocca, the U.S. correspondent of Il Foglio, who published excerpts on his Camillo blog. Basically, Jong says her fear that Obama might lose the election has developed into an 'obsession. A paralyzing terror. An anxious fever that keeps you awake at night.'

...My friends Ken Follett and Susan Cheever are extremely worried. Naomi Wolf calls me every day. Yesterday, Jane Fonda sent me an email to tell me that she cried all night and can't cure her ailing back for all the stress that has reduces her to a bundle of nerves....

Boy, talk about name-dropping! Worried about the "literary reputation," eh Erica?

...My back is also suffering from spasms, so much so that I had to see an acupuncturist and get prescriptions for Valium...

Ooooh. All the pwecious wittle witerati is having spasms! They cwy all night, wowied about wosing their weftist secuwty bwankets! Ha ha ha ha....

...Bush has transformed America into a police state, from torture to the imprisonment of reporters, to the Patriot Act...

So WHY, (as Orrin Judd has asked), are no Obama supporters talking about Obama ending the "police state?" Surely they are looking forward to those poor imprisoned reporters tottering out into the sunlight from their dungeons? And the wiretaps....why is no one celebrating Obama's executive-order-to-come, preserving your right to call madrassahs in Pakistan without interference by Cheney's Gestapo? Why? Whywhywhywhy?

Please win, Sarah! If only just to torture these self-inflated frauds! (I didn't mean literally torture them, but if you do I won't blame you. If I ask him nicely I bet Dick will be willing to stay on for a little extra waterboarding...)

"Opposed to Western/Judeo-Christian civilization"

From Orrin, in a post with the splendid title (I envy him this sort of cleverness) Inherit the Windbags, about "conservatives" who support Obama...

....In fact, the only real difference [in Obama's policies compared to McCain] is precisely that he's the most extreme supporter of aggressive social experimentation to be nominated for president during this era. On matters of abortion, infanticide, gay "rights," infant stem cells, euthanasia, etc. he is consistently and radically Pro-Death and opposed to Western/Judeo-Christian civilization. Edmund Burke would have no trouble recognizing the Jacobin in at least this aspect of Mr. Obama's politics

When we consider then what sorts of Republicans are supporting Mr. Obama we would, as Mr. Powers says, expect to find the old Eastern Establishment, secular Darwinist Right. Contrary to Mr. Powers, these issues are pretty much the same and Rockefeller money funded the more openly eugenic experimentation of the early/mid 20th Century. That's not, of course, to say that every "conservative" backing Mr. Obama is doing so because he'd increase abortion and fund it for "the poor," but it is fair to say that they are at least unbothered by the prospect. In fact, even the ostensibly pro-life Doug Kmiec was willing to forgo Communion in order to back Barack Obama.

This is why so many of the converts cite the choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate. The choice drove home the reality that the GOP is and is going to stay the party of the religious. They were hoping for a Joe Lieberman, Colin Powell, Mitt Romney, or Tom Ridge who are indifferent to or supportive of abortion.

Over time this is likely to be a more permanent divide and is certain to impact the Democratic Party more heavily than the Republican. After all, Darwinism is a marginal belief in America while Christianity is central. Eventually one would expect to see the parties divide along more clearly secular vs religious lines and the Democratic hold on entire tribes loosen, a process that will be accelerated by the recognition that intellectual elites support the Democrats in no small part because of "population control."...

It just fascinates me the people who hate Sarah. It's so revealing. The "feminists" who fantasize about seeing her raped or murdered, for example. (Ladies, your guilt is showing.) Or the Colin Powell and Christopher Buckley types on the right.

And this is all extra interesting because traditionally the V-P is someone who can give red meat to the base, allowing the presidential candidate to act "presidential," and move to the center. This is normal in our politics. So why should Republican "centrists" and libertarians hate Sarah? Why?

The real battle is increasingly about who we are. What is America and who are Americans. This is because old habits have worn off. Habits of religion, yes, but also patriotic faith, and faith in those things, including morality, that ancestors and founders have handed down to us---faith that those traditions should be revered. And just---faith in America. When I was growing up, everybody was patriotic.

I'd say that when Orrin writes: "...the GOP is and is going to stay the party of the religious," we should think of "the religious" in a broad-brush sort of way. It could include those who cherish the Great Books of Western Civ., and those who get a lump in their throats when they hear the Star Spangled Banner at the ball game. That is, those who think there are things bigger than the almighty self, things which demand an attitude of humility and willingness to sacrifice.

And the irreligious should include many people who still go to church, but recite their creed in the spirit of participating in a charming old folk-ritual. Or who call themselves people of the Right, but recoil from moral responsibility and personal humility.

The battle-lines are shifting, and as they do various people are going to find themselves suddenly stranded in no-man's-land, wondering which way to scurry. A few decades ago we had the neo-cons; Democrats who noticed that the Democrat Party had drawn away from them like the tide going out...and awkwardly found a new home on the right. Perhaps now we will have a bunch of neo-libs!

I'm thinking of Sager especially. The libertarian creep of the world. I should fisk this piece, The Rove Realignment, Have libertarians been driven out of the GOP? But what's the use? He'll never get it. Better he should just head over to the Party of Death where he belongs...

It is morally wrong to say we have a "right" to health care...

Two reasons. One, which I heard Rush elucidate, is that we have a responsibility to maintain our own health, and we have a moral obligation to help those who can't help themselves.

Making health care a "right" destroys both responsibility and obligation, and damages us spiritually.

The other I just noticed, by Rand Simberg:

Does Barack Obama agree with Marcy Kaptur that we need a Second Bill of Rights?...

...Sure he does. He already said in a debate that we all have a "right" to health care. No, I don't think that I, or anyone, has a "right" to stuff that requires taking from others. This is Eurosocialism...

Of course I've always been in agreement with those points, but I hadn't ever expressed them clearly.

We are all so GOOD!!!

Ron comments on the previous post:

You know, I've been thinking about this Obama phenomenon for some time, and it just doesn't make any sense. Where did he come from and how in the world did he get such a following in such a short period of time? It's downright spooky. Could someone out there explain this all to me....

You came to the right place, Ron. Random Jottings knows all, tells all. I think this post, with its quote by Shannon Love, gets closest to explaining...

