Operation Linda Nchi: codename for combined action--part of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM)--between the Kenyan, Ethiopian and Somalian armed forces which
began on 16 October 2011, when troops from Kenya crossed the border into the conflict zones of southern Somalia. The soldiers were in pursuit of Al-Shabaab militants that are alleged to have kidnapped several foreign tourists and aid workers inside Kenya.According to the Ethiopian Foreign Minister, the operation represents one of the final stages in the Islamist insurgency of the Somali Civil War.
It is for this reason that Al Shabaab carried out the terror attack on Nairobi's Westgate Mall. Lots of detail in the Wikipedia entry.
In 1991, thousands of Somalis flooded into Kenya’s barren
northeast. The initial influx was prompted by the collapse of the Somali
government, and by the prolonged civil war that followed.
Two decades later, little has changed. A refugee
complex designed for 90,000 inhabitants in 1992 is now bursting at the
seams. By May [2013], the official number of registered refugees in Dadaab was
401,913.
Of course, this prospective project won't be my first.
Back in 2008, when Kenya was experiencing a civil/tribal war and when a man of Kenyan Luo descent was running for president of the United States, I put forth a series of posts under the heading of Kenya Happenings and composed a page entitled Kenya: The Basics. These posts and pages were meant to dispel several misconceptions about the country, its people, its history and the conflict that it was experiencing. Of course, I had a vested personal interest aside from that which all Americans had; as many know, my biological father, Philip Ochieng is also from Kenya and is Luo like Barack Obama, Sr. (On top of that, the two men were friends.)
Because President Obama's African family is Muslim, many observers suspect that he himself is a Muslim. (I do have an opinion on the matter, one that has changed over the years. But that's for another post.) Leaving aside whether he is or not, because of his family's faith, it was and still is often assumed that the Luo tribe itself is primarily an Arab Muslim tribe. Nothing could be further from the truth or more ridiculous. Roughly ninety percent of the Luo are Christians: Anglicans, Seventh-Day Adventists and, increasingly, Evangelicals.
And Arab? Please. The spreading of this fantasy has been caused by a man named Kenneth Lamb, who claims to have done extensive research into the background of President Obama's African family but failed to take this cultural curiosity into account: that black African converts to Islam often begin to call themselves Arab and that governments go along with this fiction. Lamb's conclusion was that President Obama is only 1/8 black African, which means than Barack Obama, Sr. Was 1/4 black and 3/4 Arab.
Does this look like a man who is 3/4 Arab?
Mr. Lamb has since deleted the page containing his conclusions, but they are still being passed around, something that demonstrates the truth of this aphorism. (Here's a fine 2008 take-down of Mr. Lamb's assertions.)
This Great Lie has, in turn, served to distort the existential reality of the entire Luo tribe and of Kenya itself.
As for the war in Kenya, it was primarily tribal in nature, as is often the case where many ethnic groups co-exist within a single nation-state. But the fact that war was started by the political machinations of one Raila Odinga, Kenyan presidential candidate in 2007 and, ostensibly, cousin of Barack Obama, gave it a singular appearance in the eyes of many. (Odinga was appointed prime minister in 2008, which ended the conflict. He was the first prime minister since Jomo Kenyatta held both offices of president and prime minister in the wake of Kenya's 1963 independence. Kenyatta's son, Uhuru Kenyatta, is the current president of Kenya.) And there was additional controversy regarding former Prime Minister Odinga in the run-up to Kenya's 2013 presidential election, during which he was again a candidate. He doesn't seem to take losing well.
And there were these things: the 2008 church burnings and the 2008 Memorandum of Understanding--a document allegedly composed by Odinga in which he promises to share power with Kenyan Islamic Leaders and push for Sharia Law. There is much back-and-forth about its authenticity. (In my opinion, the document is real, considering the fact that Kenyan Muslims voted overwhelmingly for Odinga in the 2007 election. But if it is real, I think Odinga signed it because he is power-hungry, not because he's a Muslim. In any case, Odinga did not push for Sharia Law during his term as prime minister, nor did he grant the Muslims a certain number of seats in Kenya's parliament, as promised in the real/fake MOU. In return, the Muslims abandoned him in his 2013 bid to become president.)
Connecting these items--proven and disputed--with then-U.S. Senator Obama's 2006 visit to Kenya, when he appeared to be campaigning for Odinga--even though Odinga didn't officially launch his presidential candidacy until the following year--many saw a pattern forming.
Of course, I'm one who likes observing patterns and coming to conclusions as well. But the American reportage I read during that time--from both traditional and new media sources--almost always left pertinent details out. And, as I said at the time, both types of media seem to not want to get information from the plentiful Kenyan sources. I don't know what that was about, but it seemed, well, stupid.
Now in 2013, as in 1998, Kenya finds itself reeling after a Islamic terror attack in its capital city. Al Shabaab, a Somalian offshoot of al Qaeda, attacked and brutally murdered patrons of Nairobi's Westgate Mall during a three-day siege. The particulars of it are all over the place, so I won't go into it here.
But when I began to read crap from my fellow Americans like " I didn't know they had malls in Africa," I knew it was time to start writing about Kenya again. This time, the focus will be to explore the foundational enmity between Kenyans and Somalians--in addition to the religious one.
And this time, I have the blessing and knowledge base of family members--not so much to correct any info I put forth, but to give it proper context. That was something that was difficult to come by in 2008. Additionally, after five years of a president of Kenyan descent as POTUS, we have even more context, both for ill and good.
I want to run this project concurrently with my other project, the completion of my second novel, Arlen's Harem. I'll run it as a series for two weeks, to see if there's any interest. If there is, I'll keep going. And I still means that I'm going to need financial help. Donors who are willing can Go Fund Me or, if your want to get my Typepad bill paid right now and coffee in me early tomorrow morning, you can hit my Paypal tip jar.
For whatever reason, Kenya's fate seems to be bound up in ours--Americans. As a Christian, I know that nothing in the lives of the servants of Jesus the Christ is coincidental or accidental. Why God the Father would connect the fates of the Superpower and the tiny African country on the continent's east coast is beyond my ken. But, in the exploration of a political connection between the two countries, I believe that a spiritual connection will be revealed. I can feel it.
So it is that I wish to explore the history and present-day occurrences in my father's country. I am no historian, no do I have any educational credentials. All I have are will, faith and an Internet connection and, in my opinion, the faith is of the highest import.
A wise guy named Solomon asserted that reverance for the Lord--faith in Him--is the beginning of wisdom. That's my lone credential. May it be enough.
I notice patterns, more so now than back when I was a young
woman--likely because my head was filled with fruitless things with which, all
too often, young, single women occupy themselves. It was too crowded in there.
Too bad. The ability to recognize patterns could have done me some good back
then, both professionally and personally. But, it was what it was. And now, the
patterns of life are pretty much all I think about. Allow me to expound on at
least one.
Many people subscribe to subjective truth--that each person
possesses his/her own truth that may be different from another individual's
truth and I have noticed how normalized this way of thinking has become.
Not long ago, I had a conversation with a man, a friend of a friend,
on the definition of earning money. For whatever reason, he thought that any
money that a person legally possessed was automatically earned--that legal
possession and earning were synonymous. We went back and forth about this until
I put forth the following scenario: a man is walking down a street and sees a
dollar on the sidewalk. He picks it up and puts it in his pocket. Is it legally
his? We agreed that it was. But did he earn it? I'd like to think I won the
argument. But I found it alarming that, somehow, the gentleman I was talking
to--a reasonably intelligent man--had bound up earning and the legal possession
in his mind.
Then there was another conversation with another person about the
ethnicity of Jesus the Christ. This lady was adamant that Jesus in the flesh
was not a "white European" in the manner in which He is often
rendered. I agreed, but in the conversation, the passage in The Revelation
describing Jesus' hair was cited. Here it is:
His head and his hairs were white
like wool, as white as snow…
--Revelation 1:14 (KJV, emphasis mine)
The lady contended that this passage was describing the texture of His hair; that it was like
wool, and, therefore concluded that Jesus was "black." When I
countered that the passage only described the color of His hair and nothing
about the texture, she said that I wasn't "interpreting" the passage
correctly. This particular conversation did not end as hopefully as the
previous one. (As for Jesus' "race," I am...ahem...agnostic on the subject.
Moreover, I don't think it matters.)
But whatever one thinks about the truth of the Bible or the proper
translation from its original languages into English, it's fascinating to note
that even an English description of a thing is open to "interpretation" in the minds
of some; that an explicit mention of a color has many meanings outside of its
scope.
And, by fascinating, I mean scary.
I don't think this type of thinking is an anomaly and I certainly
don't think that the widespread inculcation of this type of thinking is
accidental.
A few years back, I coined the term Coconut Treatment. It didn't
catch on but it's still useful for the purpose of recognizing this particular
pattern:
Take a coconut, slice it in half, scoop out the
meat from both halves and toss the meat—the substance--into the garbage
disposal. Then take a pile of dog manure that Fido deposited into your yard,
fill both halves of the coconut shells with it and glue the halves back
together. What do you have now?
A "coconut."
This is what has happened to words and concepts in the minds of many
and it is the fruit of primary, secondary, and collegiate education also known
as the Great Dumbing Down. The fruit has been emptied of its nutrients and then
painted over or glued back together and called "fruit." At some
point, individual words and concepts became subjective. That is, they became
fluid and not set in stone. My old blog friend, Jeff Goldstein, has
a series of posts on this phenomenon, and a lot of people didn't get
that he was talking about this very thing.
(I was going to say that the idea of subjective definition is more
common among those with bachelor degrees or higher, but, in the past few years,
I've noticed that many who don't have much formal education also subscribe to
the notion. The difference between the two groups is this: the latter are less likely
to believe in subjective meaning and, even those who do will shake off this
idea once it is pointed out and explained. The former tend to be too well
indoctrinated.)
Being one of those with less formal education, I had long observed
this phenomenon, but until I read Jeff’s intentionalism series, I didn’t know
how to articulate it. Then, in last week’s Sunday Morning Book Thread at Ace’s place,
OregonMuse, the book thread master, added to my informal education by posting
the following
Postmodernism is a complex
of concepts that asserts that all our constructs are just that, constructs;
that there are no grand narratives or abiding truths; that all such grand
narratives are illegitimate power moves; and that every perspective is
necessarily a limited and local one.
and said, jokingly, that
One year of free AoSHQ Premium
content goes to the first [person] who spots the giant logical hole in this
worldview.
So, being insufficiently indoctrinated with the
Coconut Treatment, I was the first one to point out
the hole.
According to postmodern
logic, postmodernism itself is a construct and, therefore, limited and local.
And, of course, that means that postmodernism,
itself, is false, illegitimate and a mere power move, by the postmodern narrative’s own logic.
I started writing this post weeks ago, and, after
reading OregonMuse’s post, it occurred to me that postmodernism is the very fecund
parent of subjective definition. Oh, I’m know that I’m not the first person to
come to this conclusion, but, keep these things in mind: I have only a two-year
degree and, what little I do know and think about comes from volitional
reading, observation and from thinking ideas through to the end. (I had heard
of postmodernism, but whenever I began to read anything written by its
adherents, my eyes began to close.)
Something else that occurred to me about
postmodernism, besides its logical fallaciousness, is that its advent has been
long predicted. Speaking of the perilous times in the Last Days, Paul in his
second letter to his protégé, Timothy, writes this:
But evil
men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.
--2 Timothy 3:13 (KJV, emphasis mine)
Lying and being lied to.
Postmodernists like to make their written offerings seemingly complicated, but such are really quite simple, and I mean that in both senses.
It is but one big gigantic lie, negating
itself even. Above, I likened postmodernism to a mother with countless children and those who
read the Bible know who the father is. Subject truth and definition? The Lie-baby.
It’s up to each individual to see
the lies for what they are, to shake off the indoctrination.
Originally posted at Ace of Spades HQ a week ago. Re-edited. And, do me a favor: please check out the links.
A few weekends back, I made my way from my home in South Central Los Angeles to Albuquerque--where my parents and the vast majority of my family reside--for the wedding of my oldest nephew. During the twelve-hour drive, I contemplated the personalities of my nephew, his brother, his sisters, his male and female first-, second-, and third-cousins and his male cousins by marriage. All--18 to 26--are great young people.
Something that remains perennially in the news is the rate of unemployment for black teens, just over 40%. But here's a thing about my family: my five nephews and my six first- and second-male cousins are all employed! (My nieces are all under sixteen and my three female cousins are over thirty. An additional male cousin--married, degreed and employed--is over thirty as well.) How could that be?
Well here's one thing: only one of them lives in a blue state. So much for the alleged racism of Republicans. But their states of residence--New Mexico*, Texas, and Oklahoma--aren't the only factors; the others are more personal.
All are high school graduates.
Three are attending two-year colleges, two attend a four-year university, one attends a technical college, and two are four-year university graduates.
All are literate, well-mannered and well-spoken They don't even speak patois to their friends.
None have criminal or misdemeanor records.
All are prompt and know how to dress for employment. None have adopted the saggy-pants style.
Only one has a child and he is in his mid-twenties.
So what is this about? Only four of the young men have been raised by political conservatives. Two are illegitimate. Several are children of divorce--like me. All of them, however, have been raised by actual conservatives. So it is that they would not shame their families by failing to be responsible men.
My oldest nephew--the one who just married--is probably the most taciturn of the group. But he's not so shy that he was unable to woo, win, and marry a smart, accomplished, and very beautiful young woman to be his wife. And here's something about the two, my nephew, and my niece-in-law: both of their sets of parents are married to each other. And one thing about my nephew's parents--my sister and my brother-in-law: both of their parents are still married to each other. (My mom and stepdad have been married for 42 years and my brother-in-law's parents have been married for over 60 years.) And each generation consists of hard workers who have always wanted more for their children than what they had. This is what is known as a pattern.
But illegitimacy need not be a factor in producing children of poor character. Several months ago, I posited that illegitimacy by itself isn't what has caused the breakdown of the black family and the consequent breakdown of black moral character. The cause? Government subsidy of illegitimacy. When a child, especially a boy, grows up without a father, he will often run wild if there is no other male authority to which he is answerable--an uncle or grandfather, for example. But when children grow up in communities in which there are no male authority figures, when they grow up in communities in which there are few to no married couples, a people run wild.
The widespread (over 70%) illegitimacy among black Americans can be likened to the biblical fall in the Garden of Eden. Satan talked Eve into eating the fruit that God had forbidden and she talked Adam into eating it. This original sin will destroy most of humankind. The government talked black women into having babies without benefit of marriage and this phenomenon has nearly destroyed black Americans. Yet another pattern.
But just as there is redemption to be had in the heavenly realm, there is a way for black Americans to keep themselves from been destroyed here on earth.
Recently, CNN's Don Lemon--no political conservative, to be sure--was called a "turncoat mofo" for agreeing with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly that black people need to clean up their act with respect to being 'good citizens'--a phrase used because that is what I was exhorted to be when I was growing up in the much-maligned 1960s.
Mr. Lemon's seemingly simple prescription is powerful.
You want to break the cycle of poverty? Stop telling kids they're acting white because they go to school or they speak proper English. A high school dropout makes on average $19,000 a year, a high school graduate makes $28,000 a year, a college graduate makes $51,000 a year. Over the course of a career, a college grad will make nearly $1 million more than a high school graduate. That's a lot of money.
And number one, and probably the most important, just because you can have a baby, it doesn't mean you should. Especially without planning for one or getting married first. More than 72 percent of children in the African-American community are born out of wedlock. That means absent fathers. And the studies show that lack of a male role model is an express train right to prison and the cycle continues.
And there was this on Twitter:
dress nicely. use appropriate language. keep ur surroundings clean. go to school. be responsible, involved parents. That's offensive? SMH
"Turncoat mofo?" No. The turncoats are those who urge other black Americans to keep doing the same things over and over again while, each time, expecting a different result. The turncoats are those who exhort black Americans to keep riding that express train to poverty, illiteracy, prison and ruin. Like the feral teens that are a plague on our society, pattern-recognition is foreign to those who screech ‘turncoat mofo’ to a man who imparts the tried-and-true wisdom that black Americans used to impart to their progeny.
* * *
I have been called a conspiracy theorist--not to mention the equivalent of a ‘turncoat mofo’-- a number of times. However, if most political and social conservatives can acknowledge that there are forces consisting of more than a single individual which conspire to destroy America-as-founded and the ideals on which she was founded, then it is plausible that such forces have used and are using strategies—by definition, long-term plans--to achieve their aims. It is for this reason—and for the vision of my lying eyes—that I put forth the following ‘conspiracy theory.’
For many decades, black Americans hoped and prayed to be considered equal to other Americans under the law--federal, state, and local. Well that goal has been achieved. It has been long past time for black Americans, as a whole, to do their part. What happened there? It’s this: too large a number of us have become prey to those who have always wanted to keep us down, keep us enslaved, and, ultimately, destroy us.
I submit that the Organized Left and the Democrat Party—now one and the same--have long been trying to rid our country of her black citizens. That goal is now almost reached. Think about it: blacks are vastly outnumbered by whites, Hispanics, and others. And blacks have been purposefully splintered in this way: we have been duped into nearly destroying the one earthly and seemingly unshakable foundation we had. That foundation is known as the family.
The feral teens we see today are the fruit of the splintering; they are angry and they know not why. They never learned fatherly discipline--and the compromised education system never bothered to inculcate in them the desire to think through their existential situation or any other situation. Often the only "men" in their lives are other mindlessly angry little boys wearing the bodies of men. Multiply this by millions.
So now, they are beating and killing innocents of all races out of boredom or avarice or whatever excuse they want to give. But the real problem is mindless and pointless anger, stemming from the lack of proper parenting by both mother and father.
But here's the thing. Non-black people are already tired of their loved ones being raped, shot, beaten, etc. for merely walking around, for the crimes of others or simply for not being black.
And when some set of white or other non-black persons begin to retaliate; it will go badly for the splintered minority—both the guilty and the innocent--for numerical reasons alone. As a result, the Leftist-infiltrated government will come in and "save" however many black people are left, but goal will be reached: black people will be almost exterminated in the USA and whites and other non-blacks will be the slaves.
That's been the plan all along...to kill all of us and to enslave all of you.
I am grateful to God that the young men in my family are fine, upstanding citizens. But I tremble for my people—Americans--as I watch the fruit of the rotten and satanic tree called Leftism poison us all, one way or another.
That’s why I pray to Lord who provided us with the Lamb who took away all of our sins. It’s our only hope, and I submit that it always has been.
*Yes I know. NM isn's all that red. But, to this Californian, red is relative. One can open-carry in NM.
Don't get annoyed. It's really not a big deal. I mean, nobody has seen this photo, right?
This may be one of the most famous photographs from the immediate post-9/11 era. Hell, it might be one of the most well-known pictures of all time. Naturally, that means it was almost left out of the memorial.
Michael Shulan, the museum’s creative director, was among staffers who considered the Tom Franklin photograph too kitschy and “rah-rah America,” according to “Battle for Ground Zero” (St. Martin’s Press) by Elizabeth Greenspan, out next month.
for a moment, let's take Shulan's stupidity on stilts at face value. Even if the picture is just too damn patriotic for the type of dainty chest-waxing liberal who runs around calling himself a creative director, that doesn't change the fact that the photo exists. Not only does it exist, but it captures one of the defining moments of that time. To exclude it from the official WTC memorial, especially for such sniffy taste-specific reasons, would be an act of censorship. Funny, I thought the vaunted creative community was against putting limits on the truth.
So how does Shulan think the United States should present itself to the world?
“I really believe that the way America will look best, the way we can really do best, is to not be Americans so vigilantly and so vehemently,” Shulan said.
Translation: "Love of country is soooooooo passe."
Oh but wait, Michael Shulan isn't done:
“My concern, as it always was, is that we not reduce [9/11] down to something that was too simple, and in its simplicity would actually distort the complexity of the event, the meaning of the event,” he said.
Showing the US flag being raised over the rubble of the World Trade Center is 'simplistic'.
I didn't know the September 11th terrorist attack was such a complicated event. Quick Recap: Al-Qaeda extremists, enthralled by Islamic jihadism, hijacked passenger planes and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, attempting to destroy our economy and weaken our government. In the process, 3000 innocent people were incinerated because a murderous butcher named Osama bin Laden hated the United States.
September 11th is only complicated if you perseverate on the the Noam Chomsky-lite ideology of the 'root causes' of terrorism. For these sorts of leftists-, America must forever wring it's hands. The only proper thing to do in the face of something like 9/11 is for the US to abase itself in front of the nation's most virulent haters. The conversation that begins with 'Why do they hate us?' must always be a closed circuit loop that ends with 'Because we deserved it'. That what Shulan ultimately means when he wheezes about the supposed complexity of 9/11.
Here's a hint for people looking for the meaning of 9/11.
The September 11th terrorist attacks were meant to be a direct heartfelt message from al-Qaeda to America--"Die".