A bit of the quote:

...I think that politics on the Left has become a social process, i.e., a means of group identification and self-validation. Leftists care less about the triumph of ideas and far more about the triumph of a group of people with which they ego-identify. They need their ego-identity candidate to win so that they can feel good about themselves. The character and policies of the actual candidate does not matter....

When I was a wee lad, if a person wanted to be a "non-conformist," they became a Beatnik, or joined some similar artsy subculture. That is, they conformed to the ways of a group that was non-conformist! The idiocy of this sort of thing rarely seems to be noticed, then or now. (I remember it well. People daringly drank French wine and Italian coffee, and ate Moussaka. And looked down on the conformist rabble.)

It's similar now. If you want to be "good," you can't just, like, you know, be good. No way. You have to join a group that is perceived to be good. In popular imagination today that means liberal Democrat. (The fact that they are actually evil is of no consequence.) And then whenever the Democrat candidate wins, you get a sort of "validation." As if the world is giving you an accolade for being "good." Confirming your superiorty, as it were.

Now if the Dem candidate is the usual white middle-aged career pol, this validation is sort of muted. It lacks pizazz. But if the candidate is cool, and handsome, and youngish and well-dressed (all qualities one would like to have rub off on oneself)---wow, the payoff is bigger by an order of magnitude.

AND, if the ego-identity candidate is.....brace yourself for a thrill running down your leg....if he is.....yes......African-American....a magic negro....the coolest thing....the ego-validation is just stratospheric!

The Dems could probably run a cardboard cut-out of Mr Obama and have a good chance of winning....

Update: As a historical note, I remember reading somewhere about bohemian non-conformist types in New York, around maybe 1910. They would head down to The Village, which was then Italian, and be really artsy and different by eating......Spaghetti! I laugh every time I think of that.

The McCain ad I would be running...

...If I ran the campaign circus... (Inspired by this great post by Bill Dyer)

Scene: A schoolyard. A father is picking up his daughter...

Child: Daddy, daddy, I got 98 points on my math test! That's an "A"

Teacher: Now Susie, you know that 27% of those points will have to be given to those who are less fortunate than you. Other children don't have the points you have. Your grade will be C+.

Child: But, but.....I worked HARD! And those other kids just goofed off!

Teacher: Remember how I told the class how Leader Obama has taught us about "redistributive change.." You are supposed to be happy to help the poor and those harmed by white racism...

Clip of Obama speaking: "... the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which to bring about redistributive change..."

Father: But, what about our Constitution?

Teacher: Leader Obama wishes to preserve our sacred Constitution from desecration and change. That's why he has had it revised and brought up to date...

Clip of Obama speaking: "...The Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution..."

Teacher: Susie, your mind is still filled with white ideas about personal property. Next week we will begin studying Education Leader Ayers' new book "Social Justice for the New Millenium," and you will start to understand about giving to people in accordance with their needs...

"redistributive change"

...But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties...

And one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which to bring about redistributive change...

He's a Commie, who wants to destroy our country and way of life. It's that simple.

Hey, my Lefty readers. Obama says: "[the Warren Court] didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution" in favor of "redistribution of wealth." That's obviously what Obama wants. Are you OK with this or not? Yes or no? Show some guts and honesty for once, scrubs, and take a clear stand

Be thoughtful--listen to Oprah...

Bookworm writes:

...I was sitting near two women and overheard part of their conversation. After a lengthy back and forth praising Oprah, this gem came out: "Sarah Palin is stupid but she communicates really well to Americans because most Americans are stupid."

I live among this sort of people; that's exactly how they think. In fact a lot of them (including I'm sure these two---this is Marin County) are Democrats because the Dem Party is somehow, in the popular mind, "associated" with intelligence. They would never dream of showing intelligence by actually thinking. Instead they will buy some books Oprah recommends, and put them on the coffee table, to show that they are thoughtful

My experience in seven years of blogging is that Democrats are in fact really stupid. Not one of them has been able to make a case for their vague slippery ideas.

Rambling answer to libertarian comment...

I think you're wide of the mark, John.

The coercion in the case of gay marriage lies not in the marriage itself-- one is free to marry or not marry as one pleases. The coercion lies in teaching things to kids who aren't old enough to make sense of them.

So, the anecdote about the cute little Hispanic girl isn't an argument against gay marriage; it's an argument against government-run schools, which are often "captured" by people who really shouldn't be trusted with the power to ram things down the throats of unsuspecting children.

You've just pushed the underlying problem away, not confronted it. The message comes from a hundred directions, not just public schools. And private schools want to push the same message, at least here in SF. (Coming soon to a town near you!) Hollywood and Internet too.

In our world we have a LOT of people who want to change the world into something very different. And it's hard to discuss this because we are using different terminology. In your terms that goal is some sort of socialism. Something like the Euro-socialist welfare state. You see the growth of the state as the problem, and you are right--that's a large part of the plan. (Though notice that there no longer seems to be any worship of the state, as there was in fascist and communist regimes.No demands for sacrifice for the state.)

In my terms the goal is to free themselves of anything that the individual can feel as being bigger than the self. That's the nihilism I keep harping about. The goal is making oneself God. (I would say that gay marriage and socialism and "radical feminism" and the welfare state are exactly the same problem, in different dress. They all have the same underlying goal.)

We are allies in a vast struggle with people who are foes of libertarianism, conservatism, democracy, religion, and tradition. But their tactics are like the peddling of a dangerous and seductive addictive drug. One whose harms only show up slowly, and whose pleasures are immediate. Not like the old socialist revolutions---there's no Comintern anymore.

For want of common terms, I'll call the problem "the Drug."

Libertarianism doesn't have a good answer. Less government doesn't get rid of the problem. The front line is everywhere, not just government. Art, architecture, literature, journalism, entertainment; all are war zones. All are being churned and transformed like a WWI battlefield. The meanings of the very words we speak are being morphed, sometimes deliberately. (And recently we've seen capitalist bastions on Wall Street turn out to be Democrat strongholds!)

Actually the battleground is every person. Libertarianism says to let people choose, but the very essence of the people who do the choosing is what is being struggled over and changed. Changed by this Drug, that gives people the power "to be like gods." To be in control of themselves and others.

I'm sure most libertarians would agree that this drug should be resisted. BUT, the ideas that help fight against the drug did not come from libertarianism. You have inherited those ideas as part of the package of Western---especially Jewish and Christian---civilization.