One would think Osama bin Laden's earnest valentine of hate directed at the people of America would be pretty easy to figure out. Nihilism is not complex. Slaughtering people is not hard to discern. Or at least it shouldn't be.
It is in our response to militant Islam's murderous attack on America where one can find complexity. The self-sacrifice, the heroism and the ultimate survival of our nation is a tale that needs to be told. It needs to be documented and passed down from generation to generation. One really good way of documenting America's 9/11 story would be to include a picture of the three firemen, raising an American flag in the aftermath of the worst attack on our soil.
The problem is that Michael Shulan isn't just some random dude on the street with a dopey opinion. He's the creative director for the World Trade Center Memorial. In other words, he's in charge of shaping our understanding of the most painful tragedy in recent times. To paraphrase Instapundit, Shulan and the people who seek to explain American culture are just not that into America.
Our elites have, at best, a fleeting affection for the country they seek to lead and define. Most of the time, the people at the core of our culture have an active disdain for America and the people who inhabit it. From the campus Marxoids to the Hollywood Limousine Jacobins to the Washington DC/New York newsmedia hub...and, sadly, the World Trade Center Memorial...the men and women who run our institutions cannot hide their annoyance with the civilizational touchstones most Americans enjoy. This isn't healthy for our short-term culture wars or our long term survival.
If conservatives want to deal with the effete progressives snobs that man our cultural machinery, they'd better start soon. If traditionalists focused on being credible counterweights to the Michael Shulans of the world, it would do a lot to restore some balance in our society. Maybe in a few decades, we won't have institutions that automatically despise American patriotism. That would be nice.
My great-aunt Alma passed away on December 30th of last year at the age of 91. Born on the Fourth of July, she was the seventh of eight children, the last of her seven brothers and sister (her lone younger sibling, my grandmother, died in 2008), the longest lived, and the last of that generation in my mother’s and biological father’s families. I've written about her before.
I’ve been planning to post about it since then, but I felt that there would never be enough to say about it. (Plus, my general lack of motivation to post was a factor, along with the fact that, until this past Friday, I was typing almost one-handed due to a fractured left wrist.) However, Aunt Alma’s role in my life deserves whatever meager public tribute I am able to give it. She, along with my great-uncle, John W. Simpkins, Jr. (1920-2000), shaped nearly everything I am and gave me everything they had. You can read about Uncle John here.
Aunt Alma and Uncle John were the first real parents I had. This is no disrespect to my mother; as a very young divorcee, she determined that it would be better for me to be raised by two parents. So it was that my aunt and uncle raised me from ages one to nine. When my mother remarried, she and my new dad took custody of me, but my aunt and uncle always held a special place in my heart—more than any of my grandparents.
Aunt Alma had been pretty healthy into her eighties, but began to feel and show the effects of advanced age—and, as we discovered later, a slow-growing brain tumor--around 2007. In 2010, she took a bad fall and during the treatment for that fall, the tumor was diagnosed. The doctors thought she would die not long after that, but Aunt Alma was always the toughest of cookies. I took care of her at home for nine months, but that became unworkable, so she spent over a year in a nursing home. However, she made me promise to bring her home before Christmas of last year and I did. She was gone a little over a month after she came home.
We had the memorial service on January 10, 2013 and the interment on the 17th.
I feel as if there is a huge part of me missing, but I know where she is; she had long accepted Jesus the Christ as her Lord and Savior.
As one can see from the photo, Aunt Alma was drop-dead gorgeous in her youth and—before her two marriages--she was the toast of the old black club scene in both LA and Harlem back in the day. There are many photographs around the house of her classily dolled-up, with her straight, black hair elegantly coiffed and, sometimes, containing a flower. In her last years, she would often say that she could never complain to God about not having had fun in her life.
Yes, I know we don’t look alike. She had two white grandfathers; her white exterior and our distinct lack of resemblance made for some fun encounters over the years—and some not-so-fun. At the nursing home, some of the black CNAs would speak to her brusquely until some of them saw me come to visit her. Racist heifers. (PSA: if you have a relative in a nursing home, make it a point to keep them on their toes. Whenever I saw that “here comes that bald-headed b*tch again” look in their eyes, I knew I was doing my job.)
Auntie would occasionally remind me that, when I was about three or four years old, I informed her, in my logical toddler wisdom, that I was black and she was white. Not long ago, when she again reminded me of this, I thought about it for a second, and came to the conclusion that I was correct in the first place. She was white—and she was black. And a quarter American Indian for good measure.
Aunt Alma was in a bit of denial about her declining health, but she could be very sensible about it, too. One of the reasons that I moved in with her back in 2003 was that, after a few fender-benders, she voluntarily gave up her driver’s license.
When I sit in what is now my house, I am surrounded by a memorial to her and I’m grateful to God for it. More than that, I'm grateful to God for her.
John over at the fantastic Sentry Journal has a tale of the strange. I'm pretty much gonna steal his entire post, but it's too good to edit.
Last week my wife and I decided to stop at Burger King for a quick bite to eat. Burger King is currently running a promotional game called Family Food. It’s a scratch game that ask you a question and gives you three possible answers. You of course must select the correct answer in order to have an opportunity to win a prize. The prizes range from food to cash. We pulled the game piece off my large ice tea and she read the question to me. I correctly answered the question and won a $25 dollar gift certificate.
We presented the winning game piece to the employee behind the counter and she informed my wife that we would have to mail the game piece into Burger King in a blue envelop she handed to us. In order to redeem the prize you must provide your social security number to prove you’re are U.S. citizens. When my wife informed the employee that she wasn’t comfortable writing her social security number down on an envelop and sending to people she didn’t know, the employee told her it was the only way we could prove citizenship in order to redeem the prize. The point of the story is if you can’t even redeem cash prizes from Burger King’s Family Food Game without proof of U.S. citizenship, then what’s the big deal about providing some form of ID to prove who you are at the polling stations on election day. I wonder why we don’t hear the cries from the left on how Burger King is disenfranchising non U.S. citizens with their Family Food game.
The mind reels.
We live in a schizophrenic country. To be fair, most of the time America does a good job of hiding it's wackiness. In fact us Yanks are probably the best at keeping our various neuroses out of public view. Hell, there are nations that parade their insanity on a global stage. Compared to that, the US is a model of restraint.
But every once in a while, we get confronted with our own mind-wrenching goofiness. This is one of those times.
Ponder the situation: Burger King, a fast food chain, runs a contest. If you win one of these BK prizes, you must present a form of identification to the company in order to claim your winnings. If John wants that $25, he has to, in effect, show his papers.
These kinds of rules seem to be fairly common; most US companies that run contests like this stipulate that only American citizens are eligible to win prizes in the United States. Further, these sorts of contest bylaws don't raise any hackles in the Bedwetter Community. Nobody whines about 'discrimination' or 'lack of access'. Citizenship as a requirement for eligibility in a company's promotional game is one of those unquestioned parts of American life.
Say, you know what part of American life the thumbsucker caucus questions over and over and over and over again? This whole crazy mixed-up terribly-cliched old-fogie 'citizenship' dealie. Why should citizenship confer any privileges? What's so special about the US and A anyhow? Why shouldn't anyone be able to walk into a voting booth without getting hassled by some stuffy government bureaucrat who has a wacky hang-up about 'rules' or 'citizenship status' or 'laws' or Constitutional requirements'?
Remember what I said about schizophrenia?
The open-borders crowd, ethnic grievance groups and the Left--but I repeat myself three times--have helped create a situation where a person winning a $25 prize from a burger joint has to prove he's a US citizen, but a person voting for President does not.
That, my friends, should be the textbook definition of insanity, at least when it comes to national policy.
More importantly, it cannot be allowed to stand.
Either we give a shit about who votes in our elections or we don't. Either citizenship confers real tangible benefits to the people who have it or it doesn't. If the only thing being a citizen gets you is a Burger King crown, being American has become meaningless.
Pauline Kael, the famous New Yorker film critic, is probably just as notable these days for her insulated leftism as her movie reviews. Back in 1972, many Democrats were shocked that Richard Nixon was re-elected over the great progressive hero George McGovern. But few lefties expressed their haughty dismay quite like Ms. Kael.
‘I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.'
Remember that Ms. Kael said this in 1972. The ideological bubble that wraps the left in a protective husk of ignorance has been around for at least 40 years, and probably for a lot longer. When conservatives ponder how to argue with progressives, it's important to recognize just how established this intellectual tradition is within American liberalism.
Fast forward to now. Leftists will sometimes wonder how their expectations often--unexpectedly!--don't mesh with reality. More narrowly, progressives will occasionally ponder why Red State Americans aren't more reasonable, secular, intelligent and cool, like the hip folks on the left. They'll cite surveys that say the American people agree with them on this issue or that candidate, then crow about it for a while until the next shiny new data point rolls across their talking points radar screen.
First, let’s look at CBS’ lead on the new poll numbers, which they tout as good news for Barack Obama and bad news for Mitt Romney:
President Obama leads Mitt Romney among likely voters in Ohio and Florida – and has a double-digit lead in Pennsylvania – according to a Quinnipiac University/CBS News/New York Times poll released this morning.
The poll, conducted from July 24-30, shows Mr. Obama leading his presumptive Republican challenger 53 percent to 42 percent in Pennsylvania. The 11-point lead results largely from independents, who favor the president by 22 points, and women, who favor the president by 24 points.
Mr. Obama holds a six-point lead in Ohio, 50 percent to 44 percent, a state where he holds a campaign event later today. His lead here is also due in large part to women, who back him by a 21-point margin. Romney leads by ten points among Ohio men, and seven points among Ohio whites.
In Florida, Mr. Obama also holds a six point lead, 51 percent to 45 percent. He holds a small lead among both men and women and a 19-point lead among Hispanics, while Romney leads by double-digits among whites and voters age 65 and above.
On the surface, this doesn't look good for Mitt Romney. It could be cause for concern among Republican voters. It could conceivably be a sign that the GOP will have to drastically change their tactics and strategies in order to secure victory in November.
On the other hand, dig the party affiliation of the people polled.
Now let’s take a look at the partisan breakdown (D/R/I) in the sample data for each state, and compare them to 2008 and 2010 exit polling:
According to the NYT/CBS poll, Barack Obama is beating Romney by 6% in Florida using a survey that gives Democrats a 9 point edge over the GOP.
In 2008, when Obama won the state over John McCain, Democrats had a three point edge. In 2010, a year that saw the GOP pick up the governorship and retain a US Senate seat in a topsy-turvy three way race, the two parties were tied at 36%.
The Quinnipiac University/CBS News/New York Times poll is skewed in a way that doesn't even sorta reflect reality in the Sunshine State. The governor of Florida is a Republican. The Florida state senate is controlled by Republicans. The Florida state house is controlled by Republicans. The state's US Senate delegation is split, but the US House of Representatives delegation is majority Republican.
This would seem to suggest that many Floridians are quite comfortable with the GOP. It would also suggest that a nine point Democrat edge in party identification is kinda crazy. Even adjusting for the often mercurial whims of voters on Election Day, a state population that has elected so many Republicans probably can't have a voter base that skews Democrat by almost ten percent.
Two quick reminders: Who reads the New York Times and watches CBS News? Liberals. Who doesn't get their news from those two sources? Conservatives.
And now you see how a left-wing intellectual bubble is created and maintained.
The NYT/CBS/Quinnipiac poll was not meant to elucidate the readers and watchers of these MSM news outlets. It was not created to help illustrate a possible voter trend. No, the poll was taken for no other reason than to buck up sagging Democratic voters in the media and other lefty enclaves.
Let's go back to Florida for a moment. Think about a poll where the party identifcation numbers split the difference between the 2008 and 2010 figures. There might be a few more independents, and a few less of the two major parties, but it sure as hell wouldn't have a nine point Donkey Puncher edge.
The problem is a realistic poll in Florida wouldn't give Obama a six point lead in that vital swing state. It would instead display in vivid detail how badly the commander-in-chief is getting his ass kicked by Mitt Romney in the Sunshine State. And we can't have Democrats getting emo in the months leading up to re-electing President Pitching Wedge.
Now, I don't have necessarily have a problem with left-wingers trying to buck up the spirits of their fellow statists. Robust confidence is almost always more appealing than dour pessimism. But liberals should recognize the difference between the cheerleading propaganda they create for their Outer Party members and the real world. Increasingly, it seems like progressives have put strapped the industrial strength blinders on because they can't handle the bad news they've brought onto themselves.
So in one reality we have a standard-issue right-wing character assassination piece against a liberal activist few liberals had actually heard of — think Van Jones, redux — that has grown into a much larger campaign accusing him, without evidence, of serious crimes, all because of his long-forgotten past. In the other version, an untrustworthy huckster who’s insinuated himself into a certain circle of liberal activism panics when conservatives highlight his disturbing criminal past and put his current position in jeopardy, and he responds with a campaign of shameless legal intimidation — and, perhaps, certain allies of his go even further. Your tribal political sympathies — or your opinion of the people involved on each side – may determine on which side you fall, though no one involved seems capable of telling the whole truth.
Naturally, Alex is above such tribalisms.
*pause*
Hahahahahaaaaaaaaahahahaaaa!
Please read the rest of Dan Collins' piece over at the terrific Conservatory.
Alex Pareene's pathetic whitewash job on the Brett Kimberlin/SWATing affair is not a shocker. Homeboy gets off on preening his hipster-lefty credentials. It would be more surprising if a junior Juice-Box Mafia cheapshot artist and all-around hack liberal stenographer such as Alex Pareene broke with his fellow thumbsuckers and actually dealt with Brett Kimberlin's actions in an honest way.
But Dan's post got me thinking about how progressives are prone to a very convenient sort of selective amnesia. In Liberal Fascism, one of author Jonah Goldberg's larger points is that progressives have tried to cover up their movement's adoption of many fascist tenets. This is problematic because most people tend to think rather poorly of fascism. Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini are rightly seen as some of the 20th century's worst world leaders. As such, folks are loath to openly associate themselves with murderous dictators or their repellent political beliefs
So how does the Left go about having fascist tendencies while denouncing the ideology at the same time? Simple. It pins any past fascism they were guilty of on "America". But what about Woodrow Wilson's press censorship, paramilitary neighborhood watch programs and a general hatred for dissent? How are we supposed to feel about FDR's reliance on utopian Third Way politics, relentless economic experimentation and internment camps? For the liberals, none of those things are the sins of a particular left-leaning political party. Instead, they--and many other radical agendas--are examples of the basically evil nature of the United States.
At the same time, the progressive movement insists that traditional American conservatives, the intellectual children of 19th century laissez-faire liberalism, are the actual fascists in American life. This means that conservative shortcomings are always assigned to the Right's report card while liberalism's faults are never marked against them. Liberalism is never to blame when something goes wrong in the US, even when it's obvious they've gone and shit the mattress.
In 2012, political intimidation in American public life is an instrument exclusively employed by the Left. Elements of contemporary liberalism either ignore it, encourage it or subsidize it. In many quarters, progressives find silencing their political rivals through violence or threats useful.
However, when our modern-day Maoists become too bored or ashamed of Brett Kimberlin and his tactics, he will meet the same fate as the Left's torrid love affair with 20th century fascism. First, there will be a concerted effort to shove him down the memory hole. Then, in a few years, he'll be transformed from the Tides Foundation's favorite Alinsky-guided missile to a vicious right-wing reactionary. Finally, when all the dust has cleared, Brett Kimberlin will be a cautionary tale of how we all have to 'tone down' our 'heated rhetoric'.
RELATED: The great RS McCain goes deeper into Salon magazine's woes. Alex Pareene gets a friendly shout-out!
As most of my readers know, like Barack Obama, my biological father is Kenyan and my mother is American. Mom--no fan of the president’s, to be sure--does not believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya either. Her reasoning makes sense.
Mom went to Germany as a young teen—she’s a military brat—and, as a result, is familiar with the international transport procedures of the 1950s and 1960s. (Coolness factor: she returned to the United States by sea.)
Additionally, Mom gave birth to me in the same month and year that Stanley Ann Obama gave birth to Barack Obama. Armed with intimate knowledge of travel and child-birth in the Dark Ages, Mom says that there is no way that Stanley Ann Obama could have given birth in what was then British East Africa, gotten papers, immunizations, etc. in order, and made it back to the other side of the world in time to apply for extension courses from the University of Washington (state) two weeks after her son was born.
Assuming that the details surrounding the president’s birth and his mother’s actions during that period are accurate (yes, I know), I don’t think the birthplace was a mistake by his literary agent as that agent claims.
Barack Obama has a history of dissembling—much of it designed to make himself look better than the average American, especially the average black American. It wasn’t enough for him that his father was Kenyan; he had to make himself even better by claiming to be born there. “Better?” I hear you ask. Yes, better, from the perspective of a person long-simmered in hatred of this country.
Allow me to give a little insight to the mindset. Often, when I mention that my biological father is Kenyan, people assume that I was born in Kenya as well, usually in the context that it is better to have been born somewhere other than in the United States. The assumption is an irritant for two reasons: 1) I am “proud” and grateful to have been born in the United States of America, and 2) If I had been born in Kenya, there would be no reason whatsoever to mention the birthplace of my father.
If Barack Obama did lie on his literary bio, did this bit of lying in the service of pride of self and hatred for this country back-fire on him? Can't say that it has. That bio has been in the public domain for all to see since 1991, but no entity of the mainstream media saw fit to present this very pertinent fact to the American voting public. Fancy that.
And a whole lot of other paperwork too, even though Doug Mataconis insists that we don't.
My response to this question is another question, why do we need to see the transcripts?Of what possible relevance are the grades that Barack Obama got at Occidental, Columbia, or Harvard Law School to judging his time in office and whether he deserves to be re-elected? What would it reveal about his Presidency that we don’t know? To ask the same question about Romney, what possible relevance to evaluating whether he’d be a good President his grades at Brigham Young University and Harvard (where Romney simultaneously obtained a J.D. and an M.B.A.) could possibly be. It’s been 37 years since Mitt Romney finished his college education, and 20 years since Obama finished his, as James Joyner asked back in 2008, isn’t there a statute of limitations on the use of college achievements as evidence of achievement? If there’s not, there should be.
To be fair, Mataconis stipulates that Obama's college transcripts might have been more revelatory back in 2008 than they would be today. Good point and its one I'll concede. Obama's record as President is plenty damaging all on it's own. How he did in Western Civ I is not as important as his current position on entitlement reform.
However, here's a question: Do businesses and organizations use college transcripts as a way of judging prospective hires? Do companies demand college records as part of the application process? Are college transcripts used as a way of comparing and contrasting several candidates who are going for the same job?
Let me get this straight: Getting the assistant regional manager position at Staples means showing college scrips, but scoring the US President gig doesn't require any presentation of higher education records.
Okay.
Makes perfect sense.
Especially in modern America, where getting college credit isn't necessary for hardly any jobs.
But Mataconis isn't done.
...the demands for transcripts is often linked to the equally erroneous belief that he wasn’t properly vetted in 2008. As I noted earlier this month, that’s a ridiculous idea:
Barack Obama has been President of the United States for nearly four years now, and he’s been on the national scene as either a candidate for President or as President since 2007. The idea that we have no idea who the man is, or that he hasn’t been “vetted” is simply an absurd fantasy that partisans are using in what looks for all the world like a desperate effort to find something, anything that they can use against him in the upcoming election.
Yes, because the press didn't have to be dragged kicking and screaming to report that Obama ate dogs.
Mataconis seems to be arguing that conservatives should focus on 'important' issues rather than on demanding the media do a better job vetting the President. Now that's a noble sentiment. But why did the Right have such a good time hammering the Exotic Food Connoisseur In Chief about chowing down on Fido-burgers? It wasn't simply to playfully zing Barack Obama for a few days. There was a political motivation in answering back as well.
In 1983, Romney took his family on vacation and, faced with a packed station wagon, put his Irish setter Seamus in a travel kennel strapped to the roof of the car. Romney constructed a special windshield in an effort to make the dog more comfortable, but Seamus ended up relieving himself on the roof, which reportedly caused much consternation among the Romney boys. Ever since the story got out -- it was reported by the Boston Globe in 2007, during Romney's first run for president -- Romney opponents have used it in semiserious and sometimes fully serious ways to portray him as insensitive.
In late January, for example, top Obama campaign aide David Axelrod sent out a tweet that included a photo of Obama with his Portuguese water dog Bo in the back seat of the presidential limousine. "How loving owners transport their dogs," Axelrod wrote.
It wasn't a random comment. "They're obsessed with the dog thing," liberal journalist Chris Hayes said on his MSNBC program Sunday morning, referring to the Obama campaign. "And the reason is that, I have heard, in focus groups, the dog story totally tanks Mitt Romney's approval rating."
Under Mataconis' rubric, Team Barry is engaging in yucky politics when bringing up Mitt's supposedly poor treatment of his dog.
When this or any other charge of allegedly dirty pool is brought up against the Obama campaign, Axelrod and Co. inevitably answers with a hearty "So what?" A fair fight is the other guys problem. That means they really don't give a shit what Doug Mataconis or anybody else thinks should be discussed. When they brought up the Seamus story, it was because they knew it damaged Mitt Romney's chances of beating Barack Obama in November.
Mataconis thinks that elections are about winning arguments. They're not. They're ultimately about winning votes. Which is what Obama was trying to do by beating Romney over the head with the Seamus story. But when the Right engages the issue to turn it back against Obama--again, in the hopes that their preferred candidate would get more votes than his opponents--guys like Mataconis wring their hands over distractions.
Worse than that, Mataconis doesn't see the larger issue, which is the utter stinking corruption of the mainstream media. Think about the most recent example. Barack Obama stops fighting his feelings and embraces gay marriage. Naturally this causes everyone in the media to simultaneously proggasm over the President's new-found enlightenment. The next day, the Washington Post runs a story about a school age Mitt Romney possibly bullying a classmate who may or may not have been gay.
Forget that Robert Stacy McCain has spotted the flaws, baseless insinuations,White House/media coordination and outright lies in the WaPo story. The fact is the Washington Post blatantly tag-teamed with Camp Obambi to damage Mitt Romney on a political issue. Not MSNBC, the Daily Kos or The Nation. Instead, it was the completely nonpartisan, totally unbiased, nope-no-sir-no-dog-in-this-fight Washington Post that was Obama's press enabler here.
Whether it's the MSM making Barack Obama's college years terra non grata or coordinating an attack on the Republican nominee for president, the result is the same. The American media is a major component of the President's re-election campaign. They are actively participating in the fight to marginalize St. Barry's opponent.
Mataconis wants us to ignore all that. He'd have the Republicans and conservatives fighting by the Marquess of Queensbury rules while the Democrats and the MSM bring a shotgun into the ring. That's the smart move here.
Because Obama's college transcripts are not 'relevant'.
They're only irrelevant if you don't want to see how badly the media is gaming the system.
Ultimately, getting the President's college transcripts is not really about vetting the President. It's part of vetting the mainstream media. The MSM, which hates anything to the right of Noam Chomsky and desperately wants Obama to win in November.
The President needs to be investigated. But the left-wing press corps and the Gulfstream Jacobins in the entertainment industry need to be vetted as well. After all, they're playing for the same team. Only a person who has deliberately blinded himself to reality would fail to see why the goverment-media complex needs to get taken down.
Old And Busted: Getting people off the public dole.
New Hotness: Getting lots and lots of people back on the public dole.
The Congressional Budget Office said Thursday that 45 million people in 2011 received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, a 70% increase from 2007.
Political Junkie Mom is right. Having the Obama administration do stuff to increase employment or oil production is just silly rugged individualist conservative yakkety-yak. Far better for the government to do the things its really good at, like fostering long-term dependency.
But hey, it's not poor people who are getting pounded by this administration. The "rich" are about to get their comeuppance as well.
If you thought paying your taxes was painful this year, get ready for more heartache next year, when taxpayers could be on the hook for almost $500 billion in higher taxes... That's the size of "Taxmageddon."
Taxmageddon is the tax hike set to slam the economy and taxpayers on Jan. 1, 2013. It's made up of seven different categories of tax cuts set to expire, and six tax hikes from the health-care law set to kick in, as soon as the ball drops on New Year's Eve.
The Left's definition of 'shared' sacrifice: Make the poor into a permanent underclass so they can easily be exploited for votes while simultaneously punishing anyone who tries to escape the statist suck-hole of fail.
Or maybe I'm being too hard on Obama and the rest of the progressive movement. Perhaps I'm ascribing a conscious plan to people who really have no idea what they're doing. It could be that the President and his administration are just incompetent dolts.
Then again, that would go against everything we've been told about Barack Obama for the last five years. People who identify themselves as conservative think Obama is scary smart. Scions of the Left have insisted that Barack Obama is a great intelligence. How many prestigious universities did Barack Obama go to? Occidental, Columbia and Harvard represent the pinnacle of higher education not just in America but across the globe. Anyone who wrote not one but two memoirs before the age of fifty has to be pretty sharp.
If President Obama is as smart as his sycophants and enablers insist he is, then he has the intelligence to see how his proposals affect the nation. That means that Obama is happy to see more and more people on food stamps. Obama wants to hammer Americans with tax hikes. The current state of affairs in the United States is pretty much exactly what the community-organizer-in-chief ordered.
Here's the rub--I think Obama is going to play dumb during this campaign season. In 2008, dude was supposed to walk on water during a three dimensional chess marathon while simultaneously developing a vaccine for athlete's foot. In 2012, everything--and I mean EVERYTHING--will be somebody else's fault. Crappy economy? Damn you, Bushitler. Wallet-punishing gas prices? Darth Cheney and his roving band of nefarious petroleum speculators are killing the electric car with their diabolical oil-based superpowers. Stratospheric unemployment? John 'Satan's Personal Oompaloompa' Boehner simply won't let America have the kajillions of eco-tastic green jobs that every US company is just dying to create.
That line of nonsense cannot be allowed to fly. Obama has constantly billed himself--and actively encouraged others to sing from the same hymnal by the way--as a super genius. Its time to throw that achievement-free arrogance back in his face.
Dedicated to the memory of the fearless Andrew Breitbart.
Note: I began composing this essay some months before the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman shooting, but, in its wake, I felt that it was time to finish it and post it.
Usually I’m reading several books at once and using Kindle for Blackberry iPhone has exacerbated this low level of ADD.
One of the opened books on my device is Lee Harris’s The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West. The subject matter is obvious; however, in the preface and the first few chapters, Harris barely mentions Islam at all. Instead, he does two very valuable things: he defines his terms and lays the ideological foundation for those terms as they relate to his subject. The two sets of players in the scenarios that Harris describes are: rational actors and tribal actors or fanatics. All of the following excerpts are taken from the book’s preface.
Throughout most of human history, men have not behaved like rational actors but like tribal actors; and in many cultures of the world today, they continue to behave that way. They have no choice. When everyone around you is a member of a tribe, you must either belong to a tribe or be an outcast. Whereas the rational actor asks himself, “What is best for me,” the tribal actor must ask himself,” What is best for us?”
*****
[W]hat limits [the tribal actor’s] freedom is not so much the pressure of the tribal mind applied externally, but rather the fact that the tribal actor thinks with the tribal mind, and so cannot even imagine doing things differently from the way they are done by his tribe.
*****
The rational actor has the luxury of appealing to his conscience in order to condemn the behavior of his own community.
*****
The tribal actor, on the other hand, cannot take a moral stance outside the perspective of his tribe. For the tribal actor, the highest ethical idea is: “My tribe, right or wrong.” The mere idea that his tribe could be wrong is unthinkable for the tribal actor, since he defines as right whatever the tribe deems right, and wrong as whatever the tribe deems wrong.
So let’s see how these observable truths relate to black Americans.
We have seen black Americans like former presidential candidate Herman Cain (R-GA), Rep. Allen West (R-FL), and Rep. Tim Scott (R-SC)--people who are obviously black and of African descent, using the eyeball test and known heritage--be deemed "not really black.”i Men like the foregoing are those who are not Democrats, who oppose the policies supported by the Democrat Party and who do not politically support Democrats of any race or color, not even the present President of the United States of America. But how can black Americans who are not Democrats or Liberals or Leftists become not themselves? And what gives Democrats—even white ones—the authority to determine who is black and who is not?
The following videos have a common theme.
The pride/shame dynamic is what is on display here. This feature is used rein in members of a tribe who step outside of pre-defined tribal boundaries.
Black Americans are, for the most part, a tribe. Some will take offense to that opinion, but if we look into the specifics of our existence as Americans since the practice of enslaving imported Africans became widespread, we see that there is nothing else that we can be called.
Remember, our ancestors, of various West African tribes, were bought here, sold, and forcibly stripped of their various names, languages, cultures, and religions. That conditioning created a new tribe: the Negro. And even after the abolition of slavery, Americans of African descent were confined to a certain level of society. A few managed to break the barrier, but the vast majority remained in the legal, economic, educational social and tribal space into which the US Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson allowed state and local governments to pen them.
But along came the Civil Rights Era, really beginning in the 1940s and reaching its apex in the 1970s. The Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts heralded the end of our status as a tribe within a nation and they harkened to the objective ideals on which this nation was founded.
These landmarks of legislation stated that we belonged to the American “tribe” all along. But, concurrently, another idea—an ideology--was on the ascent as well: Black Pride.
Pride. When we hear the word, we interpret it in two ways.
So-called benign pride is represented in the following example: we are proud of ourselves when we achieve hard-won goals-- educational, personal, etc.; we are proudof cherished relatives and friends who do the same.
The not-so-good type of pride is that which the Bible warns against--"the high look," “the up-tilt of the chin.”
Recall that in the days before the Civil Rights Era, being a black American was a matter of shame and degradation, but the idea of “Black Pride" served to counter that. The concept of Black Pride, while initially a good thing, has, however, brought black Americans from one extreme mindset and deposited us into another. It took us away from the shame of being black to a place in which no one may criticize a black person who is deemed to be in good standing with the “tribe.” Many (most?) black Americans believe that blackness is a way of thinking and a political position and, stemming from these ideas, that any black person who deviates from the “black” mindset and political position—a black conservative--isn't really black. This idea stems further from the Left co-opting "black pride" and using it to keep anger and grievances alive long past their dates of pertinence. The purpose of this tactic is to keep the wedge open between black and white Americans, drive it wider, and produce violence. We've seen it happen many times. The ultimate purpose, taken together with many other tactics, is to destroy America.
Pride is what is always has been: inordinate high opinion of one's superiority and goodness; the preening to appear better than on-lookers. (My great-aunt calls it “floor-showing.") That we had to use pride--a sin--to “rid” ourselves of the mindset of shame and degradation is the problem. We went too far in the other direction, so far in that direction that the things which are destroying us--the things which we should be ashamed of--we have deemed inherent to blackness and called them good. We call the chains of the New Slavery--bastardy, illiteracy, mis-education, self-genocide, etc.—our due, our rights. And we believe that any of our number who breaks free ideologically and tries to tell their brethren how to be free is a traitor to the tribe. (Harriett Tubman would understand.) Shame is no longer an option, except as a cudgel for those who point this out. ii
In addition, we deem the New Slavers--the modern-day Democrat Party--to be our friends even though their forebears were always the perpetrators of overt black American slavery and oppression and they have lured all too many of us into contemporary bondage. This sort of tribal pride blocks the ability to see what's right in front of one’s face and the ability to accurately map out the future. It blocks reality.
Herman Cain was dead on when he called it brainwashing and it has been a decades-long process, coinciding with the Left's agenda to hollow out the institutions of this country.
Here’s the thing: I think that certain types of tribalism are beneficial to those within and even without some sets of tribal boundaries. Some years back, Bill Whittle famously expounded on the tribe of Sheepdogs, those rough men—and, sometimes, women--who make it their business to protect sheep from the wolves of this world. “You choose your tribe,” said Bill, and allowing oneself that choice is the province of rational actors. This isn’t to say that one should separate self from one’s racial, ethnic, national, or ideological tribe. However, it is to say that blindly following each one of the presumed norms of the tribe into which one was born is folly and it is the province of tribal actors. That is the place where into which all too many of my fellow black Americans find ourselves locked, mentally and emotionally.
Through this mindset, black Americans have become the organized Left's shock troops in latter’s war against America and all too many of us have become the Left's overseers, tasked to force the "deserters" back into formation using the tools of ridicule and shame. I almost said that the Left was at war with black people, but the Left doesn't esteem blacks enough to deem us as their enemies. We are merely tools to be used for the task at hand—to foment violent racial discord which will have to be put down using infinitely stronger government violence--and to be discarded when the task is completed, assuming that there will be any of us left after the New Civil War. And we let ourselves be used for one reason: tribal vengeance; for slavery and for oppression.
I submit that the Obama Administration, representing black Americans and no others, declared a tribal war against white Americans when Attorney General Eric Holder refused to prosecute members of the New Black Panther Party after the latter's blatant violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Department of Justice’s inaction sent a message mirroring that of the US Supreme Court Dred Scott decision (1857): that the white man has no rights which the black man is bound to respect. Leftist ideology has been inculcated into black Americans for quite some time now and one of the strategies of this process has been to keep alive racial anger and the desire for tribal vengeance for past oppression. The Obama Administration's inaction in the above matter was merely a formal declaration, but the anger has long been simmering and, all too often, it boils over. Am I exaggerating? I don’t think so. And I think that many Americans have gotten the message.
Assuming that the above is true, let’s leave aside morality and conscience for a bit and look at this declaration strictly from a strategic point of view. Leaderless families and the resultant black-on-black killings are prevalent among black Americans and directly attributable to the lure of LBJ’s New Slavery Great Society programs. (I contend that these two features are merely the aforementioned ‘shame and degradation of being black’ re-packaged and internalized. If the leaders of a people—men—don’t love their progeny enough to marry the women who bear their children and/or remain in the lives of those children long enough to bring them into functioning adulthood, why would those children love themselves or those who look like them? And abortion is merely the black female method of black-on-black killing.)
So we black Americans murder ourselves within in womb and without, assert the former as our right, and ignore the latter. These methods of self-genocide have greatly thinned the “troops.” Taking this into account, one logically concludes that starting a war with a “tribe” that outnumbers us 12-1 and outguns us is pure folly.
It will bring the tribal suicide which we’ve been slowly committing, to a quick and devastating conclusion.
Turning back to conscience and morality, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob reserves vengeance to Himself, and instructs Jewish and Christian believers to forego it. But even if one does not believe in Him, it’s easy to see the chaos which is nearly always brought about by the unending cycle of human vengeance. You murder/enslave/oppress mine, then I take vengeance and murder/enslave/oppress yours. Then you take vengeance and murder/enslave/oppress more of mine. Then I…
Is this what you want, Americans? I do not.
Harris points out that rational actors can only live as rational actors if those around him—those in his society—continue to behave as rational actors as well. He also says that, when a rational actor finds himself surrounded by tribal actors—fanatics—it becomes rational for a rational actor to revert to being a tribal actor. The alternative is to perish.
We all tend to forget that all human beings are only a few steps away from reverting to the Law of the Jungle. Twentieth-century Europe demonstrated and the Muslim world still demonstrates the truth of this. Will we Americans—all of us--continue in the way of most of humanity? Everyday, I pray not.
[i] It’s interesting that Liberals think that black people have a certain way of thinking embedded in the DNA. White supremacists think this as well.
[ii] Until recently, I found it puzzling that some black Liberals hurl all manner of racial epithets at black Conservatives; but now I realize that it’s the pride/shame mindset. Those who use this tactic, however, don’t realize that it’s ineffectual on persons who recognize it for what it is.
(Re-edited.)
UPDATE: Lloyd Marcus: Democrats Responsible for Black Culture of Anger. More precisely, Leftists are. Read the comments, tremble for your country and, most importantly, pray to The Living God for mercy and deliverence.
Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22 and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor.
“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.
“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly.
I was reading Ace’s remembrance of Hitch. Like Andrew Breitbart, I peruse Ace’s comments section almost as much as I read the posts themselves. Most commenters were respectful and more than a few were quite mournful of the loss of Mr. Hitchens. As the comments piled up, another train of thought developed, which could be characterized as the ‘Hooray, The Mouthy Atheist Gets His Comeuppance Sack Dance’. Several commenters, who identified themselves as Christians, seemed to revel in the fact that Hitchens would be damned for his atheism.
Tacky? Definitely.
An un-Christian response to the death of a human being? Surely.
But then again, what was the grand project of Christopher Hitchens’ life over the last decade? For many people–especially those not familiar with his stance on Islamic radicalism, his disgust for President Bill Clinton or his slow drift away from the political left–Hitch was best known as the public face of atheism. And it’s not like he was particularly gentle about his dislike for religious faith. No, he was a loud-n-proud attack dog for the anti-God side.
It isn’t all that shocking to find that many Christians grew tired of Hitchens’ snarling barely contained disdain for them. Believers are instructed to turn the other cheek and pray for their enemies, but believers are still human after all. Even the most patient Christian will chafe at having his beliefs trampled on over and over again. This is especially true when the trampler in question never bothers to wipe off his boots before stepping on his intended target. Hitchens’ brand of atheism was pointed, angry and more often than not insulting. When he railed against the Church or other religious institutions, it seemed as if his aim was not to change minds but to injure people he perceived as enemies.
In America and the West, Christians have endured decades of writers, entertainers, artists, intellectuals and other taste-makers who attempted to shame believers out of their faith. For many, Hitchens was simply the latest in a long line of pompous know-it-alls trying to make them feel stupid for taking the words of the Bible to heart. Seen in that light, it’s more surprising just how few Christians have piled on in the wake of Hitchens’ passing.
Beyond the question of religion, Christopher Hitchens was a writer that reveled in the act of making ideological allies uncomfortable. Since the time of Clinton’s impeachment, Hitchens was seen by many on the Left as a traitor to the cause. For the audacity of going against American liberalism’s champion, Hitch was vilified by the kind of people who had spent decades using him as an ideological buttress to hold up their arguments.
For many progressives, the final straw was Hitchens’ continuous defense of the Iraq War. The idea of Hitch making friends with the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush was simply too much for many committed leftists to tolerate. The excommunication of Hitchens from the socialist project was all but complete by 2004.
Even as the intellectual Left was ejecting a former comrade from their midst, Hitchens simply wouldn’t or couldn’t play nice in the sandbox with the Right either. Besides his utter hatred for organized religion he made sure to slam other facets of the broad traditionalist caucus. Sarah Palin got no love from Hitch. Neither did the Tea Party; Hitch accused the movement of racial bigotry whenever asked about it. Ronald Reagan, one of conservatism’s great political heroes, was worse than useless in the writer’s judgment.
How much of Hitchens’ argumentative rhetoric came from honest disagreement? How much of it was mere posturing? Sometimes it was hard to tell. The joy Hitchens seemed to take in making people squirm suggests that a good deal of his personality was a well-rehearsed form of contrarianism. This isn’t always so bad; there are far worse sins for a writer than being against the prevailing attitudes of his time.
Still, watch the clip and note how Hitchens goes after Reagan. From our vantage point in the Age of Trillion Dollar Obama, 90’s-era lefty critiques of Reagan’s budget deficits seem ridiculously quaint. More absurd is the sight of a man who at the time still considered himself a member of the socialist movement using national debt as a focus for his attack on the 40th president. For a polemicist who launched into countless tirades denouncing the hypocrisy of his various hate-figures, the grasping for this particular club to bash this particular target is just the sort of cynical opportunism Hitchens made a career out of railing against.
But what a career. To say Christopher Hitchens had a gift for writing is like saying that Lady Gaga has a passing interest in publicity. Even whenyoufoundyourselfdisagreeingwithhim, he was still far more interesting than most political writers are on their best days. Hitchens was a master of fusing his thunderous moralism to a seemingly effortless ability to create provocative imagery. For this alone, he will be missed by writers and readers across the globe.
But it wasn’t just his writing that made him great. His public persona, an improbable amalgamation of a priapic boozed-up British university student and a joyfully overfed bookworm, made him a joy to watch in a public debate. It was also that improbable mixture that was so surprising. A nicotine-fueled drunk nattering on in a cartoonish plummy Oxbridge accent about Cold War-era Eastern European leftists or some other historical obscurity should not be compelling, yet somehow Hitchens made it work. It’s possible that only he could’ve done pulled off that feat.
For this conservative, it was most enjoyable seeing Hitchens crack on his former leftist pals. Watch and laugh as Hitch eviscerates knee-jerk liberal Eric Alterman’s anti-Iraq War arguments. What comes across most clearly from the clip is the sense that Alterman could not—even at such a late hour--relinquish his lingering hurt over Hitchens’ defection from the liberal sphere. Even as Hitchens piles injury upon injury, Alterman still pines for Hitch to come back to liberal side of the aisle. The barely concealed passive aggression from Alterman gives the game away.
Sometimes a man is defined by his enemies. In many ways, Hitchens was defined by the old comrades he had pissed off over the course of his meandering exit from the progressive movement. The resentment still remains, even after a decade. Repellent lefty shrew Katha Pollitt took the occasion of Hitch’s passing to settle some bitter old scores with her former colleague. Kevin Drum damned himself by damning Hitchens with faint insult. Dave Zirin spun a chance barroom dust-up with Hitch into a comically melodramatic confrontation, complete with a bizarre slapdash amateur psychoanalysis of Hitchens to boot.
Again and again, one is faced with a rather startling revelation: The Left needed Christopher Hitchens far more than he ever needed them. They craved his stylish prose, his combativeness and his intellectual curiosity. More importantly, liberals desperately wanted to be able to claim Hitchens as theirs alone. When Hitch started palling around with liberalism’s enemies, it devastated the socialists--as it does still today.