Libertarianism piggy-backs on a great inheritance of Western ideas and virtues. And you are assuming that most people here have a good stock of those. And that therefore you can give people lots of free choice, and expect good things. But libertarianism has no answer to the problem of when those ideas themselves slip away or grow dim. I think that is happening.

To fight this insidious Drug, we can't just rely on a diminishing stock of inherited virtue. My evidence can be expressed in one word: Europe. We've been watching Europe ratchet down, down, down for the last century, at least. And to me, one of the most salient features of this decline is that, at any particular moment, people assume that ordinary European people will stay the same. They assume that the German will always be hard-working. That the Englishman's home will be his castle. That the Spaniard will be Catholic, and the Italian will have a big extended family with lots of pasta-munching bambinos. That the Frenchman will fight for La Patrie...

But all those assumptions have been WRONG. If you bet any chips on the character, the inherited ideas and culture, on the virtues, of Europeans, you've lost your bet. And this wasn't like a fight between good guys and bad guys. It was a matter of people being "hollowed out." Of virtue just draining away mysteriously.

A telling statistic: By the year 2050, 60% of Italians will not know what it is like to have a brother or a sister or an aunt or an uncle or a nephew or a niece. Italy is in demographic collapse now, and will soon be in population collapse. It is economically stagnant, and produces no exciting new ideas or inventions. But who is the "bad guy?" Who forced this upon the Italians? No one; they chose it.

What does libertarianism offer here? How does it explain this? I think you are carrying a knife to a shotgun fight. You are unarmed.

"The New Progressive Person"

This post at The Corner by Maggie Gallagher focused my previously-amorphous thoughts on one of the reasons I think libertarianism is profoundly unwise.

Any libertarian will understand that trying to force people to act contrary to the market is asking for trouble. If, say, his city government decided to issue "voluntary guidelines" on what were "fair wages" for various jobs, alarm bells would go off in his head! He would NOT say, "It's voluntary, so what do I care?" Because he knows darn well that coercion is the next step. And since enforcing such a thing would be like herding cats, there would have to be a LOT of cowboys, with a LOT of coercive power, to move the herd. (Just collecting the needed information would require massive government intrusion on people's lives.)

[Note: The libertarian could be a she, but I'm flouting the "voluntary guidelines" for non-sexist language.]

The latest Protect Marriage Yes on 8 television ad in California shows an incredibly cute 8 year old Hispanic girl bringing the book King and King home to her mother saying "Guess what I learned in school today. . . I can marry a princess!"

The anti-Prop 8, pro gay marriage crowd is running ads charging this whole idea that public schools will teach gay marriage is just a "lie."

The latest press release from the Protect Marriage Yes on 8 campaign in California rather cleverly points out the same groups now charging it's a lie public schools will teach about gay marriage whether parents like it or not --- were just in court in Massachussetts filing amicus briefs arguing parents don't have any right to opt their children out of the pro-gay marriage curriculum...

Just read the rest of the post, with the Amicus briefs arguing that parents have no constitutional right to opt-out...

Or check out this...

Lego ad red lighted over shades of pink and blue: A Swedish advertising watchdog has slammed Danish toymaker Lego for a catalogue it claims promotes outdated gender roles.

Sweden's Trade Ethical Council against Sexism in Advertising (ERK) singled out images in a recent Lego catalog which featured a little girl playing in a pink room with ponies, a princess, and a palace accompanied by a caption reading, "Everything a princess could wish for..."

On the opposite side of the page, a little boy can be seen in a blue room playing with a fire station, fire trucks, a police station, and an airplane. The caption beneath reads, "Tons of blocks for slightly older boys." (Thanks to Orrin)

The implications of "human nature" are enormous, and most people don't want to think about them. Don't want to think through what is implied. They are afraid of inferences...

Prepare for the Jew-haters...

..and the America-haters...

Jesse Jackson: PREPARE for a new America: That's the message that the Rev. Jesse Jackson conveyed to participants in the first World Policy Forum, held at this French lakeside resort last week.

He promised "fundamental changes" in US foreign policy - saying America must "heal wounds" it has caused to other nations, revive its alliances and apologize for the "arrogance of the Bush administration."

The most important change would occur in the Middle East, where "decades of putting Israel's interests first" would end.

Jackson believes that, although "Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades" remain strong, they'll lose a great deal of their clout when Barack Obama enters the White House....

Actually, although ugly anti-Semitism is still common on the Left, the really big motivator is hatred of developed Western countries that still believe in themselves enough to fight for themselves. Who could that be? Let's start a little list...America...Israel..... Ummm, anybody else? No.

And which countries do Leftists hate? Amazin' coincidence!

(Note: As far as leftists or pacifists care, the people of the undeveloped world can happily slaughter each other. They are not human beings. Unless they ally with the US--then they are evil human beings, and must be opposed by "liberation movements.".)

I'm used to this cowardly idiocy...

...When I vote against Obama on November 4, 2008:

• It won't be because Obama thinks that a nuclear Iran is no threat to the Western World, it will be because I'm a racist.
• It won't be because I think it's an incredibly stupid idea for the most powerful nation in the world to approach evil totalitarian dictators as a supplicant, it will be because I'm a racist.
• It won't be because I hate the idea of a President who will subordinate America's interests to the UN (as he inevitably will), it will be because I'm a racist.
• It won't be because Obama has the thinnest resume ever in the history of Presidential candidates, it will be because I'm a racist.
• It won't be because I think Obama's Leftist connections (Ayres, Dohrn, Soros, Pfleger, Wright, etc.) show him to be either stupid about or complicit with an agenda antithetical to basic American values, it will be because I'm a racist.
• It won't be because Obama consistently chooses as advisers people who have opted for the wrong side in the completely binary debate about Israel's right to exist, it will be because I'm a racist.
• It won't be because Obama wants to socialize American medicine, which I believe will destroy the high quality of medical care available to most Americans, it will be because I'm a racist.
• It won't be because Obama wants to gut the military and reduce us to a nation with a big target painted on our collective backside, it will be because I'm a racist.
• It won't be because Obama wants to gut the Second Amendment and destroy Americans' Constitutional right to protect themselves from foreign and domestic enemies, it will be because I'm a racist.
• It won't be because Obama has already announced loud and clear that he will support activist judges who place their “feelingsâ€� above the law, it will be because I'm a racist.....