Was Christopher Hitchens a right-winger, as his many progressive critics accused him of being? Surely not. William F. Buckley once said that an atheist could be a conservative, but a God-hater could not. Hitchens’ disgust for organized religion alone will probably always deny him entry into the conservative caucus. His various other heterodoxies from traditionalism make considering him a man of the Right impossible.
However, measuring Hitchens by this yardstick is unfair. The man loved his eccentricities more than being a rigid partisan. It was his sort of scattered unpredictable politics, the kind that infuriated both friends and enemies alike, that made him interesting. To complain about Hitchens’ lack of ideological ‘correctness’ misses the point. Hitch forced everyone who read him to question their own assumptions, even for just a moment. During a career that spanned several periods of ideological inflexibility, Hitchens' ability to break through convention is the greatest gift he could give to his readers.
Hitch would agree with the sentiment that the world is a far better place with people like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden dead. Conversely, the world is a far better place for having Christopher Hitchens live in it for sixty-two years.
On September 11th 2001, ordinary Americans were caught in the horror of al-Qaeda's monstrous sadism. The victims of the 9/11 attacks were a more or less random sampling of people from a broad spectrum of life in the States. While none of them could've known that they would be murdered by pure human evil that day, many men and women rose up and became America's first heroes in the war against radical Islam.
The 45-year-old flight attendant was on American Airline Flight 11, the first of two that crashed into the World Trade Center. During the hijacking, Ong hid in the back galley, picked up a crew phone and bravely called the airline reservation desk.
"The cockpit is not answering their phone," Ong said during the hijacking. "There's somebody stabbed in business class and we can't breathe...somebody's got mace or something."
The call lasted 23 minutes. Ong spoke calmly, giving important details of the chaotic last moments.
The 9/11 Commission declared Ong a hero.
Indeed.
Here is the phone call she placed--in the midst of the hijacking, with murder surrounding her and in danger of being killed by terrorists--telling authorities what was happening on her flight.
And then this valiant woman was gone.
What did the 9/11 attacks cost us? We can talk about the trillion dollars that simply evaporated from the American economy in a single morning. The destruction of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon was meant to be a symbolic demolition of the United States' economic and military dominance. But as important as these things are, they pale in comparison to the human price America paid on that day.
Think about the hopes and dreams of the three thousand people who died on that day. What did Betty Ong want for her life? Was she saving for a house or new car? Did she want to get married? Were children in her plans? Did she have career aspirations? These are questions that seem so banal, at least for the living. Tragically, they cannot be answered when it comes to Ms. Ong--or anyone else who died because of Osama bin Laden's perverse ideology.
Three thousand people are no longer with us, which means three thousand sets of families and friends were victimized on September 11th. Those people who had a connection to the 9/11 victims not only had a part of their lives ripped away from them, but they had a part of their future destroyed as well; the weddings that didn't happen, the children that won't be born, the birthdays that have become a time of mourning. When seen from that perspective, the 9/11 attacks take on an almost unthinkably barbaric and inhuman dimension.
It was Osama bin Laden and his followers who decided to make war against us in this fashion. It was bin Laden, one of the most extreme adherents of a religion that has trouble reconciling itself to democracy, human rights, free market economics and the rest of modern civilization, that elected to use large scale terrorism on the United States. America did not seek out this fight. The fight was brought right into our home. We had no choice but to bring war upon bin Laden and all those that would stand with him. We have no choice but to continue to fight against all who follow in al-Qaeda's path.
On this day, we should mourn. We should mourn for those who had loved ones taken from them. We should mourn for our country and all that it lost on that day. But we should also celebrate the men and women that gave their lives in order to save us. We almost never think of our neighbors and coworkers as potential heroes. As it turns out, the 9/11 attacks showed us that America is full of people who will rise in the face of unimaginable danger to help others.
At one of the darkest moments in this country's history, there were many like Betty Ong who put themselves in harm's way in order to do the right thing. During the worst attack on America's soil, there were citizens that sacrificed their own lives in order to save the lives of others. These folks were not sports icons, blowhard politicians or members of the celebrity class. Our fallen 9/11 heroes were in fact ordinary Americans who were placed into unspeakable situations and performed extraordinary feats of selfless bravery.
On this day of sadness and pain, we should leave some room in our hearts for wonder. Hopefully we never stop marvelling at the feats of our fallen champions from September 11th. The valorous dead deserves our remembrance and our reverence. We owe them far more than we can ever repay.
Update I: Robert Stacy McCain shares his rememberences of 9/11. He also knows who the real enemy is.
Update II: Manhattan Infidel posts a poignant piece about his 9/11. The Infidel speaks a hard but necessary truth:
What happened that day makes me angry. It still makes me angry. To call Islam Medieval is an insult to the middle ages. Islam is pre-medieval. It is stone age. It is barbaric.
Read the whole thing.
Update III: Karen Howes of the terrific Eastern Right has this to say:
May we always continue to be Americans.
Amen, Karen. Amen.
Update IV: Matt of the Conservative Hideout has some thoughts about American unity.
Update V: Chris Wysocki of WyBlog reminds us that we still need patriots.
Update VI: Edge of the Sandbox is annoyed at Muslim imams getting invited to places they don't really belong. Preach on, sister.
Update VII: The Crack Emcee gives us the enduring strength of George W. Bush. He kept us safe and we ended up hating him for it.
Update VIII: David Wong of Cracked.com tells the story of how "Loose Change" poisoned the 9/11 tragedy.
Update IX: Right Hand Man of the superb Sentry Journal talks about heart.
Update X: Angel of Woman Honor Thyself honors those taken from us on 9/11 with a heart-wrenching piece.
Update XI: CG Hill takes a look at his September 13th 2001 reaction and fisks it.
The top congressional leaders from both parties gathered at the White House for a working discussion over the shape and size of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan. The meeting was designed to promote bipartisanship.
But Obama showed that in an ideological debate, he’s not averse to using a jab.
Challenged by one Republican senator over the contents of the package, the new president, according to participants, replied: “I won.”
As a statement of fact, the Bamster was of course correct. He did win the 2008 presidential election in very handy fashion. John McCain was a lousy candidate, but that doesn't change the fact that 52% of the public pulled the HopeyChangey lever.
As it relates to the contemporary fight over the debt ceiling, Obama's 2009 triumphalism represents just how badly the President misread the circumstances that swept him into power. Candidate Barry ran as an aspirational post-partisan Lightbringer. He was going to change the country's imperial posture on the world stage and reverse the damage done to the US's reputation by the American warlord Premier Bush. International intellectual elites, formerly hostile governments, hardcore terrorists; all would fall for Barack Obama's apologies for past American misbehavior and his sophisticated charisma.
On the home front, an Obama presidency was advertised as an even-keeled moderate administration that would stand athwart the ideological poles of American politics cooing, "Let's Be Nice." President Pantscrease (thanks again, David Brooks!) wasn't going to give in to the extremes of the Republican Party hacks of course, but he also wasn't going to let Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi define his political agenda either. Sure, there would be some new spending, but nothing crazy. Yes, there were going to be some tax hikes, but only on the really rich people.
A conciliatory anti-Dubya abroad and a pragmatic centrist in the domestic sphere: this is the Barack Obama many Americans voted for in 2008.
In 2011 we find ourselves sifting through the wreckage of Obama's presidency. All the ridiculous spending with absolutely nothing to show for it, all the bloated Leviathan government programs passed against the public's will, all the ludicrous domestic decisions that have damn near annihilated the private sector, all the random wars started with little public explanation and even fewer plans for victory; all of these things and more were borne out of Barack Obama's self-delusion. This arrogant ideologically-blinkered talentless achievement-free hack of a man, with decades of politically correct college campus leftism crammed into his thick Ivy League skull, actually thought that just because he snookered some folks into believing his factless self-description he could govern like the Marxoid rabble-rouser he actually is.
Better still, Barack Obama wants John Boehner and the rest of the GOP--you know, the folks who won last November--to make the exact same mistake he did back in 2009. In the budget ceiling battle going on, the President needs Speaker Boehner far more than he probably ever thought he would. In fact, Obama's chances for pulling a victory out of this (and saving his re-election bacon) rest on John Boehner's forgetting the reason why people voted for the GOP in the midterm elections.
Related: Let's look at the grand agreement that Obama wants and needs Boehner to approve. The Democrats get the Republicans to stop hammering them about profligate spending. In exchange for that, the GOP gets what exactly?
...the president and his allies are playing a familiar card. It’s not that they are against entitlement “reform,” they say, it’s just that they want to protect the beneficiaries from any financial sacrifice. And so we learn in recent days (see here and here) that Democrats are willing to put sizeable Medicare and Medicaid “cuts” on the table. Among the changes that are reportedly under consideration are further reductions in what providers of services and products are paid, trims in Medicare’s support of hospital-based physician-training programs, and importation of Medicaid’s pharmaceutical-rebate scheme into the Medicare prescription-drug benefit for the so-called “dually eligible” (that is, the elderly who are enrolled in both programs). And apparently some Republicans are willing to play along.
These kinds of changes in Medicare and Medicaid are nothing new. Various versions of them have been included in every budget deal going back 30 years, and most especially in the bipartisan deals of 1990 and 1997. They do not constitute genuine entitlement reform. They will not fix Medicare and Medicaid. And they will not solve the nation’s budget problem.
Yes, on paper, the Congressional Budget Office will say they save money, perhaps even a lot of money. But CBO has said that every time a budget deal in the past has included similar provisions. As the years go by, the savings always vanish in the regulatory complexity of the programs, and entitlement spending continues to rise just as it always has. Moreover, arbitrary across-the-board payment cuts are actually damaging to the efficient operation of the health system. They lead to cost shifting, and they drive willing suppliers of services out of the marketplace. In the end, price controls do nothing to change the underlying reasons for cost growth.
So...the Republicans would get nothing. And a whole lot of it.
Excuse my Frogtalk, but why the frack should the GOP cave in on this? Because some jack-ass grandees over at the Washington Post are crying about it? Newsflash: The mainstream media hates Republicans and conservatives the way Roman Polanski hates statutory rape laws. They lie and lie and lie some more, all in the hopes of convincing enough people of the progressive-approved narratives.
More than a few people got their knickers in a twist when Rush Limbaugh said he hoped Barack Obama would fail. Very few people, even those on the Right, ever mention the countless magazine articles, newspaper op-eds and television pieces the MSM produces every goddamn day that practically begs the Lord for the Republicans to fall down a sinkhole and vanish from the political scene.
What about the Mitch McConnell horrible train wreck compromise, you ask? 'Demoralizing' would be a grotesque understatement. Imagine if in World War II the Allies spent months planning the D-Day invasion of Normandy, executed the landing, suffered horrendous casualties and successfully secured a beachhead in France...then turned around and went back to England on June 7th. That's the kind of insanity Senator McConnell is proposing here.
The Republicans have gone too far to stop now. If they do some sort of preemptive surrender where they end up with no real spending cuts while giving their imprimatur to Obama's liberalism, the GOP will all but guarantee the formation of a third party. That in turn will probably mean an Obama win in 2012. The stakes are that high.
Bob Belvedere, a blogger you need to read, takes this view of the modern liberal mindset.
Leftism is incompatible with American Values. It despises custom, morality,and Right Reason. It rejects the importance of tradition and, in fact, scorns and spits on it. Leftists seek not to learn from the wisdom of those who have come before them. They disdain the hard-won knowledge that politics is the art of the possible. They seek to remake the world in their image, to be as gods.
How can you deal with such people?
You can’t because they believe they have found The Answer — that secret knowledge that the man of the Right believes can only be known to God. The Left believes mankind can be perfected, whereas those on the Right know that Human Beings are, well, human, in the purest sense of the that word — they err and will always err, they are flawed and will always fail.
Thus, the Right seeks to craft governments and institutions that put checks on the damage erring men can do. The Left, on the other hand, believing that people can be perfected, sees no reason for such restraints. Their faith in the idea that the Eschaton can be Immanentized, leads them to brook no opposition because, well, how can you oppose the Illuminated Wisdom they have discovered unless you’re an idiot or a fool? It is a torturous logic they follow and it leads, inevitably, given the frustrations they will experience imposing it on their flawed fellow Human Beings, to them torturing their fellow Human Beings. And it has in every single place it has been tried.
Read the whole thing. It's that good. I'll be here when you come back.
People have been saying this for a while, but Mr. Belvedere's post is a strong reminder of a fundamental truth: The progressive movement has engaged in a slow-motion just-slightly-under-the-radar civil war on traditional America for at least the last 50 years. The roots of this conflict lie in several places. Early utopian dreamers like Hebert Croly and John Dewey, frustrated by 18th century classical liberalism, laid the intellectual framework for several generations of liberal activists. Woodrow Wilson's Constitution-bashing administration is a key component. FDR's 'let no crisis go to waste' opportunism enshrined many unconstitutional assumptions into the fabric of American politics. All of these factors and more led to the rise of the 60's-era New Left radicals such as Bernadine Dohrn, Tom Hayden and Noam Chomsky. This driving force in US politics has scored many victories in the last five decades.
A skeptical reader might ask how the last fifty years in American political life can be seen a 'war.' After all, it can be argued that the Constitution creates the conditions for gridlock, narrow-issue voting blocs and partisan rancor. One could make the case that the modern wrangling we see over the national debt, abortion and our various wars is nothing more than business as usual. To some extent, the people who take this position are not completely wrong.
However, consider the following scenario: a state supreme court threatens to create a right to gay marriage if the state legislature doesn't do it on their own. The earliest American thinkers--even Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall himself--couldn't have imagined a scenario where the legislature would be told by the judiciary to make a law. It goes against what most citizens in the modern era think of when they consider the roles of elected officials and the courts.
Think the situation laid out above is crazy? If you do, well, you're wrong. That's just the kind of insanity New York just went through in the push to legalize gay marriage.
The strategy used by the American Left, in which they use their ideological companions in the courts to force a result that progressives demand, is 'democratic' in roughly the same way that Josef Stalin's show trials were 'legal'. They both have the patina of the rule of law, but, in reality, they're both shams. In both instances, a large force bullies another party in order to come to a pre-determined outcome. Most importantly for our purposes, by going so far outside the bounds of constitutional law and tradition, progressives have all but abandoned previous understandings of how America governs itself. This amounts to nothing less than an act of war by the Left against groups of citizens it regards as not just political opponents, but as outright enemies.
It helps if one thinks about American politics like a football game. Imagine that the Washington Redskins are playing the New England Patriots. For three quarters, both sides play by the standard rules of the league. There are lead changes and penalties and back-and-forth action, but the teams play within the framework of NFL regulations; i.e. a touchdown is six points, pass interference is illegal, etc. Then, at the start of the fourth quarter, Washington announces that it will play the rest of the game with 12 players on offense and defense, as opposed to the customary 11. A few minutes later, the 'Skins proclaim that their team will play with a round soccer ball (as opposed to the regulation football) and that they can merely kick it anywhere into the end zone to score a touchdown. Moments later, Washington announces that it will arm its players with hockey sticks which their team can use in any way they please. Finally, the Redskins bribe the officials to allow the Washington club to do whatever the hell it wants.
In this admittedly fanciful situation, it should be clear that while the New England Patriots were busy following the previously understood rules of the NFL game, the Washington Redskins had abandoned playing football altogether. The Washington squad was playing an entirely different game in order to beat New England. They didn't just cheat in order to get a blatantly unfair advantage over their opponent. By going so far outside the regulations, they had in effect declared war on the Patriots.
The same is true of American liberals over the last several decades. They have used anonymous bureaucrats, the judicial branch, moronic Republicans, the mainstream media and any other useful club to expand the size of government and ravage the old Constitutional order. Rarely do liberals score major victories through legislation alone. When they do, it is usually done over the strenuous objections of the citizenry.
This is war. It's not a war fought with bullets or bombs (except when Bill Ayers is really worked up). Instead, it's a war fought with statist regulations, legislation from the bench, Arlen Specter and Learjet liberal Hollywood propaganda. But just because there aren't battlefields and graveyards doesn't mean there isn't a serious conflict going on in America between liberals and conservatives. Whoever wins that fight will determine not just the fate of America, but the world economic and political order created by the US's influence.
The Crack Emcee brings us a CNN anchor dude getting emo.
You’ve got to love this. They went after her – again – and they got nothing! All they’ve exposed is the media’s craven nature and it’s willingness to act as the go-to guy for the Democratic Party. Watch the clip. At one point the reporter looks *stunned* because he’s got to admit the person he’s “investigating” is somebody good who he clearly admires. It’s like he was given the job of killing a kid and he,..just,..can’t,…do it.
Da Emcee nails it...again.
How about we call the former governor by her rightful title. Sarah Palin: The Most Vetted Non-Presidential Candidate Ever.
Did anybody go through Barack Obama's e-mails as US Senator when he announced his run for the Presidency? If the media did, you never heard about it. Ya gotta think that if the lamestreamers did find anything in an Obama email nit-pick expedition, some producer or editor at one of the big media dogs would dutifully toss it down the memory hole. Wouldn't want the general public to get an unfoavorable impression of the Left's Chocolate Jesus sacred worship figure.
Numerous news outlets have decided to crowdsource the Palin e-mails. Did these same media organs go with this tactic when ObamaCare was being debated? How about Cap-n-Trade? What about the Porkulus? Nope. None of that got our Fourth Estate a-rolling like Palin's e-mails.
Amazing.
I'm a Herman Cain supporter. I hope he is the GOP nominee in 2012 because I think he's got the best shot at beating Obama. Having said that, here's an argument for a Sarah Palin presidential run: Nobody can touch the chick. They can't lay a glove on her. Her detractors couldn't hit her with an RPG if she was the broad side of a barn and they were standing ten feet away.
The Left throws everything at her. They have fired every salvo they possibly can. They've had squirrelly weirdo reporters move next door to her house. They engage in bizarre conspiracy theories about the 'true' mother of Trig Palin. They blow her verbal 'gaffes' into week-long exposes, then get cranky when it turns out that she was right.
The progressives almost always come out looking worse than she does whenever they get into a food fight with Palin. She makes them look ridiculous. Better still, because the left cannot stand to get humiliated, they forget the first rule of holes: when you've put yourself at the bottom of one, the first thing you should do is stop digging. Instead, they continue to take shots at her, hoping that just once they'll get lucky and put an end to her career in public life.
Chances are that the media has found every possible trouble spot Sarah Palin might have in her background. Barring something completely out of the blue, there are no scandals lurking in Palin's history. If there was, you can be sure the MSM would've reported it by now.
You can argue against Palin on stylistic grounds. You might think her snowbillyisms and folksy demeanor won't translate into a winning formula in a national election. You can even question some of her policy emphases.
The one big advantage Sarah Palin has over everyone else in the 2012 presidential field is that there will be no surprises. Every rock has been turned over. If she runs for the White House, you can be sure the media will keep digging into her past. You can also be sure that Palin will beat them more often than not. In a race that is certainly going to be a media-driven death march against whoever the GOP nominates, being a proven MSM slayer is no small thing.
I believe both parties, and most people in the public eye, would agree, if they could make an agreement which could be enforced and relied upon, that "We shall not beat up each other over this stuff."
That would accrue to everyone's interest in the political/media class. Note I speak only of this class. I am not saying that this agreement would serve anyone else's interests. But it would serve politicians' and media-types' interests.
You don't screw with me, I don't screw with you. For this class, such an agreement would be mostly upside.
But the problem is, of course, the same one as is the whole point of the Prisoner's Dilemma: You can't trust your opponents to go soft on you.
So what do you do? Concede the field, in which case only your own allies get pummeled like this, but you sweetly avoid pummeling their guys in the hopes that they will honor their side of the bargain?
They won't. They never do.
Read the entire piece. It's full of win.
Both American political parties, from the show horses on down to the foot soldiers, simply cannot maintain the kind of reciprocal understanding Ace describes. He's absolutely correct when he says that the political class would benefit enormously from a mutual agreement to shut the hell up about it's sex scandals. For a lot of reasons, politicos can't resist the attack dog urge. Interestingly, it wasn't always this way.
In the 60's, when John Kennedy had hot and cold running girls installed at the White House, the Republicans knew about JFK's peccadilloes and decided to keep their powder dry. Whether it was out of a desire to keep their own shenanigans private or just out of a sense of deference to the presidency, the GOP were tight-lipped about President Kennedy's numerous extramarital excursions. Congressman Weiner's misadventures in web-based hook-ups make it clear that the old early sixties circumspect attitude is not just gone, but probably can't come back.
This inability on the part of the Democrats and Republicans to hold their fire is a big reason why Mitch Daniels' idea of a truce on social issues is so monumentally wrong-headed. Who polices that agreement? Nobody could; even if every Washington DC politician said yes to it, no single person or organization would be trusted by either side to act as a fair mediator/enforcer.
Another problem with Daniel's truce is that even if the politicians went along with the deal, the mainstream media most certainly would not. The most knee-jerk attack dog partisans in American politics are the editors, producers and reporters that make up the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC and the rest of the lamestream Democrat Party rah-rah chorus. If they have access to information that helps Democrats or damages Republicans, they will run it. This will force Breitbart and his allies to do the same thing when they get information damaging to the Dems. The truce would be over almost before it started.
In fact, given how cuddly the MSM is with the Democrat party, a truce on social issues could only hurt Republicans. With the exception of Fox News and several big-name rightish blogs/websites, the conservative argument against abortion, gay rights and other lifestyle debates is almost never given a fair treatment by the big news outfits. Under the Daniels scenario, Democrats could truthfully say they weren't scoring points while their allies in the press and Hollywood kept pushing the progressive agenda. Republicans would have few options. They couldn't expect the MSM to help them out. Worse, the Republican's sorta allies on the Right blogs--the ones that might be able to pump up a conservative social agenda--just don't yet have the same kind of reach that the lamestreamers have in the media universe.
Finally, just how far down the political totem pole would the truce go? Would it only affect the Beltway folks? If that's the case, the social issues gag order would unravel as soon as a state legislature votes to approve gay marriage, put limits on abortion, allow prayer in school or mandate that teachers instruct students on condom use. Just because DC pols swear off social issues legislation doesn't mean the states have to. As soon as a controversial social issue flared up at the state level, national Republicans and Democrats would almost have to weigh in. That would put enormous pressure on the truce's architecture; once one politician says something, others are going to want to discuss it too.
Weiner's train wreck is a reminder of just how impossible a voluntary censorship of any kind is in modern politics. Political figures cannot be bound by informal gag orders. Mutually assured partisan destruction won't hold anybody back from using damn near any club to beat their opponents over the head. The price is too low and the payoffs are too high.
Allahpundit over at HotAir.com makes an astute observation about the rising political fortunes of Herman Cain.
By the way, note his choice of hat here and the country/western soundtrack. Like I said after Frank Luntz’s focus group went nuts for him in South Carolina, he may very well emerge as the “southern candidate” in the field. How the media’s going to square that with their deathless assumptions about southern conservative racism, I have no idea — but it’ll be amazing to watch.
Read the rest, I’d say.
What does it mean to be from the South? If you listen to the scions of popular culture, all you have to do to find a racist sexist homophobe proto-fascist is talk to a denizen of old Dixie for five seconds. It’s such a lazy intellectually dishonest position, but many people have internalized that sentiment. For some, merely hearing a Southern accent means the speaker is thinly-disguiseduber bigot. The truth is far more nuanced, and much kinder to Southern folk, than tired shopworn stereotypes.
Does racism exist in the South? Of course it does. Flawed human beings, not choirs of angels, live in the South. The real issue is just how much race plays in electoral politics. The 2008 presidential election gives us an indication of the race factor. It seems like the answer is 'Not nearly as much as you might think'. Barack Obama beat up on John McCain in North Carolina and Virginia, two key members of the old Confederacy. Obama's victories would suggest that caucasian persuasion racial animus wasn't enough to stop voters in these states from pulling the Donkey Lever.
Since the South isn't a bastion of knee-jerk race hate, here's an interesting question--What happens when 60% of Southern whites vote for Herman Cain in the 2012 general election? How does pop culture, with all of its built-in lefty prejudices, react to that?
There are two probable outcomes to that hypothetical scenario. One is that Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment universe will pull an Officer Barbradyand act like that Cain's snagging the cracker vote is no big deal. The South is still racist, but those stupid hillbilly wingnuts are so thick that they can't help but vote Republican even though the GOP nominee is a black man. Lord knows the media loves to ignore things that mess with their preferred narratives. The old head-firmly-buried-in-ones-own-ass approach has served the entertainment biz quite well over the years, so this is quite likely to happen once again.
The other possibility is that pop culture figures acknowledge that southern whiteys voted for a black man, but will argue that Herman Cain doesn't count as a true brother because he's conservative. As strange as that sounds, it's well within the bounds of cultural Left's playbook. According to Jesse Jackson Jr., if you're black and you don't vote for health care reform, you're not really black. According to the weird feminist sisters, Sarah Palin's right-of-center leanings means she's not really a woman.
Both of the above predictions/probabilities make the Left look incredibly stupid. Which is all the more reason why Herman Cain should be the Republican nominee for President in 2012. Make Cain the GOP standard-bearer, then watch how Alec Baldwin, Tina Fey and Chris Rock struggle to explain that Herman Cain's victory doesn't count as racial tolerance. Failing that, put Cain at the top of the ticket, then get a good hearty laugh when doucherocket cultural critics like Michael Eric Dyson and Cornell West try to explain to average Americans that Herman Cain really is not black.
In the post 9/11 age, Westerners have tried to explain why Islam has taken such a violent turn. From full-throated terrorist apologias to more sober hard-eyed analyses, America and her civilizational cousins have examined the reasons for violent jihad. Great debates have been had over the last ten years. September 11th was a wake-up call for many Westerners. While many of us are still asleep, the US conservative movement has at long last decided to examine the deeper motivations and passions that drive Islamic fundamentalism.
While this process of examination has been beneficial, sometimes it is necessary to listen to Muslim dissidents themselves. They will often tell you far more of the story than you'd likely get from other sources. That's why Raymond Ibrahim's translation of a Khaled Montaser piece is pretty important.
We Muslims have an inferiority complex and are terribly sensitive to the world, feeling that our Islamic religion needs constant, practically daily, confirmation by way of Europeans and Americans converting to Islam. What rapturous joy takes us when a European or American announces [their conversion to] Islam—proof that we are in a constant state of fear, alarm, and chronic anticipation for Western validation or American confirmation that our religion is "okay." We are hostages of this anticipation, as if our victory hinges on it—forgetting that true victory is for us to create or to accomplish something, such as those [civilizations] that these converts to our faith abandon.
And we pound our drums and blow our horns [in triumph] and drag the convert to our backwardness, so that he may stand with us at the back of the world's line of laziness, [in the Muslim world] wherein no new scientific inventions have appeared in the last 500 years. Sometimes those who convert relocate to our countries—only to get on a small boat and escape on the high seas back to their own countries.
There's a lot of truth to digest there.
First, it is important to note that there are Muslim scientists and thinkers doing important work. They study and invent and innovate not in Damascus, Jakarta or Tehran but in London, Frankfurt and Chicago. This indicates that there is no genetic or racial basis for the lack of 'Islamic inventions'. It is the culture of Muslim-majority nations that is stifling.
The West in general, and America in particular, is the only place where a Muslim can safely use his mind to create something other than yet another jihadist ideology or violent terrorist organization. If you're a clever Muslim who wants to invent something in the United States, chances are that the fast-thinking Farouk will be rewarded for his hard work and labor should his innovation actually perform. The same cannot be said for the vast swath of kleptocracies that riddle the Middle East. The man with a plan in the Islamic sphere will most likely see his good idea stolen by the thieves that man the important government posts or ignored by religious fundamentalists. There's really no reason for the intelligent person to even bother trying, so he doesn't.
That five hundred year failure rate has to gall many hard-core Muslims. While the mongrelized infidels in America and Europe have dominated the world with rapidly changing technology, vibrant expansionist pop culture and wild commercial success, Muslims live off the fruits of Western intellectualism but cannot hope to emulate it in their own homelands. According to the Koran, it is Muslims that have the truth--and more importantly, God--on their side. For Islamic supremacists, having God in their corner should've meant that they would be blessed with inventions and innovations. They should've been the winners of progress, not the debauched kaffir West.
Consider another irony. Even many of the Islamic sphere's bad ideas come from us. The Ba'ath party that dominated Iraq and continues to oppress Syria is merely an Arab facelift for a German socialism. Bashar al-Assad is basically Erich Honeker with a much funnier name and a slightly more brutal secret police organization.
More to the point of Montaser's article, Islam's constant seeking of Western validation--specifically through the conversion of Westerners to Islam--speaks to the inherent weakness of the faith. We in the West sometimes think that Muslim expansionism is a sign that the Western world or that Judeo-Christian values are in decline. But what does it say about Islam when the only way they can feel good about themselves is if some Eurotrash brainfart or American half-wit starts praying to Mecca five times a day?
When you always have to have the approval of others, you are doomed. The same is likely true for the supremacist version of Islam. While non-Muslims cannot do much to make that collapse happen, we can encourage those voices who criticize the backwardness of modern Islam.
I snagged the link from Kathy Shaidle's Five Feet Of Fury, who directed me to Jihad Watch, which got me to Raymond Inrahim's post. Thanks to all.
Summary: "I'm not apologizing for RomneyCare. I thought it was cool, so whatevs. Also, I'm not changing anything from my 2008 health care plan because that would look like I was flip-flopping and I sorta have an image problem about being a slippery political weasel."
No really, watch the clip. Then come back and tell me that's not pretty much what homeboy said.
Meanwhile, Allahpundit does his counter-intuitive reaction thing to Romney's speech.
No one would have believed him had he apologized so there was no sense in doing it. On the contrary, if I were advising him, I’d tell him to go on the attack and make his opponents be as specific as possible in what they’d do differently. The more he can discredit their plans as unworkable, the more he can reframe RomneyCare as the best choice from a very bad set of health-care policy options. In fact, if he’s feeling extra cheeky, he could use the public’s ruinous love affair with Medicare to his advantage. Under RomneyCare, the state forces you to buy a product from a third party; under Medicare, the state forces you to buy the same product from the state. It simply calls it a tax instead of a mandate, and instead of granting you coverage immediately, it shafts you until you’re 65. Do Pawlenty, Gingrich, et al. also oppose the “mandated” premiums known as FICA? I’m not sure Romney wants to go the Mediscare route since it’ll make fiscal cons even angrier at him than they are now, but if he gets desperate enough, look out.
If Mitt has any chance of getting the GOP nomination, Republican primary voters will first have to get over their lingering reservations about Romney's past social liberalism and his more recent changes of political heart. Importantly, the party rank-n-file will have to get over it's virulent hatred for ObamaCare. If the President's government medicine scheme is no longer seen as a huge threat, RomneyCare will not seem like such a big deal. That means that Mitt won't have to keep defending his Massachusetts health plan. Most of all, issues like foreign policy or terrorism, will have to come to the forefront of GOPers concerns.
The rub for Romney is that his doubling-down strategery can only be successful if a bunch of things break his way. The irony here is that super-achiever alpha dog Mitt finds himself in a position akin to a middling baseball team just before the regular season begins. What do the managers of these kind of clubs always say? 'If our ace starting pitcher stays healthy, we'll win a pile of games.' 'We can be successful if the third baseman can repeat his slugging stats from last year.' 'The team is gonna do real well if a few of our rookies pan out and live up to their potential.'
Ball clubs like that almost never succeed. Why? Because there are simply too many factors that have to go right. Let's say the stud hurler keeps himself from getting hurt for the entire year. That doesn't mean those year one noobs are going to pan out. The third baseman who hammered fifty home runs last season? He just tested positive for cattle steroids and will be lucky to plink out fifteen dingers after his fifty game suspension and his lack of chemically-enhanced power.
Romney is in the same position. Because of his problematic voting record and his insistence on defending his health care plan, Mitt has to rely on a heaping helping of good fortune. All politicians require a large infusion of luck to get elected. In Romney's case, his chances ride on a set of circumstances that isn't likely to fall into place. By making this speech, Romney has decided that he's most likely not going to be president.
I ask because that's the only reason I can figure why he pwns himself, then doubles down on stupid via his Twitter stream.
In a recent post at the Washington Post's site, juicebox mafia capo Klein thinks he's figured out who Barack Obama really is.
Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is — or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican from the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.
If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a health-care plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal coverage; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans staked out in the early ’90s — and often, well into the 2000s.
It's important to note just who is making this wack-job statement. As noted by my new blog homie Proof, Ezra Klein was the founder of the junior high mutual zit-squeezing club Journolist. The four hundred reporters, academics, professional liberals and assorted mouth breathers in the listserv were basically a wing of the Obama presidential campaign in 2008, with future Obambi Cabinet members to boot. Needless to say, Klein has a serious intellectual interest in rehabilitating his teeny bopper fan boi crush's political fortunes.
Now, let's look at the 90's era Republican's 'best ideas'. The individual mandate that some Republicans championed back in the day was...and more importantly, is...unconstitutional. I know Klein thinks the Constitution is just some old impossible to understand scrap of parchment, but when something is plainly unconstitutional that pretty much makes it a stupid idea, not a good one.
As for cap-n-trade, I don't know if paid Washington Post journalist Ezra Klein has been keeping up with current events, but anthropogenic climate change has been revealed to be a fraud. C&T was a policy cooked up in response to fears of global warming caused by man-made carbon dioxide emissions. Why would Republicans keep advocating a policy that supposedly solves a problem that does not in fact exist?
Finally, we get to Klein lauding President George HW Bush for raising taxes. Ezra pats Pappy on the back for 'getting the job done' on the 1990 budget deal in his original piece. Funny thing is that Klein never really specifies how these tax hikes were successful, either as policy or politics. He just sorta says they are and moves on.
When confronted about the shakiness of his 'Republican raises taxes = epic win' theory, Klein has a ready retort:
This is the part when you realize that debating Ezra Klein is like having a discussion with Barry Bonds about the dangers of performance enhancing drugs. No, it's even worse than that. It's like debating a pre-med student on specific techniques and methods involved in neurosurgery. The dude is simply in way over his head.
How did Bush the Elder get wacked for raising taxes? For one thing, Bill Clinton hammered him for it in campaign ads.
That ad was a staple of Clinton's 1992 campaign. What makes the spot so effective--and what Ezra Klein simply cannot grasp--is that HW Bush's raising taxes gave Clinton ammunition that didn't just wound the President, but also damaged the Republican brand on a critical everyday checkbook issue. Why does Klein think people vote for the GOP anyway if not because of tax policy? It must be for the Republican's famous snappy fashion sense and party-hearty attitude [sarc/].
The best part of Klein's journey into fail is when he is again confronted with his stunning lack of understanding, he resorts to the lamest of rhetorical evasions and promptly moves the goalposts. But hey, far be it from me to point out how badly his argument is falling apart. Let's let Klein's own source, that he dutifully pointed out, do it for us.
If politicians are not rewarded at the polls for the choices they make, don't expect other politicians to make similar choices.
What exactly are we dealing with here? Klein brings up a political period from the recent past. It's not like it's a hundred years ago, when the issues and characters involved are far removed from our current context. Nor are we talking about particularly deep or convoluted political theory. No, this stuff is pretty easy to understand.
Which makes me believe that Ezra Klein is not just another overpaid undersmart liberal. By producing such an elementary amateurish piece--and then digging further down into the proverbial hole--it's clear Klein is a masochist.
Ace had a great post the other day that I meant to talk about, but I didn't get to it. Well, I'm getting to it now.
Here's the money chunk.
...And at universities, in the pseudo-sciences, they are constantly attempting to "explain" conservative thinking as a type of cognitive dysfunction. Not willing to give into the faddish and ephemeral? Ah, well, a part of your brain is too small and won't let you sample "new experiences."
Note the normative assumption always packed into these claims: That the conservative brain is "too small" as compared to the liberal brain, defined as normative; the conservative measure represents a deviation away from the assumed norm while the liberal trait is privileged as the norm, or if not the norm, then the ideal.
No pseudo-scientist every finds that liberals have a bigger amygdala (or whatever) and are therefore "too open to new experiences" (a.k.a. too trendy, too faddish, too ephemeral in one's sense of self). None of these guys ever says the liberal trait represents a deviation from the norm or ideal -- no, they're always the norm or idea. It's always the conservative's traits that need to be "explained" as a psychological defect or an actual defect with their physical brain structure.
Yeah, you should definitely read the whole thing.
The thing is, that denormalizing process of conservatives and conservatism Ace talked about has been going on for a long time. To pick just one example, think about guns. For most of America's history, gun ownership wasn't really debated all that much. It was only relatively recently that the Left got the bright idea to limit gun ownership amongst law-abiding citizens.
A key part of the anti-gun strategy was to denormalize the idea of firearms. Guns weren't just supposed to be severely curtailed in the general population. They were weirdo objects for strange people. Whether it was geographic arguments ("Southerners are all gun nuts, of course") or class justifications ("The uneducated are the only ones people who still have guns") the goal was the same. In fact, lefties were so hell bent on making guns abnormal they faked at least one scholar-researched book to make it look like America didn't have widespread gun ownership in it's history.
In general, the Left has had some success in making conservatism seem strange. At the very least, they've reinforced amongst themselves the 'Right=Alien' arguments they always make. For committed progressives, conservatives are not just political rivals anymore. They're the Other.
Truth be told, the hard Left doesn't make up a majority of American citizens. Break it down on a state-by-state basis. Even where they make up the largest percentage of voters, they don't make up a majority. From those perspectives, it's pretty easy to see just how marginal the liberal ideology is in America.
Conservatives should take this vulnerability on the Left--specifically, their lack of numbers-- and use it against them. More importantly, how about we examine and highlight their own behavior. For your viewing pleasure, courtesy of No One Of Any Import, are some lefty protestors barking at a recent Tea Party rally.
Blinkered, moronic and as charming as athlete's foot ? Where's the sign-up sheet for that?
Lefties insist that they are the sane, logical and normal ones.
Yeah, that dude is totally playing with a full deck.
Before we get too cocky, liberals have a few advantages. They still control the MSM and they can still get some progged-up professors to create 'science' to prove their ideological biases. These are no small things. They can dupe a lot of the politically uncommitted folks out there.
However, conservatives have distinct advantages of our own. As stated before, the voter identification numbers are on our side. Best of all, any time the Left goes out in public, they behave like the complete oddballs that they really are. It shouldn't be too hard to make liberals seem strange--because they are strange.
Seriously, you have a group of people that are cool with one of their own shouting that he wipes his ass with the American flag every night. Now that's definitely a little bit of hyperbole on his part, but the fact remains that homeboy's peers were copacetic with his sentiment that the American flag should be disrespected early and often. Just a reminder: THIS IS NOT NORMAL.
The Right can score legislative victories. They can win elections. But in order to really make inroads they have to start beating back progressive culture. That means pointing out just how alien their ideology is when compared with the mainstream of American political thought.
ALSO: Here's the great RS McCain with a story about another Lefty weirdo. How weird are we talking about here? How's about possible jail time sound?
Looks like the Unions are flush with cash. Too bad they don’t spend it on their members.
Haha.
Let's suppose you're a UAW member. You do your job. You toss in your dues. Then you notice that your union has given $29 million dollars to Democrat Party candidates. Now your leadership might be hunky-dory with pro-gun control pro-abortion eco-nut tax-hiker gay friendly candidates, but how cool are you with all that?
Maybe the UAW isn't such a good example. President Obama just gave them a car company. Maybe the guy on the line is willing to put up with the vast variety of lefty crap if he thinks he got a good deal out of hijacking Government Motors.
Lets try a different group. What about the rank-n-file Teamsters? Thirty million dollars were sent from that union's coffers to political candidates, with 93% of that going to Donkey Punchers. The Unicorn-in-Chief's energy policies ("Drill Nowhere, Drill Never, Double Eco-Boner Rainbow All The Way!") have pushed diesel prices up past four dollars a gallon. That's gotta be putting a serious hurt on the wallet of most truckers.
The leadership of unions no doubt enjoys having a cozy relationship with Democrat Party power brokers. Rubbing elbows with the well-connected Donks and getting them to push the union big-wig's agenda is huge. The problem is that the average union member might not think their interests are being represented very well if all their dues money is going to Democrat candidates.
The great Jerome Corsi documents yet another shrapnel fragment flying off the continuing Obama train wreck.
Bill Ayers: One more, one more (question)
Question:Thank you sir, thank you, thank you. Time magazine columnist Joe Klein wrote that President Obama's book, "Dreams from My Father," quote: "may be the best written memoir ever produced by an American politician."
Ayers: I agree with that.
Question:What is your opinion of Barack Obama's style as a writer and uh …
Ayers: I think the book is very good, the second book ("The Audacity of Hope") is more of a political hack book, but uh, the first book is quite good.
Question: Also, you just mentioned the Pentagon and Tomahawk …
Ayers: Did you know that I wrote it, incidentally?
Question: What's that?
Ayers: I wrote that book.
Several audience members: Yeah, we know that.
Question: You wrote that?
Ayers: Yeah, yeah. And if you help me prove it, I’ll split the royalties with you. Thank you very much.
Oooooof.
WND contributor Jack Cashill seems to thinkthis is a shot across Barack Obama's bow. In his opinion, the very anti-war Bill Ayers is angry at Obama for the President's Libyan war kinetic military action. I think that's a pretty good assessment.
I don't believe that's the entire story here though. I think Bill Ayers is suffering from a classic case of 'Tire Tracks From Under Obama's Bus' Syndrome. Peace Prize Barry basically used Ayers like a kleenex. Instead of Ayers catching at least a little credit for penning Dreams--something like 'By Barack Obama and William Ayers'--homeboy got a whole lot of nothing.