Us Republicans are accustomed to being called "racists" and "homophobes" and "sexists" and all the usual Lefty crap that substitutes for actually debating the issues. I expect to hear a ton of it if Barack loses. Well, in anticipation, I spit with contempt on all cowardly Leftists.

Don't go there...

You know, if I became a Democrat, and (oxymoron alert) I continued to be able to think and reason clearly, I'd be voting against Barack Obama, because putting him at the center of the world's attention for four years is likely to destroy the Dem Party. There are lots of dead fish starting to float to the surface, but it takes time for hidden facts to be untangled and organized. And for their import to sink in...

Probably, alas, more time than we have before the election. But not more time than we have before 2012...or even 2010... Do you really want to spend the next four years waiting for the next shoe to drop? and the next? Does the name Rashid Khalidi ring a bell? Do you really want to find out?

Dr Sanity:

...Nothing disgusted me more about the last Presidential debate (and believe me, there was LOTS to be disgusted about) than Obama's casual remark that, "A lot of you remember the tragedy of 9/11."

Yeah, I remember that day. And it wasn't a fucking tragedy--like some sort of natural disaster--it was an act of war in which 3000 Americans were killed in the blink of an eye by despicable people with ideologically distorted minds eerily similar to William Ayer's and his ilk. I am not the one who has forgotten that day and what it meant and still means.

Yeah, I remember 9/11; and I am also not likely to forget any terrorists who despise this country and what it stands for and want to destroy it--whether they hail from Al Qaeda, Mr. Obama's neighborhood, or any address on the extreme political left.

The simple fact is that Barack Obama is anti-American. He has spent his adult life swimming in Leftist schools of fish. I know these people. I went to college at Berkeley, and I live in San Francisco. They use code words in public discourse, but they savor any flaw that's noticed about this country. When abu Ghraib is mentioned their cheeks glow and their eyes sparkle.

And even the code words are giveaways to anyone who cares to think and notice. People who refer to 9/11 as a "tragedy" do NOT love this country. Imagine someone whose family-member was brutally murdered by an evil maniac. Would they call it a "tragedy?" As if it was just one of those random bad things that happen? No way! They'd call it murder, and do their best to see that the killer was locked-up forever, at the very least.

Real Americans love their country the way they love their family. (No, I'm not saying that precludes criticism.) I may criticize my relatives, even fight with them, but if one of them is attacked, it's like an attack on ME. I would not be standing at a distance, I would have no cool reserve. Likewise if this country is attacked.

When Leftists reacted to 9/11 with detachment, they were saying clearly that they do not love our country. Barack Obama is wholly a person of the Left. He does not love America. Democrats, if you elect this guy people are going to figure it out eventually.

The opiate of the trendy liberal...

Peter Guttman has written a piece which argues that no one should be President who hasn't traveled. (He's a travel writer!) I think he's got it exactly backwards...

...Although historians will long debate how this country arrived at the global mess it's now in, it seems clear that much of it could have been prevented. In fact, I believe that a relatively simple amendment to the Constitution could prevent it from happening again. Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, drafted in 1787, says that only natural-born Americans, at least 35 years of age, who have lived in the country for 14 years can serve as president or vice president. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has proposed (apparently with his friend, Arnold Schwarzenegger, firmly in mind) that this antiquated provision could best be corrected by opening the presidency to foreign-born U.S. citizens.

[It's hard to debate this guy, since the "global mess" is not defined--sloppy writing. War on Terror? Financial crisis? We're not popular in Belgium? Maybe it's the old "Europeans are so much more sophisticated and nuanced than us crude cowboy Americans" line. I'm guessing he is NOT thinking of Schwarzenegger as a solution to anything. For the record I don't think we are in a "global mess."]

But this adjustment misses the real point. Although a revision to this section is much needed, I believe that qualifications should not be loosened but rather tightened. I suggest the Constitution be amended to require that candidates for the presidency (and vice presidential selections as well) have visited a minimum of 20 countries. The amendment would require that each visit would have been made more than four years before the candidate's possible inauguration and that it would have lasted at least 48 hours. This serves as proof that a candidate is genuinely interested in, and possibly even knowledgeable about, the world around him or her.

[I would argue the opposite. The person who has travelled that much has likely lost the clarity of vision of what America is all about, and in fact probably never had it in the first place. I propose that to be eligible for the Presidency, a person should have lived at least twelve years in rural or heartland America, doing some real job. (Not government or foundation or academic or journalist).]

In the 21st century (unlike the period during which the Constitution was written), travel no longer means days of arduous journey by stagecoach or months aboard a steamship to reach an overseas destination. In a country that hopes to lead the world toward a more enlightened future, it is no longer acceptable to allow the reins of American leadership to reside in the hands of anyone lacking what is perhaps the most valuable credential of all -- the experience of foreign travel.

Sadly, we ignored a red flag during our previous two presidential campaigns. Quite simply, a middle-aged man of considerable means and privilege who has freely chosen in his first fortysomething years on this planet to visit fewer than four countries (of the almost 200 United Nations' members) should not be permitted to captain our nation. It is plainly irresponsible to allow a blindfolded driver to navigate through the increasingly chaotic rush-hour traffic of global development, aided only by an off-key chorus of back-seat drivers...

[He misunderstands the Presidency. If the President is steering the car he is failing his duty. (Think Carter.) What the President is supposed to do is to SEE WHEREwe want to get to, and continually nudge the thousands of drivers of our government to move that way.]

...Our recent myopic, good-versus-evil attitude toward foreign policy has been one of the obvious results. Our current cartoon perspective on the world could have been sensibly altered with the experience-tempered subtlety and sophistication of leaders who have spent time outside the country.

[It's the "good-versus-evil attitude" that is reasonable. We face opponents who are evil. And we ARE the good guys. "experience-tempered subtlety and sophistication" are just code-words for moral relativism. and a decadence that will never fight against evil, even if it's throat is about to be sawed through by terrorists.]

I believe that President Bush has been gravely HARMED by the traveling he has done in office. He started out like the child who sees that the Emperor has no clothes, and isn't afraid to point it out. He broke silly taboos, for instance by saying openly that we would defend Taiwan. And demanding that the Palestinians abandon terrorism before getting any more concessions. But we haven't seen much of that refreshing candor lately---too much traveling, I'd guess.