It might have been easier on Ayers to get no props for Dreamswhen Obambi was a hack community rabble-rouser or a benchwarming Illinois state Senator. When the former Weatherman watched Obama become a Democrat Party show-horse and media-created President, without ever acknowledging Bill Ayers' full contribution to the St. Bambi mythos, that was probably incredibly grating. Obama's North African adventurism may have been simply the last straw.
More importantly than Bill Ayers needing to recover from his skinned knee and bruised ego, this episode is just one more nail in the coffin for the Barack Obama 2008 campaign narrative. Dreams From My Fatherwas a big piece of Obama's intellectual curriculum vitae. As opposed to the supposedly illiterate Dubya or the crusty old warrior John McCain, Candidate Lightbringer was a serious author who had written not one, but two books. Dreams and The Audacity of Hope were meant to display Barry's intellectual firepower. While the junior Senator from Illinois had almost no legislative accomplishments, his alleged mastery of the written word was supposed to assure nervous voters that they were supporting a true Renaissance man.
And now we see the myth of Obama's intellectualism crumbling. All it took was one of the key enablers in Bamster's web of lies to get pissed off at his former protegé. Barry's chickens are finally coming home to roost.
But really, one can't be completely shocked when a politician as weaselly as Barack Obama is found out to have inflated his resume. To paraphrase Winston Churchill's comments about Clement Atlee, Senator HopeyChangey's barely-there congressional record had much to be humble about. No empty-suit candidate with a similar doughnut hole in his history could do anything else. Obama is clearly no exception to this fibbing phenomenon.
The blame for Obama being able to pull off this sham rests not with the president, but with the American mainstream press. The New York Times/MSNBC/Washington Post Axis of Fail constantly pats itself on the crotch for brave truth-telling. Instead of digging into Obama's shady past, they did everything they could to bury damaging details about their preferred candidate and attacked his opposition.
Better still, this MSM willful blindness also reveals just how badly they suck at the one job in which they're supposed to be experts. They're the ones who were supposed to figure out just how much Bill Ayers figured into Barack Obama's narrative. The lamestream press allowed the illusion of Barack Obama's superior intelligence--a major component of his appeal to voters--to flourish without a question. By doing that, they set themselves up to be punked by bloggers who have shown more initiative in the last two years than Big Media has shown in the last two decades.
UPDATE: Now a big ole' Memeorandum thread too. Time to pile on while the piling on is good, I say.
Via the American Thinker. I think John Hawkins is spot on in detecting the sarcasm here, but if you’re inclined to believe that Ayers is The One’s ghostwriter, you’re bound to detect a “deeper truth” in his tone.
... I think he enjoys mocking people who push this idea and enjoys it doubly when they can’t detect the mockery. In fact, I’d bet that this is his stock response anytime the book is mentioned in his presence — insisting that he wrote it to see if the listener laughs and then toying with them if they seem credulous. But as I say, your mileage may vary.
Yeah, this doesn't exactly work for me. AP's analysis blithely discounts Jack Cashill's work that pretty much proves that Bill Ayers wrote "Dreams". Cashill lays out the bones of his argument here.
To credit Dreamsto Obama alone, one has to posit any number of near miraculous variables: he somehow found the time; he somewhere mastered nautical jargon and postmodern jabberwocky; he in some sudden, inexplicable way developed the technique and the talent to transform himself from stumbling amateur to literary superstar without any stops in between.
If anything, the last few years should make Cashill's thesis even more believable. The Duffer-in-Chief is not exactly breaking his back as President. Dude works harder on his NCAA basketball brackets than on seemingly anything else. The guy requires a teleprompter for both formal and informal occasions. It seems highly unlikely that Barack Obama would put in the work necessary to become a strong writer.
Moreover, why can't two things be true at once? Why can't Bill Ayers be sarcastic and be telling the truth at the same time? I mean, it's sorta weird, but it's not such a strange thing. Ayers is a squirrelly lib hack. It makes weird sense that he'd do something so goofy and underhanded. Homeboy probably gets a little thrill thinking how clever he is laying out this secret in plain view.
A great deal of commentary and comments has been generated which compares the horrendous situation in Japan to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Observers note that while New Orleans residents—and even police officers—took disaster’s opportunity to loot businesses and homes, the Japanese survivors of the 9.0 earthquake and the resultant tsunami have absolutely abstained from such behavior. People who know far more about Japan than I have concluded that the absence of such behavior is due to Japan’s singular, nearly undiluted culture—a thousand-year long tradition in which honor is the only thing one has and the loss of which is the greatest loss imaginable.
This makes sense. After all, most material things that are lost can be accrued again relatively quickly while one is still living. Lost honor, however, is very tough to regain and is, sometimes, gone forever.
Some of the comments have bordered on the racialist—that the Japanese don’t loot because it’s not in their racial make-up and that others—namely blacks—do so because it is part of our racial make-up. Leaving aside the insult, I think the difference goes deeper than that, even deeper than the concept of lost honor. There’s something that the Japanese understand which all too many black and other Americans used to understand but now do not: that what one does in public and how one treats his/her neighbor(s) affects not only the individuals involved but also the entire community. This concept applies to local communities and to the larger community; the nation. Not understanding that is the downside of individualism. (Of course, honor-shame cultures have their downsides as well; Japan has a very high rate of suicide.)
I submit that Katrina’s New Orleans was a manifestation of a people—namely black people—who have voluntarily given up their honor and their sense of shame. They have abandoned themselves.
Black Americans—specifically, the descendants of American slavery--are the most American of Americans; I said this before and I’m certainly not the first to make this observation. Unlike all other immigrants to America, our ancestors were forcibly cut off from all of the totems of their various West African tribes: names, languages, family structures, belief systems. These things have buoyed all other ethnic groups—including recent African immigrants—in their sojourn to this country and all of them had the choice to hold onto the elements of their cultures that fit into the American ideal and discard those which were incompatible. American slaves were granted no such luxury. Our ancestors were emptied of their identities and re-created in the image of what America had for them. And, up until roughly fifty years ago, much of that image was molded by oppression and scorn.
However, most black Americans held on tightly to the universal totems of personal and communal honor: love of God, family, love of community, industriousness, self-reliance--all of which also flow and follow from America’s founding document. (That America strayed away from those principles with respect to black Americans isn’t the point, that those principles even existed is. And, with those concrete principles in hand, black Americans were able to point to them and say to other Americans, “live up to your—to our-- principles.”)
We may stem from Africa, but we are not of Africa—not even me. Our character and (sub)culture are wholly American and, largely, our American ancestors fashioned these for themselves--appropriating most of the good things which America had to offer and which largely insulated them from the bad. That is the inheritance which all too many of us have repudiated.
What we saw in New Orleans after Katrina was a microcosm of the character disintegration of this most American of Americans. It wasn’t born of DNA nor of the historical effects of slavery; it was born of the wholesale abandonment of a character tried and refined by fire and of the principles which held black Americans together in prior times of adversity.
If mother and father don’t love child enough to at least try to create the most tried and true environment for the nurturing of that child, it follows that neither mother, nor father, nor child will love and respect neighbors or community. We declined en masse the prescriptions and proscriptions of God regarding the family and allowed government to usurp the place of the head of the family--the husband/father/leader/protector. We abandoned the identity which our forebears shaped for us and put chaos in its place. And when disaster strikes, it’s every man and woman for self. Multiply that times a few million.
In short, the average Japanese person loves his (Japanese) neighbor and does not covet that which belongs to that neighbor. It’s part of their culture—their belief system. And they’ve held to that system without Judaism or Christianity being a significant part of their society. They know who they are and from whence they’ve come.
Matt over at the Conservative Hideout has some thoughts on the so-called 'Worst Generation'.
My parent’s generation spent the wealth that was so painfully earned by their parents. Then, they created failed program after failed program, all paid for with trillions of borrowed dollars. And when the programs were clearly failures, and, in fact, made things worse, they plodded on. The kept following the leftist narrative, and never-ever cut their own benefits, no matter how unsustainable they were. They also rejected the spirit of their parents, who had endured the great depression, and survived WW II. Their parents had sacrificed, but the boomers wanted what they wanted, and they wanted it immediately.
Read the whole piece, ya'all.
While I agree with much of Matt's sentiments, I think the Baby Boomers sometimes get a bad rap. After all, they didn't come up with Social Security. That was second-gen progressive Franklin Roosevelt's idea. The Great Society programs--Medicare, Aid To Families With Dependent Children--were dreamed up by Lyndon Johnson.
No, the Boomers didn't create a lot of the now-crumbling social spending architecture that threatens to destroy America. What many folks in the post WWII generation did was assume that the nationalized Ponzi schemes and subsidization of personal failure they inherited from older generations were going to continue without consequence. With that monumentally absurd analysis in place, the New Left movements that arose in the Baby Boom generation set about creating ideologies and rationalizations that reinforced their flawed assumptions.
Look at one example. Conservatives assert that welfare is destroying the American family. Baby Boom feminists (and their intellectual progeny) argue that the traditional family is outdated and sexist. The nuclear familial arrangement, with its coercion and fundamental unfairness towards women, is not worth being concerned about. The dissolution of that unfair institution is not only necessary, it should be welcomed. Welfare might be hurting marriage and the old family arrangements, but it's just doing the needed work to get society to the post-traditonal family that feminists crave.
While some elements of the Boomer left were busy cementing themselves into soft socialism and cultural Marxism, many others entered into the media. Take a gander at who sets the agenda in much of the MSM. Arthur 'Pinch' Sulzberger, the head of the New York Times, was born in 1951. Steve Capus, president of NBC News, was born in 1963. The editor of the Washington Post is Marcus Brauchli, who was born in 1961.
These folks--and many others in the legacy media--are all part of the post-war Baby Boom. How many times have you watched some gauzy nostalgia-laden montage of 60's and 70's era protests/concerts/hippie love-ins/Timothy Leary yammerings? The reason why these dreadful creations are so ubiquitous is because the Boomers who look back at that time so fondly are the ones who make up the majority of American news organizations. Further, most of the contemporary coverage of the baby boom social movements are almost always positive. The excesses of dudes like Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman or Bill Ayers are generally airbrushed away. Even better? The self-congratulation to actual accomplishment ratio is usually quite skewed. "Hooray for us, we stopped the Vietnam War and stuff. Also, we listened to the Velvet Underground, so yeah..." Yikes.
Because Baby Boomers--especially lefty boomers--dominate the media, they paint a distorted picture of 60's/70's youth. If you just watched CNN or read Time Magazine, you'd think every teenager in America from 1966 to 1978 was an idealistic acid-gobbling Vietnam War protester who lived on commune in Southern California with her Native American spirit guide, seven sex partners and five children named after various wildflowers while David Crosby constructed ever more elaborate water bongs and Gloria Steinem ritualistically burned her bra. The reality is that boomers during their formative years inhabited a broad continuum, from stern straight-laced traditionalists to wild-eyed liberal doucherockets, and that many of these neat categorizations we're fed just don't add up.
What is the worst sin of the Baby Boomers? The knee-jerk leftism to which some of them continue to bitterly cling is annoying as hell. The unreal self-descriptions and constant back-patting is tiresome. The thing is that none of them would be particularly fatal. They'd just be aggravating.
The most egregious error committed by the Boomers isn't any of that crap. According to Stanley Kurtz, via the great Pundette, the issue for the 'Worst Generation' is the fact that they didn't make babies.
In 2005, I reviewed some of the first books on the subject and concluded that a demographically induced economic crisis could spark a revival of religious traditionalism, a far more radical decomposition of the family, or both.
At the time, it looked as if a possible demographically-induced economic crisis was at least a couple of decades away. We seem to be running ahead of schedule. To a large extent, the economic troubles here and in Europe already factor in the unsustainable entitlements of the future.
Although an economic crisis is imminent, and the underlying cause demographic, I haven’t noticed many calls for increased child-bearing. That is in striking contrast to the world-wide movement in response to the less proximate and more theoretical global warming crisis. It’s a measure of how unthinkable changes in our post-sixties life-styles still are. Yet it doesn’t mean change won’t happen, if and when a demographic-economic crisis truly strikes.
It probably doesn't matter all that much that a lot of Boomer peeps smoked a gazillion pounds of OG Kush looking for a cheap buzz or a spiritual experience or whatever. The tendency for elf-esteem boosting hagiography of 60's and 70's accomplishments doesn't explain our present difficulties. The leftist leaning of many in that generation by itself doesn't damn the post-war generation.
The fact that they couldn't be bothered to squeeze out a few more kids here and there is the lasting destructive legacy of the baby boom demographic. In many cases, it wasn't purposeful. Their intentions were often noble, or at least not totally self-serving anyway. Often there were perfectly rational rationalizations for their reproductive decisions. Career moves, financial choices, a concern for the environment, bad relationships, high divorce rates; all those things tend to slow down the baby-making. More, all of these factors could've happened to any generation.
I really don't think baby boomers sat down as an entire generational cohort and decided to stop making kids as much as their parents did. I also don't think they all planned a demographic collapse that would threaten the entire economic future of the America. There were definitely more than a few Boomers who were worried about overpopulation, but for the most part it was a host of decisions and life events that slowed the Boomer breeding.
The problem here is, like so many other good (or at least not-evil) intentions, America has managed to pave a road right into the abyss with miles of supposedly good plans and allegedly smart ideas. The Boom generation didn't mean for this to happen. Nonetheless, we find ourselves in dire circumstances due to some very misguided decisions.
Daniel Pipes ponders the notion of an Islam compatible with democracy.
Just as Christianity became part of the democratic process, so can Islam. This transformation will surely be wrenching and require time. The evolution of the Catholic Church from a reactionary force in the medieval period into a democratic one today, an evolution not entirely over, has been taking place for 700 years. When an institution based in Rome took so long, why should a religion from Mecca, replete with its uniquely problematic scriptures, move faster or with less contention?
Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. Pipes breaks down some of the massive hurdles Islam has to leap over in order to embrace democratic ideals.
A point Pipes doesn't touch on is how the modern Western world has treated the various Islamist movements it has run into over the last 50 years. Since Sayyid Qutb gave birth to the modern jihadist movement, elements of the West have been bombarded by various facets of Islamic violence. Whether it has come in the form of stateless entities like al-Qaeda, belligerent theocratic governments or a combination of the two is beside the point.
So how have the elites in America reacted to the decades-long aggression of expansionist Islam? Accomodation, moral equivalence and feckless dhimmitude. Among other pathetic reactions. Then we wonder why Islam continues to pick on us.
Non-Muslims can't do much to reform to Islam. As Pipes notes, that kind of wrenching cultural shift takes a long time. Democratization is not something the West will be capable of accelerating very much.
But that doesn't mean the West has to lay down and accept terrorist Islam's deranged premises about the separation of church and state, the role of women, property rights or religious pluralism. Nor does it have to tolerate the violent acts of murder and mayhem the Qutbist keep throwing at us. Instead of that, the West could decide to tell Islam--through words and deeds--that certain things won't be tolerated. Like honor killings, imposition of sharia, the crushing of religious minorities or female circumsicion.
Would that turn Islam into a religion that welcomes democratic reform? Probably not. But it would probably be better than the subtle message of approval some in the West insist on sending to Islam.
First, Glenn Reynolds on what the GOP should do in 2011:
...ignore the press. The establishment media still have their power, but they've never been weaker, and they're perceived by an ever-greater percentage of Americans as simply an arm of the political-class Democratic Party. If you pay attention, they have power over you. If you do what you think is right, they don't.
Historically speaking, this seems to be the hardest thing for many Republicans inside the Beltway to do.
The social scene in Washington DC is chock full of soft (and hard) statists. If it was up to the swells at the Washington Post, the federal government would always grow. And really, why should any of the smart set in the media-government complex want conservative governance? Getting back to a limited constitutionally based federal apparatus would mean the end of the taxpayer funded gravy train.
The other thing that the incoming Republicans must realize is that the media hates them. Not 'dislikes'. Not even 'disagrees with'. Hates. A freshman GOP congressman might get a few invitations to DC cocktail parties if he votes against some piece of conservative legislation. Attending those soirees comes at a cost. The very necessary reform of our government will be stymied, of course. More importantly for the Republican gadfly, hanging with the Washington kool kid set means being a slave to their whims. The media only loves GOPers when they take a crap on Righties. Once the apostate Representative votes for right-of-center programs, the big media folks will turn off their Strange New Respect.
Next, Jay Cost has some sic transit gloria mundi-style words:
...what's most memorable about the 1946 election is that it wasn't a harbinger of a post-New Deal realignment. Two years later, the Republicans were swept out of power as thoroughly as they had been swept in, and apart from a brief and bare majority at the beginning of the Eisenhower administration, they wouldn't recapture a House majority until they were led by a guy named Newt. What happened?
One major reason for the GOP's failure to retain the majority was the response of the Democratic party to the results of 1946, wherein the party moved quickly to outflank the GOP on the Communist issue. It's no coincidence that Americans for Democratic Action -- a liberal interest group that was resolutely anti-Communist -- was founded in January 1947 just as the 80th Congress convened. President Truman fought the Republicans tooth and nail on domestic politics over the next two years, but on foreign affairs he and the Republicans, led by Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, hammered out a bipartisan policy that would remain in place more or less for the next quarter century. What's more, under the advice of his political counselors, he also went after Henry Wallace, the former cabinet secretary and vice president whom Truman had fired after he publicly promoted a soft stance on the Soviets. Wallace's third party candidacy in 1948 was just what Truman needed to push most of the Soviet sympathizers out of the Democratic coalition, thus undermining one of the major Republican arguments from 1946.
The GOP's big pick ups during the 2010 midterm elections happened--in part--because voters are nervous about galloping Obama style liberalism. There is a deep concern amongst the citizenry about runaway spending, crippling debt, long term unemployment and the perception that government is incompetent when dealing with real world problems. In early January, it seems impossible that Obama and the Democrats could outmaneuver the GOP on the small-government/entitlement reform/jobs front. But it is very possible. The Republicans aren't known as 'The Stupid Party' for nothing.
If the GOP lets Democrats retake the high ground, they will forfeit a massive opportunity. They will throw away the nation's best--and possibly last--chance to get America back to a Constitutional framework. Worse for the GOP, they'll irreparably damage their small government brand. There are already more than a few conservatives who don't trust the Republicans as it is. Let the GOP go back to their Hastert-era big stupid spendaholic ways and you can almost garauntee the formation of a right-wing third party.
The Republicans can take bold solid steps to reform the federal government. Or they can devolve and die. The choice is in their hands.
The political composition of U.S. adults held fairly steady in 2010 compared with 2009. Conservatives remained the largest group, followed by moderates and then liberals. At 35%, the percentage of moderates has declined to a new low, highlighting the increased political polarization that has occurred over the past decade.
...While the political pendulum in Washington can swing widely, Americans' political ideology, like their party identification, tends to shift more gradually. Such a shift has been underway in recent years. While the changes are not large, they are unmistakable. Moderates are growing fewer in number while the percentages of conservatives and liberals have expanded. Conservatism has gained ground among Republicans and independents, while the growth in liberalism is strictly among Democrats.
Liberals will look at the Gallup poll and have an immediate response: "What about 2008? Liberalism won in that year."
Sure about all that, Nancy? Obama ran as a sane, cool-headed moderate. Conservatives warned that St. Barry was a flaming lefty, but most voters either couldn't be bothered to dig too deeply into Obama's troubling ideological pedigree or just didn't think it was that big a deal considering the Bamster's GOP opponent. In 2008, Republican George Bush was presiding over a crumbling economy and two foreign wars, one of which was fairly unpopular. John McCain ran a weak-willed feckless campaign that did much to alienate and demoralize his very necessary conservative base. When he did do something right--like pick Sarah Palin for VP--the campaign promptly misused that most valuable asset when it couldn't afford even the slightest mistake. If the Democrats couldn't win big in that electoral year, they were never going to score a major victory.
Again, how did the Donkey-Punchers get their wins in '08 and '06? (I throw 2006 in because it set the table for the unified Democrat government of the last two years.) They ran guys such as Bob Casey, Jon Tester and James Webb, men who could pull off a fake-o-la centrist political stance when needed. Look at the Democrat campaign messages in those years. 'Open, honest, transparent government'. 'Most ethical congress ever.' '95% of Americans will see a tax cut.' The self-description we got from the Democrats in 2006-2008 could be summed up as: "We're in the middle of the road and we're not Bush. Pretty please vote for us and we'll be your BFF's."
By the fall of 2008, Dubya was seen as ideologically brittle and only slightly more popular than raw sewage, shin splints and homelessness. Running in the middle while opposing Bush was smart strategy for the Democrats. However, while it may have been the politically intelligent move, it was not--and is not--what anybody would consider openly left-wing.
Liberalism did not win in 2006. It did not win in 2008. Instead, it cloaked itself in moderation, a reasonable tone and...in the case of Barack Obama... a pretty princess visage. While the Left bided it's time, George Bush, Denny Hastert and most of the elected GOPers busied themselves with soiling the party's small government brand.
Once the Left ascended in 2008, with it's big congressional majorities and an ideologically copacetic presidency, how did it govern? Like progressive statists, of course. Now, if liberalism were truly on the rise, why did America's left-of center party get creamed in the off-year elections of 2009 and subsequently pummelled in the 2010 midterms?
The Gallup poll gives us some very important lessons about American politics. First, it shows just how aberrational the 2008 election was in relation to the ideology of the America electorate. More importantly, the Gallup data indicates that US voters will be potentially quite receptive to conservative policy initiatives if these ideas are articulated and fought for with vigor.
Cross-Posted at Blog De KingShamus. Big ups to the rad Baldilocks for letting me hang out and post here.
After I posted Discover the Networks’ “The Muslim Brotherhood’s Strategic Goal for North America” on my Facebook page, one of my friends--a friend in real life--pointed out that Christianity has history of conquest and forced conversion as well.
I don’t mean to pick on my friend, but I felt it necessary to reiterate my response here (edited):
[In order for an individual to examine the tenets of his/her faith], one must look at the foundational work establishing that faith.
Before the Bible was made available to the everyday Christian, the Church leadership--meaning the Catholic Church--dispensed doctrine interpreted in whatever manner it saw fit. After Johannes Gutenberg, the Bible was made available to all who could read it. It is no accident that Christianity was radically transformed and Reformed after that.
The same is happening to Islam with respect its adherents and its doctrines.
One of the Founders of these two religions commanded his followers to love God with all one's heart, soul, strength and mind and to love one's neighbor as self; the other commanded his followers to convert non-believers at the point of the sword or make them pay the unbelievers' tax.
As each set of followers have become more and more familiar with the foundational doctrines of the two sets of religious belief, they have begun to behave more and more in accordance to those doctrines: one set has become less totalitarian almost to the point of zero and the other more aggressive and violent.
The Bible and the Koran are objective documents with historical contexts readily available in this information age. It is up to the individual to make himself/herself familiar enough with both--if desired--in order to come to a cogent conclusion.
My friend mentions the genocides committed in the name of Jesus. Of course, the crimes of the prior millennium’s Christian missionaries are well-known and acknowledged:
Christian missionaries of Europe fell into error and sin back when they were bent on converting the natives of all lands--not by the act and desire of leading others to Christ, but by making Christianity about something other than Him, His Sacrifice, Resurrection and the purpose thereof. The missionaries bound up Christ in themselves and their own ethnicity.
[Edited also. I can’t help myself.]
Those crimes do not take anything away from the quality of the Gospel; they only speak to the quality of the human beings preaching it. Again, were such missionaries following the Bible or ignoring the inconvenient parts when they trampled non-Christian cultures?
This subject reminds me of my assertion that it’s necessary to be able to analyze information rather than simply to gather it. The will and ability to do this has become essential—not just to "win" an argument, but for personal and national survival.
It bears repeating on today of all days--building sound structures requires work, planning, wisdom and inspiration. Most importantly, a climate must exist in which all of these attributes may flourish:
After years of negotiations, debate, and drawing up and redrawing up of plans, it was decided that the World Trade Center would consist of 15 million square feet of floor space distributed among seven buildings. These would include two towers that would soar over a quarter mile into the sky. The towers would top the Empire State Building by 100 feet. Some people, architects among them, wondered: Could such lofty skyscrapers be built?
'Yes' was the answer of at least one man; one who blossomed in the climate called America:
Minoru Yamasaki was born to Japanese immigrant parents in Seattle in 1912 and studied architecture at the University of Washington in 1932. He then moved to New York to complete his professional education, and established a practice in suburban Detroit, Michigan, in 1945. Yamasaki designed several major Seattle buildings including the Federal Science Pavilion (now Pacific Science Center, 1962), IBM Building (1964), and Rainier Square and tower (1977). He is best known as the chief architect of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City. Upon completion in 1976, the WTC’s twin 110-story towers were the world’s tallest buildings. Yamasaki died of cancer in 1986, and was thus spared seeing his greatest work destroyed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
During WWII, Yamasaki and his parents were protected from FDR's internment by his second employer, Smith, Hinchman, and Grylls.
Allegories and ironies abound.
While his Japanese kinsmen were acting against Americans, Chinese, Filipinos, etc. based on the assumption that the former were ethnically superior, Yamasaki, the American, was living his life according to the American ideal of individual excellence--even as FDR's America was falling monstrously short of that ideal. And it is pertinent that it took individuals to protect the Yamasakis from their government; for self-interested reasons to be sure, but how much does that matter in view of the results?
The Japanese and persons of Japanese descent (and other East Asians) have a well-deserved reputation for excellence in most any endeavor and it is no secret that this excellence seems to stem from elements of the Japanese culture. Like very many other ethnic groups, Japanese immigrants to the United States came to America with their cultural baggage--both good and bad--and did what successful new Americans do: they adapted. They retained the elements of their culture which are compatible with the American Ideal (individual excellence), discarded those elements which were not (ethnic tribalism/supremacy) and, for the most part, passed on the positives to their wholly American progeny.
Yamasaki's Twin Towers were a testament to that success and to the soundness of the American Ideal.
It is indeed a blessing that he did not live to see his masterpieces destroyed by those who hold ethnic and religious tribalism more sacred than individuality, but though Yamasaki and his Towers reside only in our memories now, nothing can destroy what that fine American achieved in a climate created just for men and women like him.
The owners of YouTube, however, have blocked the account of John Alembillah Azumah--the man interviewed in the series and the author of the book, The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa: A Quest for Inter-religious Dialogue. One can guess that some people were offended by the series--a state of affairs which often occurs when the truth is told.
This particular copy of the video, entitled "Muslim Black Slavery - Islam Slave History of Black Africa," is now posted at MetaCafe by a third party.
Here's Azumah's preamble:
The success of Mohammedan Islam in deceiving, misinforming, deforming and contorting both history and reality over a period of almost fourteen hundred years has been astounding--that is, until now.
The greatest tragedy about this particular subject is that most of the descendants of African slavery--the black people in the Americas, around the world, as well as among the African blacks--are totally ignorant of the actual facts.
Before we lose the concentration of our visitors, I would like to make the following statement and then prove it: that the worst, most inhumane and most diabolical of the black African Slave Trade was initiated, refined, perpetrated and implemented by the Mohammedan Arabs and, later, aided and abetted by the black converts to Mohammedan Islam.
I predict that, as usual, the two subcultures--those of denial of facts and of Political Correctness--will attack us without once disproving a single statement and/or conclusion that we make.
And here are some pertinent excerpts:
While the European involvement in the African Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to the Americas lasted for just over three centuries, the Arab involvement in the African Slave Trade has lasted fourteen centuries and, in some parts of the Mohammedan world, is still continuing to this day.
(...)
It should also be noted that black slaves were castrated based on the assumption that the blacks had an ungovernable sexual appetite.
(...)
A comparison of the Islamic Slave Trade to the American Slave Trade reveals some extremely interesting contrasts.
While two out of every three slaves shipped across the Atlantic were men, the proportions were reversed in the Islamic Slave Trade: two women for every man were enslaved by the Muslims.
While the mortality rate of slaves being transported across the Atlantic was as high as ten percent, the percentage of slaves dying in transit in the Trans-Sahara[n] and East African Slave market was a staggering eighty to ninety percent.
(...)
While many children were born to slaves in the Americas--the millions of their descendants are citizens in Brazil and the United States of today--very few descendants of the slaves that ended up in the Middle East survived.
While most slaves who went to the Americas could marry and have families, most of the male slaves destined for the Middle East were castrated and most of the children born to the women were killed at birth.
Azumah pronounces the denial of the facts concerning the on-going Islamic Slave Trade as 'obscene.'
To those whose male ancestors survived American Slavery long enough to ensure that the former would be alive in the twenty-first century and, therefore, be able to refer to me as a House Negro for suspecting the motives of the putative builders of the "Ground Zero" Mosque, I feel pity.
That pity is mixed with a sense of astonishment, however, at this conclusion: that so many black people are so well indoctrinated with perpetual anger at the sins of America's past, that they would ignore the more egregious sins of Islam's present and desired future. Hurling epithets and pretending that the opponents of the "Ground Zero" Mosque want to stifle freedom of religion is a lot easier than gathering the pertinent facts, connecting them, analyzing them and coming to a cogent conclusion, it seems.
On the other hand, perhaps such people have indeed concluded that Islam would like to expand its near destruction of those of African descent--with black men being the special and specified targets for annihilation. Perhaps the slinging of epithets, etc. is merely a smokescreen--an insurance for the future. Such people will be able to say to their future masters, "see? I stood up for the Ummah against that infidel, Ochieng."
Maybe such people are merely trying to protect their own testicles--such as they are.
Enslave a man's mind and the rest of him--including his testicles-- will follow; no more need for physical chains.
UPDATE: John Alembillah Azumah's bonafides: he is the Director of the Centre for Islamic Studies at the London School of Theology. I would imagine that he has competent security and, no doubt, he is in need of our prayers.
UPDATE 2014: I can't find a link to this, but if I remember correctly, Dr. Azumah has long fled the UK.
Over at Ace’s, there’s a commenter who continually tells Ace’s presumably mostly white readership that it’s pointless to go on about the history of race relations in this country and that white Americans should simply join the battle which the Obama Administration and the organized Left are trying to provoke. When I responded with a condensed version of how black American social and political allegiance has been manipulated over the past ten decades, he stated that a people who could be so easily (sic) manipulated must really be inferior.
This man demonstrates the type of limited perspective that I sketched out in Part One and, actually, his type could have furnished me with an additional bullet point; not only is he unable to think strategically, he actually rebukes the notion that such analysis has any value. Moreover, such a person is blind to how his own thinking and emotional state have been shaped and molded by Leftist ideology in a much shorter time span than was so for black Americans.
In this second part, my purpose is to detail another tactical weapon of the Left, the purpose of which has been to instill a set of attitudes in the minds of the American populace; in this case, the mindset is meant for white Americans.
If the Left has been successful at keeping racial grievance in the forefront of black American agenda—in indoctrinating black Americans into believing that retaining racial anger at whites is inherent in being black and essential for black survival--it has also been successful in later years of producing a certain mindset in white Americans. Actually this seems to be two mindsets, but it is really a singular one—a two-headed beast. The first is guilt-fear and the second is unproductive anger.
White Guilt-Fear
From one of my political progenitors, Shelby Steele:
What is white guilt? It is not a personal sense of remorse over past wrongs. White guilt is literally a vacuum of moral authority in matters of race, equality, and opportunity that comes from the association of mere white skin with America's historical racism. It is the stigmatization of whites and, more importantly, American institutions with the sin of racism. Under this stigma white individuals and American institutions must perpetually prove a negative--that they are not racist--to gain enough authority to function in matters of race, equality, and opportunity. If they fail to prove the negative, they will be seen as racists. Political correctness, diversity policies, and multiculturalism are forms of deference that give whites and institutions a way to prove the negative and win reprieve from the racist stigma.
Institutions especially must be proactive in all this. They must engineer a demonstrable racial innocence to garner enough authority for simple legitimacy in the American democracy. No university today, private or public, could admit students by academic merit alone if that meant no black or brown faces on campus. Such a university would be seen as racist and shunned accordingly. White guilt has made social engineering for black and brown representation a condition of legitimacy.
It’s a “read the whole thing” kind of essay.
The phenomenon of white guilt doesn’t merely mean that many white Americans feel guilty for the actions of pre-CRA America. It also means that all white Americans must pay for the sins of their fathers and pay for a system from which they are perceived to still be the beneficiaries and to still have advantages over all other Americans simply due to being white. Stemming from that premise, all whites are guilty until proven innocent.
Why are some of you so afraid of being called [labeled] 'racist' when you know that you aren't?
Little did I comprehend the near mortal terror in which the white American of goodwill and good-faith lives at being labeled as racist. What I discovered was that white Americans are being systematically made to pay if they step outside the ever-shifting boundaries of Political Correctness. If a given white person does cross one of these boundaries, he/she is “payed-back,”: often by losing employment which is usually accompanied by being driven into bankruptcy. Therefore, avoiding the label of ‘racist’ ( or ‘sexist’ or 'homophobe’) has been a matter of economic survival for white people—especially for heterosexual men.
Here are excerpts from some of the responses to the "Question" post. (The comments have been re-opened there, by the way. Also, keep in mind that the responses were given back in December 2009--before the Tea Party Movement and before the wanton slinging of the racist label had begun in earnest. It seems such a long time ago.)
It isn't fear, it's just a healthy respect for the consequences. If you work for a Fortune 500 company in a right-to-work state, being labeled a racist is going to get you an unpleasant visit to HR, a poor rating, and the beginnings of the process that is going to get you fired. These companies have all instituted mandatory diversity training, and no deviations from the usual company policy of denigrating white men and elevating blacks, Asians, Hispanics, women, and GLBTs will be tolerated.
The 'Racist' epithet and label are being used as a wedge to keep the races at one another's throat, in my opinion, because harmony threatens the occupations of so many people. And divisiveness is profitable. So those of us who are clearly not racist will not speak up as a general rule because the "race card" trumps all others, in the courts and in the court of public opinion.
The Left, including their politicians, much of the news and entertainment industries, and much of academia and the public schools have been in the process for decades of sedating, dumbing down, and propagandizing the American people.
I lived and worked in Mountain View, San Jose, Sunnyvale, and Palo Alto for thirty-plus years. I never bought into the "white guilt" thing, and made no secret of my non buy-in, and it cost me at least one substantial rise in income…So yes, being labeled "racist" can cost you.
[A]busive race-mongers and their disingenuous ideals must be challenged by and removed by their racial/intellectual peers. Why? Because they are in control of the conversation. As long as their peers allow them to remain unchallenged in their control and limning of the innocent, I don't think it will go away[…]Just as fear breeds resentment, unchallenged abuses breed ever-bolder tyranny.
One person described the labeling process in the following manner: once the white person has been tarnished with the racism label, all the others turn away from him rather than come to his aid—even if they believe he is innocent. (That reminds me of a book; several, in fact.) The reason? Such aid rendered will result in the defender being tarnished as well. This makes sense because of the Leftist premise, again: whites are always guilty of racism or are the beneficiaries of it. Who wouldn’t be afraid knowing the probable outcome?
(When I suggested that whites en masse refuse to play the racist game, one rocket scientistimagined that I was saying that, because white Americans often wouldn’t fight back when accused of racism, the persecution was their own fault. That sort of faulty reasoning is a subset of the white guilt-fear-anger axis. It’s also Rapist “Logic”: “she was asking for it and it was her fault that she was raped because she didn’t fight back.”)
Individual guilt can be a positive thing: a motivator to get clean and make restitution to the wronged party. (And this Christian asserts that the identity of the wronged party is always the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel [nee Jacob].) However, when group guilt is the matter at hand, there exists no actual defendant or plaintiff in reality. Under such a fantasy, the "plaintiff" can never be made whole and, obviously, the "defendant" can never be made to pay enough. And that brings us to...
White Anger
Dr.Steele again:
People often deny [a better verb, I think: disavow] white guilt by pointing to its irrationality--"I never owned a slave," "My family got here eighty years after slavery was over." But of course almost nothing having to do with race is rational. That whites are now stigmatized by their race is not poetic justice; it is simply another echo of racism's power to contaminate by mere association.
Persons who use this cogent logic are exactly right; however, they forget about the Leftist premise regarding beneficiaries—that even if, say, a Russian immigrant arrived in 1995, he/she still gets a perceived advantage over the black American, simply by being white.
Where the anger comes in should be obvious to anyone who has been on the receiving end of wrath for acts they have not personally committed, but it goes deeper than that. The idea of group or generational guilt stems from the biblical notion that the “sins of the father are visited upon the son.” However, when the Left builds upon this notion, they are forgetting who the visitor—the inflictor—is. (Hint: it’s someone in whom much of the Left does not believe.) This should lead us to the conclusion that group or generational guilt is something that the political Left doesn’t believe in either. Sowing the need for it and reaping the resultant white guilt-fear-anger is just a tactic…toward the goal.
The white person who feels unproductive anger at blacks as a group is in just as manipulated as the black person who feels this way toward all whites whether either is justified or not. Why? Because blanket anger toward group for things which an individual of any group cannot change—such as skin color or race--leads to the Vicious Circle of un-washable guilt and anger that I've already described and it gets the Left what it wants—the goal.
Properly targeted, productive anger, however, is where moral and valuable solutions lie--not to mention absolution.
A Certain Justifiable Anger and How the Left Uses It
That Leftist politicians and shapers of the mainstream media content are labeling the Tea Party Movement as racist is a fortuitous example (for them) of how to use the indoctrination which they have implemented. Oh, they know that the Tea party movement isn’t actually racist in its foundation, principles or goals. They do, however, know this: in the mind of the black on-looker who sees the Movement’s mostly white makeup and who does not recognize that he/she has been indoctrinated with an incomplete view of American history or that his anger/vengeance is being purposely inflamed, all the Leftist conditioning will spring up at the first flinging of the epithet ‘racist.’
As a result, whites who know that their opposition to the policies of the Obama Administration and the Democrat-controlled Legislative Branch of government is totally based on principle are even further angered. The Left uses this conditioning and the anger of being unjustly accused to paint the Movement as anti-black, shaping it in their own image as the fruit of the Racial Discord tree which they have planted and so diligently have fed and watered.
Conclusion
White and all other Americans—some who are keen observers of the history of Leftism, of Statism and who understand how and why this country was founded; others who merely want to provide for their families and live as free as possible--are easily able to visualize the path on which this country has its footing and are justifiably angry with those in our government who are purposely leading the United States of America toward tyranny. This is not “white” anger; this is American anger.
The tactics educated into both sets of the American populace are designed to do two things: 1) dis-empower both to the point of believing that their fellow citizens are their enemies, and 2) inflame negative and violent emotions to the point at which actual violence will take place. Fear, anger, and--the progenitor of the two—covetousness; the Left’s long-stoked Race War cannot begin without these. (I am purposely leaving out the equation of Americans of Hispanic descent and the illegal alien question; things to address in Part Three. ) [2014 note: I changed my mind about Part Three's subject matter, but, considering what has happened in 2014, a Part Four is needed.]
The Left sows and inflames Racial Discord in order to eventually style itself and its chosen representatives as the solution to the Discord it continues to sow. And the “solving” of that problem brings us back to my conclusion, stated in Part One, the Fundamental Transformation.
Power is the Left’s goal; power over all areas of each individual American life, regard of race creed or color of the particular American. The good news: the Left has over-played the Race Card with President Obama’s face on the suit. And it has stirred up righteous anger of we who recognize that Leftist Ideologues have long been actively targeting the goal of permanently impeding the Pursuit of Happiness and depriving all Americans of Liberty, Property and, ultimately, Life.
The proper purpose of law is to use the power of its collective force to stop this tendency to plunder instead of work. The law should protect property and punish plunder. The law, whether made by one man or one group of men, operates with the sanction and support of a dominating force, and this force must be entrusted to those who make the laws. Legal plunder occurs when the law takes from one person and gives to another. The law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. If such a law is not abolished, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.
Have you noticed that there are some people—many people--who have no concept of time?No, I’m not referring to the chronically tardy, though I do suspect that many of them fall into the categories of which I’m about to outline.
Those to whom I’m referring do not have a concept of the following; they are
Unable to consider individual events from the past as anything but singular and isolated occurrences, e.g. unable to connect those events with each other and—further--with contemporaneous, on-going events,
Unable to use known, available and pertinent information/ideas to analyze the sum (or, to use a better mathematical term, the product) of events in order to come to a plausible conclusion as to what is going, and
Unable to take that conclusion and reasonably project what may happen in the future.
The ability to do this is called strategic thinking—the ability to recognize patterns and figure out what is true and what is false.Most of the time, this inability has nothing to do with IQ and can be selective and temporary.I believe that, in the latter two types of cases, the inability is due to a syndrome to which almost all of us are prone: wishful-thinking.
Many do not want to or cannot put together the events which have lead this country to its present state, much less come to a reasonable conclusion. However, I don't fall into either category. Believe me, sometimes I wish I did.
But the more I learn about the history of the twentieth century, the more I consider it against what is known about human nature, the more I observe the state in which this country finds itself in at present--the more I believe that the peril anticipated by all too many observers, was planned by the Left.
I wrote the following op-ed for Pajamas Media on July 30, 2008. Since one still sees many asking this very same question, I think that a re-post is appropriate. It is slightly edited from the original version; I can't help myself.
********
A few weeks back, I lambasted prominent black conservatives for even thinking of voting for Barack Obama, a man who embodies only one part of the two-word description “black conservative.”