I'll drink to her....

The more I think about the debate the more jazzed I get. (Or maybe it's the Laphroaig. They have it at Costco now. You just gotta drink it. Life's too short not to.) The attacks on our Sarah over the last few weeks have been the most insane thing I've ever seen in politics.

I was even reading somebody's screed about how her lip liner or lip gloss or some such was a fake! I mean, this was seriously discussed! With blown-up photographs. I kid you not. She is Kryptonite to Lefty losers, and they knew it from the first day McCain announced her. They went berserk, they've thrown everything they could at her...... And tonight she just made all that ankle-biting moot. She just went right past it onto new ground.

And think about when her e-mail was hacked. What was cool and really interesting was that they didn't find anything useful. There was really nothing there for anyone to be ashamed of. Her private life is exactly the same as her public life. Just imagine if people could eavesdrop on a private conversation by Obama and his radical leftist pals. Wow. If that went public he would be dead. Sarah: WYSIWYG

The situation for Republicans is not good, and Mr Creepy may well end up being our Jimmy-Carter-of-color. But that, bad as it will be for the country and the world, will just beg for a Reagan to follow on. And we may have found her....

Grim days, I think...

Today's events have really got me down.

I have been arguing for years that the "Left" in this country, and throughout the developed world, is not just pursuing bad policies, but is in deep psychological and existential trouble. Is suffering from pathologies that have no likely cure.

A crisis is an chance to test the theory. The indication is that I'm right. And this is a case where I would LOVE to have been proved wrong. Because I think we are not just looking at one financial crisis. If a large portion of the country---maybe 25%, maybe 33%? Who knows?---is seriously deranged, then we can only expect things to get worse in the future.

Only scrubs act like this...

CBS New anchor Katie Couric ordered staff to drop all references to "Governor" or "Gov." from her interview with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. When a staff member pointed out that in other venues, Couric and CBS News had referred to Governor Palin's opponent, Joe Biden, using his title of "Senator" or the abbreviation, Couric, according to a CBS News editorial aide, sought approval from CBS News management to drop the "Governor" reference during her broadcast interview with Palin that began on Wednesday night.

"It's not true," said another CBS News source. "We treat everyone the same."

But, in fact, that's not the case: as late as September 22, CBS News and Couric -- even on the CBS website -- used Biden's honorific. Here is an excerpt from the transcript of a Couric interview with "Sen." Biden:

Katie Couric: How is it preparing for the debates?

Sen. Joe Biden: Well, it's kind of hard to prepare because I don't know what she thinks. There's been no -- I don't know a lot about her, so I have to assume for purposes of the debate that she agrees with John on everything.

Now compare that the transcript of the "Palin" interview:

Couric: Why do you say that? Why are they waiting for John McCain and not Barack Obama? Palin: He's got the track record of the leadership qualities and the pragmatism that's needed at a crisis time like this.

In fact, at no point during the broadcast interview does Couric refer to the GOP vice presidential nominee as "Governor."....

The usual Quaker scam...

....Meanwhile, other religious figures are reaching out to Ahmadinejad. On Thursday, the Iranian president will be the honored guest at an Iftar dinner--the ceremonial breaking of the Ramadan fast--at the New York Grand Hyatt Hotel. That meal is sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, the Mennonite Central Committee, Quaker United Nations Office, Religions for Peace, and the World Council of Churches-United Nations Liaison Office (notice the absence of any Jewish organization.) According to the invitation, the assembled guests--including Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann, President of the General Assembly of the United Nations and the Rev. Kjell Bondevik, former Prime Minister of Norway and President of the Oslo Center for Peace and Human Rights--will hold a "conversation about the role of religions in tackling global challenges and building peaceful societies." The discussion will occur "In the presence of His Excellency Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

You'd think that with such a high-profile figure addressing such an important topic, the Quaker lobby and its friends would want to share their honored guest's views with the world. But the event is closed to the press. So I called Mark Graham, Director of External Relations for the American Friends Service Committee. He said that "Jewish individuals," but not Jewish organizations, had been invited to Thursday's event, though he wouldn't name any of them for me. As far as the program is concerned, the evening's discussion will consist of a "dialogue around the idea that God has created us all and our common humanity. People are going to speak about the politicial, social,and religious implications that it has for their faith perspectives." This is actually the fourth event that AFSC (which has led interfaith delegations to Iran, though, again, with no Jews participating) has held with Ahmadinejad, and when I asked Graham about Ahmadinejad's thoughts on the Holocaust, he defended the Iranian President, telling me that "he readily says that the Holocaust was an historical event and he feels for the Palestinian people since the creation of Israel." When I asked if AFSC would press the Iranian President about his pursuit of nuclear weapons capability, support for international terrorism and the murder of American soldiers in Iraq, Graham told me that, "What we hope for with this event, like with others, is that we will help to understand each other a bit better. We will have more precedent for open questioning and a two-way dialogue that's open and honest."

There will be a protest of this Quaker Meeting. Details here.

The pacifist position is simple. War is something that America and Israel do. Iran openly racing to build nuclear bombs while openly talking about frying Israel is not war. So, why should any pacifist object?

Actually, it's worse than fake-pacifism. The Quakers and all those other "inter-faith/peace" groups are completely hollowed-out. They have no faith of any kind. All that's left is leftist politics. (And they would be much more respect-worthy if they really believed in those.) You can bet money that these useful idiots will conclude that Ahmadinejad is a mis-understood peace-lover, but Sarah Palin is a threat to the planet.

And you can be sure no Quakers will be holding "candle-light vigils" about this Christian convert under sentence of death in Iran.

Who do you stand shoulder to shoulder with?

....LIBERAL AMERICAN Jews, like liberal Americans in general, and indeed like their fellow leftists in Israel and throughout the West, uphold themselves as champions of human rights. They claim that they care about the underdog, the wretched of the earth. They care about the environment. They care about securing American women's unfettered access to abortions. They care about keeping Christianity and God out of the public sphere. They care about offering peace to those who are actively seeking their destruction so that they can applaud themselves for their open-mindedness and tell themselves how much better they are than savage conservatives.

Those horrible, war-mongering, Bambi killing, unborn baby defending, God-believing conservatives, who think that there are things worth going to war to protect, must be defeated at all costs. They must intimidate, attack, demonize and defeat those conservatives who think that the free women of the West should be standing shoulder to shoulder not with Planned Parenthood, but with the women of the Islamic world who are enslaved by a misogynist Shari'a legal code that treats them as slaves and deprives them of control not simply of their wombs, but of their faces, their hair, their arms, their legs, their minds and their hearts.

The lives of 6 million Jews in Israel are today tied to the fortunes of those women, to the fortunes of American forces in Iraq, to the willingness of Americans across the political and ideological spectrum to recognize that there is more that unifies them than divides them and to act on that knowledge to defeat the forces of genocide, oppression, hatred and destruction that are led today by the Iranian regime and personified in the brutal personality of Ahmadinejad. But Jewish Democrats chose to ignore this basic truth in order to silence Palin.

They should be ashamed. The Democratic Party should be ashamed. And Jewish American voters should consider carefully whether opposing a woman who opposes the abortion of fetuses is really more important than standing up for the right of already born Jews to continue to live and for the Jewish state to continue to exist. Because this week it came to that.

Most people probably find this situation confusing. Why would Jews reject help in standing up to terrorists who want to kill Jews? Why would they put lefty politics ahead of preventing the possible destruction of Israel? Regular readers of Random Jottings know the answer, everyone else has to flounder.

I was going to rant here, but really, you can guess my opinion on this... and I won't try to top Caroline.

"Today's Democrats will not stand against the darkness"

I think Dr Sanity has this right...

...Because, you see, Iran and the rest of the terrorists are patiently waiting. They are waiting for the Democrats--with all their inherent moral weakness and confusion; the Iranians are waiting because they perceive fear, appeasement, defeat, and surrender in the Democratic rhetoric and behavior. They know that as soon as an Obama gets elected, they will be home free and will not have to suffer any consequences for wiping Israel off the map--from the U.S., anyway. They will be able to do as they like without interference.

The dithering Democrats will excuse, rationalize and basically look for any reason to exculpate any atrocity Iran initiates, because they are 'the party of peace' and they just know they can talk to lunatics and trust them

They Iranians know that today's Democrats will not stand against the darkness; instead they will simply turn off the lights and dwell in the dark without protest--then say it is a good thing...

My own feeling is that we will continue to fight the War on Terror in the pattern wisely set by President Bush. Democrats will have to do it, or be turned out by the voters.

BUT, it will likely be a much bloodier and longer war if we elect Obama, or any similar Dem. The terrorists play a game of advance and retreat. They try to gain objectives by using enough violence to destroy the forces of order and freedom in some odd corner of the globe, without actually rousing various sleeping giants.

Put yourself in the shoes of al-Qaeda, and look at Mr Obama. You just know he doesn't want to fight. Nor do Pelosi or Reid or Biden or any of the Dems. Terrorists will push a lot harder if those people are in control. And all those who look to us for global leadership will be discouraged, and will be less likely to stand up to terrorist intimidation. Eventually we will roused to action, but in the meantime a LOT of people will die. (And Tel Aviv may get turned to green glass, and then Tehran in retaliation, in which case tens-of-millions will die.)

And those deaths will be the responsibility of those who are appeasers. Who project weakness instead of resolve. AND those who vote for them.

Voting for Mr Obama is murder. Voting for the party that ejected its one senior leader who strongly supported the War on Terror is murder.

Voting Democrat right now is voting to kill little brown-skinned people in distant corners of the planet.

The looniest lefty meltdown yet...

Oh boy, this cookie takes the cake. And unfortunately she's a local scribbler, and my daughter (who has taste) was required to read one of her books in school. She made my kid suffer, so sympathy is not what I'm feeling...

Anne Lamott:

I had to leave church Sunday morning when it turned out that the sermon was not about bearing up under desperate circumstances, when you feel like you're going crazy because something is being perpetrated upon you and your country that is so obscene that it simply cannot be happening.

I sat outside a 7-Eleven and had a sacramental Dove chocolate bar. Jeez: Here we are again. A man and a woman whose values we loathe and despise -- lying, rageful and incompetent, so dangerous to children and old people, to innocent people in every part of the world -- are being worshiped, exalted by the media, in a position to take a swing at all that is loveliest about this earth and what's left of our precious freedoms.

When I got home from church, I drank a bunch of water to metabolize the Dove bar and called my Jesuit friend, who I know hates these people, too. I asked, "Don't you think God finds these smug egomaniacs morally repellent? Recoils from their smugness as from hot flame?"

And he said, "Absolutely. They are everything He or She hates in a Christian."

I have been in a better mood ever since, and have decided not to even say this woman's name anymore, because she fills me with such existential doubt, such a sense of impending doom and disbelief, that only the Germans could possibly have words for it. Nor am I going to say the word "lipstick" again until after the election, as it would only be used against me. Or "polar bear," because that one image makes me sadder than even horrible old I can stand...

This is especially kooky because I'm sure the author (and her Jesuit pal) would tell you that conservatives are hate-mongers and think God is on their side---and of course that we are deficient in loving-kindness. And yet here she is foaming at the mouth with pure detestation, and writing about how God hates the people she hates! And totally unaware of the irony.

Her problem of course is that she's looking into the future....and she isn't it. Sarah does that to people.

We'll cry all the way to the bank."...

It's getting to be hilarious how freaked-out leftizoids are about our Vice-Presidential pick! I've haven't seen something get under their skin like this since GW Bush suggested to the world's "liberals" that since they are always bloviating about how bad Hitler was---surely they will be glad to help take down a present-day Hitler! Ha ha. Didn't that put the frauds on the hot-spot.

But Palin's better. Her mere existence is like sprinkling salt on Lefty slugs. Pure delight... Like this example:

By Charles M. Blow, NY Times:

Mr. McCain, on Monday you repeated your delusional notion that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. [Grew at a 3.4% rate last quarter--sounds strong to me.] Now, the federal government is working on a deal to save that economy from collapsing. [No retard, it's the financial sector that is a problem, not the economy as a whole. Of course this will damage the economy in the future if not fixed, but right now all the other economic sectors are still strong.] You have admitted that the economy is not your forte, so you could have used a running mate with some financial chops. (Remember Mitt Romney?) [McCain is only a phone call away from Romney's advice. Plus about 10,000 other economic experts. Why this weird obsession about Palin? Since when is the V-P the main economic advisor?]