Several black conservatives were quoted in the article to which I was responding. However, the most revealing quote came from former U.S. Representative J.C. Watts:
J.C. Watts, a former Oklahoma congressman who once was part of the GOP House leadership, said he’s thinking of voting for Obama. Watts said he’s still a Republican, but he criticizes his party for neglecting the black community. Black Republicans, he said, have to concede that while they might not agree with Democrats on issues, at least that party reaches out to them.
“And Obama highlights that even more,” Watts said, adding that he expects Obama to take on issues such as poverty and urban policy. “Republicans often seem indifferent to those things.”
Watts’ turnaround suggests one of three things to me: 1) that he has changed his political philosophy and should probably change parties; 2) that when he was running for office he was saying what he needed to say to get elected in conservative Republican Oklahoma, rather than saying that in which he believed; that is, he was never really a conservative Republican; or 3) that he realizes the futility of trying to attract most black Americans to his party on the basis of principle.
I don’t know which is the answer, but there’s a logic to Watts’ statement regarding Obama and that logic undergirds the astounding Democrat/liberal/Left success among the black electorate in contrast with the Right’s failure in the same area. The key to understanding lies in the assumptions inherent in the phrase “reaching out.” Who should reach out to whom on the basis of what? What smaller actions fall under the large umbrella of “reaching out”? Here are the blanks filled in:
Who: the Republican Party should do the reaching out.
To whom: the party should reach out to the black community, that is, to black people as a singular entity — a collective.
How: the outreach should be done on the same basis as it is performed by the modern Democratic Party.
Programs
Policies
In short, the Republican Party must “do things” for black Americans which it does not do for other citizens and which are identical to the things that the Democratic Party does. Or better. But the Republican Party can’t be what it isn’t.
The bottom line: Republicans want black Americans to pursue happiness and the Democratic Party wants to provide happiness to black Americans.
A party and its principles
The Republican Party that Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan (re)built has not been designed to reach out to a group on the basis of identity, but on the basis of a given group’s ideas and values. By the party’s very definition — its basic principles — this precludes reaching out to groups which have race, ethnicity, or gender as their sole criterion for coalescing as a political entity. So when some observers wonder what the Republican Party is going to “do for” the “black community,” most Republicans will have a certain look of puzzlement on our faces, as if someone just asked why we don’t offer attachable wings so that our prospective party members can fly.
Many black Americans cannot shake the notion that a political party is supposed to provide quid pro quo. That the Republican Party won’t do anything for them besides get off their backs, get other citizens off their backs, and get out of their way so they can pursue happiness just isn’t good enough. But where did the idea come from?
The idea that the government should step in when overt oppression is being practiced but should not help or hinder black American advancement certainly precedes Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan. And, in practice, as Bruce Bartlett (H/T Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred) and La Shawn Barber point out, before the Civil War and during the century that followed the abolition of slavery, the Republican Party was responsible for several federal measures designed to protect Americans of African descent from their fellow citizens and to punctuate the basic citizenship rights guaranteed to the freed slaves and to their progeny. Fact is, however, the Republican Party would not have had a leg to stand on had not the founders of the United States based the principles in the Constitution on certain philosophies.
Obviously, black Americans were happy to receive the protection. However, after the Republicans clamped down on the racists, they (mostly) removed themselves from the equation to allow the country’s black citizens to be free. But when they did that, the nemeses fell in, masquerading as friends.
It is here that black Americans found themselves attacked from the top and from the bottom. Forty years ago most black Americans were used to being physically and socially restrained to an extent. However, what happened to black Americans in the 60s is that their enemies found a way to accomplish what the physical barriers of slavery, the legal oppression of northern segregation, and the overt terror of Jim Crow could not.
The mental chains
At the top, President Lyndon Baines Johnson — a Democrat whose pre-Kennedy legislative career had been that of a typical Dixiecrat — put forth a set of programs and policies infamously known as the Great Society, actually giving a part of the public funding to those who qualified to receive it. The bottom line? Many of the programs amounted to life subsidy — “reward” for indolence, whoredom, and irresponsibility. At the bottom, liberals, leftists, and Democrats inserted themselves wholesale into the educational processes of the black poor. That education put forth a portrait of America as a full-scale villain, which made her history unneeded — except the parts necessary to understand the crimes perpetrated on her perennial victims. With that in mind, why would liberals, leftists, and Democrats teach their captive audience about the historical role that their political opponents played in setting and keeping them free? Between the manipulation of education and the government handouts by Democrats, the Left could even convince black Americans that it was the Republicans who had actually been black America’s oppressors — and that idea, that lie, would become far more useful to the Democrats than any Great Society program, as LBJ allegedly foresaw.
An even more serious deficiency has been nurtured by the systems dominated by leftist philosophies of education, and that deficiency leads us, finally, to the answer to our question.
Too few people put enough thinking into principles — their nature or, of utmost importance, their foundation. As a matter of fact, what many people call principles aren’t really that, but are commodities — items to be bought and sold. And it is one’s principles — or one’s commodities — that inform the decision as to whom one should give his/her allegiance.
Example: consider the admonition to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Or is it “do unto others as you suspect they would do unto you”? Or “do unto others before they do unto you”? Or “do unto others as they’ve already done unto you and not one minute before they do”?
Like all other axioms, the Golden Rule has its origin in a way of thinking, a school of thought — a philosophy, in this case, biblical. One forms his/her principles from a philosophy, usually one or several taught at school and/or at home. Now I can’t speak for what is taught in all homes, only my own. However, I can authoritatively say that few bases for forming principles — as opposed to commodities — were taught at the public schools I attended in South Central Los Angeles. Barely were the particulars of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights covered. Of course we had heard the phrase “unalienable rights,” but what did that mean, really? And the men who formed these words, these ideas, and built a nation on top of them, where did they get these ideas about rights and government from? Did they just pop up, unbidden? Or were the men simply building on the philosophies of someone(s) else?
Who knew the answers to these questions? Not I; not then. Where I went to school, one was taught what to think, but not how and definitely not why. One was not taught how to build a foundation for one’s principles or that a foundation even needed to be built.
Into that vacuum jump many notions, but the one specific to the subject at hand is the idea that the party which is giving you the most things — the one that will “do something for you” — is the party to which you should belong. And if “principles” have no foundation, those “principles” — and their owners — can be purchased. And though there are a few black so-called conservative Republicans out there, all too many of them — like Watts — still find themselves reverting to the “do something for us” idea, a liberal Democrat ideal. No wonder some believe that conservative political persuasion is grounded in advantage rather than principle.
The Democratic Party has counted on this absence — of history taught/learned and of principles adhered to — in all of its members, but most especially has it counted on this dearth in black Americans, a dearth which has allowed too many black Americans to stick themselves to the Democratic Party like glue, or chain themselves to the party like …
The Democrats should take pride in a job well done.
Of course all women should stop having abortions. But since the question singled out black women, and since that conversation is between two black American women, myself and Jessica Ann Mitchell, and since we find the state of the black American family in near death, I felt it necessary to tailor my further response to black Americans.
The first part of my response has already been publicized here, but I posted the following originally in a Facebook note. For that reason, I will only post here what I deem to be the second part of the answer. There might be a little preaching. That's an essential part of me. He's a part of me.
Today has always been a special day for me. Yes, I celebrate the anniversary of the birth of the country in which I have survived and thrived. However, today is also the birthday of my great-aunt, Alma Jenkins Simpkins.
Today she is eighty-nine and she is the last surviving of and has experienced the most years of all of her siblings. She is the seventh of eight; she had four brothers and three sisters. Her lone younger sibling, my grandmother, went to live in the next world in 2008.
The four elder siblings were born in Mississippi and the rest were born in Oklahoma.
Her father and three of the four brothers died young--violent deaths, One, William, was executed for murder by the state of Arkansas. (William's race is listed as 'Native American' and they are, certifiably, one quarter Indian.)
Aunt Alma's eldest brother and three sisters died of diseases of the spirit--one cannot say that any of them were unpreventable: un-medicated high blood pressure and untreated cancers.
All of them were wild men and women, something I know both from reputation and from observation. Aunt Alma says that her father and all of her brothers carried a handgun on their persons wherever they went and weren't afraid to use them. She says that white people called her mother and her sisters "Mrs." and "Miss" in 1930s Oklahoma.
Last night, I made a green salad, and today I have cooked her an extensive breakfast, something not normally done because of her high blood pressure. Later, I'll prepare macaroni and cheese and broil slabs of boneless ribs. Aunt Alma will probably have a beer. And, of course, there is ice cream and cake.
Then, we're going to start a conversation--something which is now sometimes difficult due to her teeth. It will be a conversation about the men of our family who died before I was born--men who took their independence seriously and, sometimes, paid dearly.
Isn’t it interesting that Europe finds itself in financial straits and that some on the continent are lamenting the gradual incursion of Islam in very many of its countries?
From reading Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope (I read it years before Glenn Beck recommended it), I discovered what a death toll World War One had taken on the population of its European participants. Present-day protesters against the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would have committed serial seppuku over the type of casualties taken in any single battle of the Great War—the great numbers of dead being caused by contemporaneous weapons combined with American Civil War-era tactics. Then there were the civilian casualties. Overwhelming to ponder at the time, no doubt, but small potatoes compared to what was to come a few years after the “War to End All Wars.”
Europeans murdered each other thoroughly in that war, in World War Two, in between the wars and afterward. They did so via gas chambers, ovens, starvation and government prison camps and most of them viciously turned on the Jews using the means stated. Because of that--and abortion--there have not been enough indigenous Europeans left to reproduce and, thereby, fund the welfare states in which they so desperately believe and which are become their undoing. So they had to invite in immigrants from Africa and Asia--mostly Muslim.
And therein lies the interesting part. Murdered Jews—the monetary experts and culture of Europe--who would have reproduced to populate a far stronger and more admirable Europe, IMO--have been replaced by those who hate both Jews and non-Muslim white Europeans and who reproduce at a far greater rate than do their hosts. And the kicker is that the white post-Christian Europeans invited in their would-be conquerors.
The children and grandchildren of those who coveted Jewish possessions will soon be in a struggle with those who simultaneously claim that there was no Holocaust and who long to perpetrate the next one. No, hatred doesn't have to make sense.
That struggle will be over possession of a land which is covered with the ashes of the Jews.
You don't think God doesn't keep his promises? Think again.
In the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War and during what is known as the Reconstruction period, sixteen black American men—several of them former slaves--served in the US House of Representatives with most being from states of the former Confederacy. All were quite literate and some were self-educated. What is certain is that these men saw hardship and racism that most of us 21st century brats of all colors cannot begin to conjure.
What is also certain is that each of these men were Republicans and for a very good reason: the Democrat Party of that time was the self-described Party of Slavery and remained the Party of Black Oppression long after. (Arguably, this legacy continues.)
Linked here are the fascinating biographies of each congressman and some of the speeches the men gave during the debates for the Civil Rights Act of 1871—also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act—and the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
The site linked is called Neglected Voices and the voices of these men have indeed been neglected but the title is so…weak. These men were anything but weak, hence the title of this post. I’m sure, however, that they’ve been spinning in their graves of late at the words and deeds of those for whom they set precedent.
These men didn’t have to invent tales of racial epithets hurled or of racial violence; such were their constant companions throughout their lives. Yet they did more than muddle through life, they soared. These were real men, not victims; our current crop of representatives looks microscopic next to them
At any rate, here’s an excerpt of a speech from Richard H. Cain (pdf), in which he contradicts overt assertions by his white colleagues regarding the black race’s alleged inferiority:
While hanging out yesterday at Ace's yesterday as he was flogging racists, I happened to mention that many if not most black Americans view the federal government as beneficial and friendly. Some other commenters were surprised and I was surprised at their surprise, because it isn't difficult to figure out why this is. Whether it's the Emancipation or the desegregation of the Armed Forces or Brown v. Board or the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the federal government for the most part had seemed to be on the side of the black American as his constitutional rights were being oppressed by state or local governments.
What needs to be spelled, however is what the federal government did in the above-mentioned areas: it legally removed obstacles to the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of Americans who are black. And that is what it was supposed to do.
The present problem in my unlearned opinion is this: the federal government began overstepping its bounds during the Great Depression and did so most infamously in the late sixties via the Great Society programs. Doing more that getting local racists out of the way, the federal government sought to and succeeded in making itself the suppliers of life, liberty and, putatively, the happiness of many black Americans. (Try telling a senior of any race that Social Security is sending the country to financial ruin. You'll get an earful about her "rights".)
And even many black Americans who do not rely on the federal government still view the fed as our friend because of that history.
What's needed in order to change this perception is obvious: education--not a new education but the old one, one which contains an objective explanation of the role of government.
Simply put, the role of the American government is to remove obstacles to liberty of the People--even when that obstacle is American government itself. Supplying all of one's needs is not government's role. That's God's purview.
We all remember President Obama's statement containing the assertion that one of the flaws of the US Constitution was that is only contained a list of "negative rights," meaning negative government "rights." The idea that a Harvard-trained lawyer thinks that the government has rights or that there was no list of positive responsibilities assigned to government was mockable. (Hey, you voted for him.)
But what the statement betrayed was a widespread misconception present in those of us who aren't lawyers of any variety of a friendly fed whose role is to insert itself between God and man's liberty and to redistribute wealth (aka stealing). The notion that the founders "forgot" to address this is hilarious.
So when the Democrats came to full power this year, they began to build on the foundation that Democrat Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson laid. The good news? Between Socialized Medicine, Cap and Trade, TARP, etc., the federal government's active role in overstepping its bounds--in crippling America--is opening the eyes of Americans of all races. The bad news: there may not be an America left when the federal locusts finish.
I can’t believe it has been 20 years since
I sat here in the USA watching my friends on TV as they scale a previously
untouchable Berlin Wall.I had left what
was then West Berlin not a month before.Talk about the worst timing in the world!
President Obama isn’t in Germany this time—perhaps he thinks
that he has traveled to Europe enough for one year—but Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton is there and appears to be getting on quite well with German
Chancellor Angela Merkel (a former East German physicist).
My old Berlin friends and I plan to have our reunion this February,
but I think that an adult beverage of choice should be lifted today in honor of those
who helped shake the foundation of the Wall and bring it down—including, most
notably, one Ronald W. Reagan who, in his famous 1987 visit, exhorted last USSR head of state Mikhail Gorbachev to “Tear
Down This Wall.” President Reagan seemed to speak the Wall’s destruction into reality.
It says in the Bible that believers can do that.I just report.You decide.™
UPDATE: President Obama gave a video address for the celebration in Berlin. Appropriate considering present events, but he was unable to resist making it about him.
“Few would have foreseen … that a united Germany would be led by a
woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a
man of African descent. But human destiny is what human beings make of
it,” Obama said.
Airlift to America: How Barack Obama Sr., John F. Kennedy, Tom Mboya and 800 East African Students Changed Their world and Ours by Tom Schachtman
To refresh your memories, the Tom Mboya Airlift is the endeavor that brought Barack Obama Senior and hundreds of other young Kenyans to America to be given Western higher education and to return to their home and be prepared to lead their nation in the wake of its independence from the United Kingdom.
Before you curse the day that fate brought Barack Obama Sr. to America, don't forget that if the Airlift hadn't occurred, I wouldn't exist either.
One of the many disconcerting facts that I've run across since discovering the existence of Barack Obama Jr. is how much the students of the Mboya airlift were nurtured and supported by prominent individuals of the hard Left of that era and this one--Cora Weiss of the Institute for Policy Studies and entertainer Harry Belafonte, to give a pair of seemingly divergent examples.
When I mentioned this to my mother, she said "oh yes, Roosevelt [University, Chicago where my parents met] was crawling with Communists back then." Mom never quite saw the attraction of Leftism, lucky blessedly for me and my siblings.
However, one can't imagine how eerie it is to feel as though your existence was engineered by someone other than God and one's parents.
Today is the 70th Anniversary of the invasion of Poland by the Soviet Union. Following close on the heels of the invasion of the country by Hitler's Germany on September 1, 1939, this resulted in the disappearance of Poland until the aftermath of the Allied victory in World War II.
Do you think that President Obama knew this history before deciding to break America's agreement with Poland and the Czech Republic? Neither do I.
But I bet that his puppeteers advisers did. And I'm 100 percent sure that Vladimir Putin is celebrating.
UPDATE: Happy Judas Molotov-Ribbentrop Day! Jules Crittenden notes the bitter irony of events and has some excellent links at the end on the history of World War II's beginning.
UPDATE:Arthur Chrenkoff reminds us of how savage were hallmarks of the the 20th century: the tribal wars and genocides of Europe.
God love Senator Jim Demint (R-SC). I never thought I'd say that about a U.S Senator.
UPDATE:Live Webcam. And Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) can't seem to find the word 'Czar' in the U.S. Constitution.
(Thanks to Ace of Spades HQ who has a couple of breathtaking photos.)
UPDATE: From VodkaPundit:
That's pretty much the case. Once you folks who object to the government redistributing your money to others realize this, you'll be truly free.
UPDATE: A NYC firefighter who responded to the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11 reminds us that people are still dying from the diseases that come from inhaling the remains of two disintegrated office buildings and two destroyed jet aircraft.
UPDATE: I think we've just heard a coinage: Million Patriot March.
UPDATE: I can't wait to see what the ground covered looks like afterward--certainly no worse than did the National Mall following Presidential Inauguration Day 2009.
The weirdest thing happened this morning. I received an
email from my father--the African one--saying that he was in Nigeria attending a conference and that he was without money or a passport; he said that
he had accidentally left them in a cab.(Most
regular readers know that my father is Kenyan journalist Philip Ochieng.)
It was the correct email address. The wording of the letter,
however, seemed suspiciously generic as if were a broadcast--or a Nigerian email scam.But I thought it was my father so I emailed
back—“Okay I will help.”Blessedly, however, I decided
to Google the name of the conference.
So when the incipient scammer wrote me back with details I
said “will help you, Father, but I need to know that you are who you say you
are.”Two simple questions were asked and the answer to one should have rolled off of the tips of my father's fingers.
The response?
Julieet [sic], why are you asking such question,
i want you to use the information of theHotel managerand send what you said you have for
now. i also want you to call me on this number +*************. Get back to me with the scanned copy of the transfer receipt.
I don’t think so.My
father’s email address has been hacked.
So now I have to figure out how to let him know this. Suggestions?
UPDATE: An old friend volunteered to look up the headers and they do resolve to Nigeria. The friend jogged my memory and I remembered that there is still an old email address of my father's lying around so we'll see whether he still has access to it.
A bust of the former prime minister once voted the greatest Briton in history, which was loaned to [Former President] George W Bush from the Government's art collection after the September 11 attacks, has now been formally handed back.
The bronze by Sir Jacob Epstein, worth hundreds of thousands of pounds if it were ever sold on the open market, enjoyed pride of place in the Oval Office during President Bush's tenure.
But when British officials offered to let Mr Obama to hang onto the bust for a further four years, the White House said: "Thanks, but no thanks."
(Rumor has it that the president treated the bust far less ceremoniously than that.)
Obama, breaking with precedent, wouldn't grant the prime minister the customary honor of standing beside him in front of the two nations' flags for the TV cameras. [SNIP]
Still, Brown kept a stiff upper lip as he sat in the Oval Office yesterday as Obama, skipping the usual words of welcome for his guest, went straight to questions from the news services. Brown didn't get to speak for six minutes, after Obama had already answered two questions.
Many observers seem puzzled. I’m not and neither is the UK press. It’s about Kenya.
If you recall, before Kenya became Kenya (1963) it was a British colony known as British East Africa. Between 1952 and 1960, there was this little “difference of opinion” between the UK and the natives of British East Africa—primarily from the Kikuyu tribe. That conflict is known as the Mau Mau Uprising. There were tens of thousands of African civilians killed and, according to Wiki, seven to ten thousand Africans interned by the British colonial masters. In Dreams from My Father, President Obama says that his grandfather was tortured by the British during the conflict, though he was not a Kikuyu but a Luo. Guess which prime minister ordered the Mau Mau insurgency to be put down.
Mystery solved. It seems that the president is seeking to humiliate the progeny of those who humiliated his ancestors. Revenge isn’t that complicated a motive.
However, a question remains. Is this any way for a President of the United States to behave?
Read also about the gifts which the Obamas gave to the Browns during the latter's visit, especially this one: a collection of 25 classic American films on DVD. Not exactly special. And even more curiously: Brits can't play American DVDs.
To be fair, Prime Minister Brown was thoughtless in his gift-giving as well. One of his gifts to the president: a seven-volume classic biography of Churchill by Sir Martin Gilbert. One would expect a UK Prime Minister to know the history of his own country, but one could say the same thing about our own head of state.
UPDATE: Welcome, Ace's morons!
UPDATE: Welcome all others. Just to clear up some items, I am half Luo like President Obama (take note of my URL), born and raised in the United States. My father and the president's father arrived in the United States via the same means--the Mboya Airlift.
UPDATE (April 25, 2016): Welcome Instapundit readers! My new blog is located here.
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. One can guess that some people were offended by the series--a state of affairs which often occurs when the truth is told.
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