But no. Who did you pick? SnowJob SquareGlasses whose financial credentials include running Wasilla into debt, [One project got hit with a big lawsuit, and that cost the city millions, but it was otherwise a thrifty administration.] listing (but not selling) a plane on EBay [She got a talking-point that drives you nuts, then she sold the plane the usual way. Sounds pretty smart to me!] and flip-flopping on a bridge to wherever. [Ended up doing the right thing--when has Obama ever?] In fact, when it comes to real issues in general, she may prove to be a liability. [So why aren't you nihilists happy? Hmm? Who are you talking to here? Are you whistling past the graveyard of failed Leftist candidates?]

In what respect, you may ask?

It turns out that the Republican enthusiasm for Sarah Palin is just as superficial as she is. They were so eager for someone to cheer for (because they really don't like you [Actually we like him MUCH more now.]) that they dove face first into the Palin mirage. But, on the issues, even they worry about her. [No, we worry that she may get tripped-up by some Palin-deranged leftist. But she's obviously fundamentally sound and wise.]

In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted this week 77 percent of Republicans said that they had a favorable opinion of Palin. But when asked what specifically they liked about her, their top five reasons were that she was honest, tough, caring, outspoken and fresh-faced. Sounds like a talk-show host, not a vice president. [Liar. You would KILL for a candidate those words fit. You haven't had one in my lifetime.] (By the way, her intelligence was in a three-way tie for eighth place, right behind "I just like her.") [Oh yeah. Our stupid candidates like Reagan and Bush keep getting rejected by the voters. Not. As my mother says, "I'll cry all the way to the bank."]

When those Republicans were asked what they liked least about her, they started to sound more like everyone else. Aside from those who said that there was nothing they didn't like, [You don't seem to be telling us what percentage said that. I bet it's high.] next on the list were: her lack of experience, her record as governor and her lack of foreign-policy experience.

Also, most Republicans think you only picked her to help with the election, not because she is qualified, and a third said that they would be "concerned" if for some reason she actually had to serve as president. [Concerned about your head exploding and splattering us with brain tissue...]

And Palin is proving to be just as vacant as people suspected. In her interview with Charles Gibson last week, she didn't know what the Bush doctrine was. [I answered that one here. She knows the concept, just not the name. Let me explain. The world is like the Old West. If Jesse James and his gang move in nearby, YOU GUYS want to wait until AFTER he has pillaged the town and raped the women and killed the men to do something (If the UN allows, of course). The dumb cowboy says, "T' hell with that, boys, let's go smoke 'em out!" Would you care to ask ordinary Americans which view they support?]

Update: I keep laughing about guys like this, who put on a mantle of ponderous seriousness to tell us that Sarah Palin is an insignificant fluff-ball who no one could possibly take seriously! And by the way tell us Republicans what we really think, since we can't figure it out ourselves. Psst. What we really think is that we could kiss Sarah's feet in gratitude, for giving these chomskys indigestion.

"Is THIS really how they want to win an election?"

The Anchoress on the hacking of Sarah Palin's e-mail...

...I don't know anyone who has not occasionally used their private email for business and vice versa. But that's not the point. What they've done to Palin is criminal and can bring jailtime. More importantly, is THIS really how they want to win an election? By getting into picayune minutiae of email, trying to find something scandalous, when there is not a politician alive who would want his or her private emails smeared across the internet, of for that matter, anyone else? What gives these people the right to think they can invade someone's privacy like this?

And excuse me, but aren't the people on the left the ones who have been telling us - without basis - for the last 8 years that "evil nazi Bush" has been "intruding into people's private correspondences" and that this (if it were happening) would be a bad thing? Can the hypocrisy get any thicker? First Palin is "not a woman", and "not the mother of her baby," and all the rest of the looney tunes stuff—now, she is not an American entitled to her privacy? Is she associating with known terrorists? Is that why she was invaded?...

Crazy. Literally. I mean, we are so used to Lefty craziness that we hardly notice any more how crazy it is. This is really nuts. Imagine if some McCain supporters had hacked Joe Biden's e-mails and published them, and published his phone numbers and stuff like that. Everyone would go ballistic, and Republicans most of all. We'd be falling all over ourselves to condemn this outrage.

But most Dems seem to think this is no big deal. You guys are just crazy. Lost in a mental wilderness where nothing means anything any more.

Lefty panic makes my morning coffee taste SO good...

By Gary Kamiya, in Salon:

....Palin represents the reappearance of the one part of Bush that never died -- the culture warrior. [What's hilarious is that she doesn't have to be a culture warrior. She hardly mentions "God guns 'n gays. Neither did Bush. And Palin never mentions abortion. She just IS the Culture of Life.] Democrats may have forgotten about the notorious red state-blue state divide, or hoped that the failures of the last eight years had made it go away. But it hasn't. It's been there all along. [And it's coming to your home town!] If Palin catapults McCain to victory, it will be revealed to be the most powerful and enduring force in American politics. And that fact will raise serious questions about the viability of American democracy itself. [Right, it's not a democracy if those stupid voters reject their betters]

The culture war is driven by resentment, on the one hand, and crude identification, on the other. Resentment of "elites," "Washington insiders" and overeducated coastal snobs goes hand in hand with an unreflective, emotional identification with candidates who "are just like me." [Resentment of "proles" goes hand in hand with an unreflective, emotional identification with a metrosexual nihilist "who is just like me"]

Large numbers of Americans voted for Bush because he seemed like a regular guy, someone you'd want to have a beer with. [He IS a regular guy.] As Thomas Frank argued in "What's the Matter With Kansas," ideology also played a role. As hard-line "moral values" exponent and former GOP presidential candidate Gary Bauer told the New York Times, "Joe Six-Pack doesn't understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn't have a say in it." [Well, Mr Kamiya, that's a very good question. This is a democracy. Why, EXACTLY, do you think Joe S should NOT have a say?] The GOP appealed to Joe Six-Pack by harping on cultural issues like the "three Gs," gods, guns and gays.... [We don't have to harp. You Lefties keep assaulting the beliefs of ordinary Americans. You do all the heavy lifting. We just have to look like more-or-less like ordinary people, and we get elected.]

....It's terrifying that so many Americans are so driven by resentment that they will vote against more qualified candidates simply because they seem "different" from them. [That's very true. Sarah Palin is clearly the most qualified to be President of the four candidates, yet the resentment of Lefty nihilists because she is "different" won't even let them consider her.]

For what this means is that anyone with expertise, unusual intelligence, mastery, special knowledge, is likely to be rejected by voters who are resentful of "elites." [As an example, mastery of energy issues, expertise in working across the aisle in the Senate, or special knowledge of the nuts and bolts of state and local government. Or the unusual intelligence needed to rise quickly in politics without riding anyones coat-tails, or having an Ivy League education.] This constitutes a rejection of the very idea that it matters if someone is better at something than someone else. [It's a shocking thing. I see it daily here in SF.]

The peculiar thing is that this only applies to politics: Voters who would not dream of taking their car to an incompetent mechanic or their body to an unlicensed physician have no problem electing totally unqualified candidates to perform the most difficult and important job in the world, simply because they identify with them. [The Obama strategy in a nutshell.]

If you are not smart enough to earn a living, become a journalist.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) By Ed Stoddard and Yereth Rosen- Is Sarah Palin a friend or foe of big oil?

As governor of Alaska, she raised taxes on oil companies and clashed with them over a planned pipeline through her state.

But on the fundamental issues of drilling for oil and the environment, her positions look very much like those of the man she seeks to replace: Vice President Dick Cheney...

Personally I consider a comparison with Dick Cheney to be a big compliment. But this really shows desperation by the Media Wing of the DNC.

And stupidity! The world is not divided between "friends and foes of big oil." Oil companies are just businesses, with good points and bad points. The idea that they are reservoirs of mysterious evil, and that any sane person would be "foes" of them is the level of thinking of sociology professors at junior colleges. Or Reuters "journalists." Imagine someone dividing people into friends or foes of "big auto." Pretty stupid, right?

If you are Governor of Alaska, you very much want to have big oil working in your state, but you need to negotiate hard to get the best terms you can. That's what Palin did. She's neither friend nor foe of the oil industry, and I'm sure they don't consider her a friend or a foe. More like a tough but honest business partner. Alaska is in the oil business almost as much as they are. I'd trust any oil company employee over a Reuters hack.

We are nearing the end of eight years of the Bush Administration. I'll take this moment to say, "Thank you Mr Cheney. You are a patriot and a great public servant, and your life should be an inspiration to all real Americans. And the fact that you have attracted the ankle-biting hatred of the pit-Chihuahua's of the nihilist Left is just confirmation of this."

Kooks---fewer than they appear?

I gave my son a ride to SF State this morning, and we were listing to a bit of Rush. And he said that he thought that the kooks who are at the heart of the Democrat Party are really not that great in number, and that their influence is amplified by the Drive-By Media.

I think there's a lot of truth in that. Actually, I hope there's a lot of truth in it. My perspective is probably slanted, living here in SF as an "embedded journalist" within the post-moral Left.

There are surely large numbers of ordinary Americans who vote Democrat because they always have, and because the liberal platitudes seem appealing. But who would recoil in horror if they could eavesdrop on a private conversation between Barack and his pal Bill Ayers.

The Dem Party is sort of like student government on a college campus. Go to almost any college or university in America, and look at student government, and you would guess that the entire school is a glowing fire-pit of anarchism, Marxism, jihadism, La Raza-ism, and environmentalist-wacko-ism. You would think the guy in the picture is the norm.

Actually, 90% of college students pay no attention to "student government" at all. They just want to get their education, plus have some fun. The Leftizoids can take over the student gov because they are the only ones who care! (It's different in High School, where status is the great disideratum. Thank God my kids are all past that!)

Similarly, Obama was nominated on the strength of the votes of caucus-goers (and the infatuation of the media). If all the states had primaries, he would not be the candidate. It's the extremists who care enough to drag themselves out for the lengthy tedium of a caucus.

Evasion ...

....It may seem like ages ago but during the Clinton administration, conservative traditionalists were everywhere. The nuclear family is sacrosanct. Women should shun the workforce and become full-time moms. Kids should obey their parents and, if they choose not to, discipline, including harsh measures, ought to be applied. Sex outside of marriage is strictly forbidden. Our culture is spinning wildly out of control, and sexual liberation, the worst byproduct of the God-awful 1960s, is the cause. And, by the way, abortion is murder and should be forbidden.

All that is left, if the Palin controversy is any indication, is abortion. Palin's defenders, far from being traditionalists, are moral relativists. We should not rush to judgment. It is important to understand the pressures that families face. Love is all you need. Forgive in order to forget. People are entitled to their privacy, even, if not especially, in the bedroom. The state should not be in the business of telling people what to do. It sounds like the language of the left, but it has also had long resonance on the libertarian right. When the McCain campaign said that Bristol Palin had a choice, it was correct. These days we all have choices. The fact that we do has always bothered conservative traditionalists.

Sarah Palin's nomination is a public service. No longer will we hear lectures from the likes of Newt Gingrich telling poor women on welfare how to conduct their sex lives. Focus on the Family will have to focus on a different kind of family. William Bennett has no virtues left to write about. At long last our national nightmare over sexual hypocrisy has come to an end, and we can all thank John McCain for that...

Conservative traditionalists are still everywhere. And one thing sure hasn't changed since the 90's: Leftists like Mr Wolfe are afraid to engage their actual arguments, and instead desperately erect strawmen to tear down.

Mr Gingrich was not "telling poor women on welfare how to conduct their sex lives," (except in the sense that he may have pointed out that certain actions tend to have bad consequences, such as keeping you mired in poverty and welfare dependency.)

His main point, and mine, is that you, Mr Wolfe,YOU, and your fellow Leftists, are destroying human beings by undermining the intricate web of culture and laws and faith and decent entertainment and traditions and hard work that used to encourage people to live their lives well and sensibly.

The Christian view of sin (or at least the Catholic one I was taught) is not that God is a killjoy who doesn't want you to have fun. Rather, he is like your mother when she told you not to poke the knife into the electrical outlet! God says if you do certain things you will suffer bad consequences. That's just the way the Universe works. (Interestingly, the Hebrew word usually translated as "commandments" can also mean "statements." Think of The Ten Statements, and things will be clearer.)

Conservatives want to discourage sin because people—and societies—who try not to sin do better, in both the short and long run. Bristol and Levi are less likely to have successful lives together because they