There can be few sights more humiliating for the American people than that of a US president kowtowing to a foreign leader or to supranational institutions. Continental Europeans are used to this sort of thing after decades of dominance by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, and have grudgingly accepted over time the gradual and undemocratic erosion of their freedoms. But most Americans fiercely defend their national sovereignty, and find the idea of giving international organisations a say over their laws and lives completely unacceptable.

The Obama administration however has submitted a report to the UN Commissioner on Human Rights, South African judge Navanethem Pillay, which makes direct reference to a popular Arizona immigration law aimed at tackling illegal immigration, which is fiercely opposed by the White House, and is the subject of legal action by the Justice Department. The report references

A recent Arizona law, S.B. 1070, (which) has generated significant attention and debate at home and around the world. The issue is being addressed in a court action that argues that the federal government has the authority to set and enforce immigration law. That action is ongoing; parts of the law are currently enjoined.

The highly controversial reference to the Arizona law serves only one purpose – to gain UN and international support for the Obama administration’s position in the face of mounting opposition from Arizona legislators and a majority of the American people. A recent Rasmussen poll showed 61 percent of Americans backing Arizona-style laws for their own states, and just 28 percent supporting a Justice Department challenge .

By doing so, Obama officials undoubtedly hope to stir up international condemnation of the Arizona policy in advance of the UN General Assembly meetings in September, which they believe will increase pressure on Arizona to back down. It is a highly cynical move that speaks volumes about the Obama team’s willingness to undercut American sovereignty and popular will on the world stage.

This approach has rightly been strongly condemned by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who described the Arizona reference in the government report as “downright offensive”, and called on it to be removed. The State Department has just announced that it will stand by its decision to include Arizona in its UN submission, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton strongly in favour of it.

It is important to note that the Obama administration’s report to the United Nations will go before the UN Human Rights Council, which includes in its current membership some of the world’s worst human rights abusers. The likes of China, Cuba, Libya, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, will have a right to pass judgment over the Arizona immigration law, a humiliation for a great superpower before some of the most brutal regimes on the face of the earth.

Over the course of the last 19 months, Barack Obama has bowed before Emperors and Kings, and apologised for his country on numerous occasions, from Cairo to Strasbourg. By deliberately placing the immigration policy of a US state before the Human Rights Council, he is now bowing before the United Nations, and undercutting the sovereignty of his own nation. This is not leadership but a surrender of US interests before a declining world body that is a hotbed of anti-Americanism, and a bully pulpit for many of the world’s most odious tyrants. It is also yet another example of an imperial-style presidency that is increasingly out of touch with the American people and public opinion. – Nile Gardiner @ Telegraph UK

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the “bitter” people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging “to guns or religion or” — this part is less remembered — “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

That’s a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

– Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

– Disgust and alarm with the federal government’s unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

– Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

– Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become “ungovernable,” last year’s excuse for the Democrats’ failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities — often lopsided majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.

What’s a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president’s proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.

Then came Arizona and S.B. 1070. It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) illegal immigration should be illegal, (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.

As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays — particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?

And now the mosque near Ground Zero. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration’s pretense that we are at war with nothing more than “violent extremists” of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.

It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” — blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims — a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, “just downright mean”?

The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama over-read his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them. – Charles Krauthammer @ WaPo

The last U.S. combat forces exit Iraq this week. The argument over Iraq is still nowhere near finished.

The costs of the Iraq war are evident to all. Now consider an alternative universe, with different choices –and weigh those costs.

As president, George Bush assessed his options in 2002, oil prices averaged less than $23 a barrel. These low prices had squeezed Iraq’s income and therefore Saddam Hussein’s power.

But war or no war, the price of oil would zoom upward in the 2000s. China had more than 90 times as many cars on the road in 2010 as in 1990. Chinese oil imports grew 7.5% a year, Indian oil imports only slightly less fast. Soaring oil demand from China and India pushed prices higher and higher: averaging $28 a barrel in 2003, $38 in 2004, $50 in 2005, $64 in 2007 and $91 in 2008. A surviving Saddam would have been a wealthy Saddam.

Not only wealthy, but empowered. The international sanctions regime had collapsed in the late 1990s, freeing Saddam to import more or less what he wished, potentially including the instrumentalities of war.

As we now know, Saddam Hussein had not in fact succeeded in reconstituting his nuclear program as of 2003. But Saddam did try twice before to gain a nuclear weapon: He had a program in the 1970s that was wrecked by Israeli airstrike in 1981, and then a second program in the 1980s that was discovered by UN arms inspectors after the First Gulf War.

It seems incredible that a Saddam still in power in the 2000s, unconstrained by sanctions and enriched by Chinese and Indian oil money, would not have tried a third time. Even if Saddam had not sought to build a nuclear bomb, an additional $100 billion or so in annual oil revenues would still have paid for a lot of mischief in the Middle East.

Would Saddam have competed with Iran to fund Hamas? Would he have made common cause with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to support anti-government insurgents in Colombia? Would Iraq have offered haven to al-Qaeda terrorists escaping Afghanistan?

A Saddam-ruled Iraq would not have been a quiet or comfortable place. And when the regime finally did end, it would have ended violently. When the U.S.-led coalition overthrew Saddam, violence erupted between Sunni and Shiite Iraqis, leading to an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths. Does anybody imagine that things would have gone better if the regime had ended instead with a Saddam assassination or heart attack?

Blame the Americans, if you like, for not having a better plan ready to contain the violence. But it was not the United States that caused the violence, much less the United States that committed the violence.

Now Iraq is finding its way to stability. For all the country’s many problems, it has an elected government and an effective post-Saddam security force. Would this have happened in the absence of international forces? Or would Iraq have looked like Lebanon between 1975 and 1991, a cauldron of sectarian violence for a generation, with casualties of many multiples of 100,000? Again: We cannot know, but the ugly scenarios are the most plausible.

With hindsight, everybody would fight the Iraq war differently. That is always true for any war. But it should also be true that with hindsight, some war critics should rethink their criticism. The outcome the critics wanted — a long-term stable future for Iraq without the cost and trauma of international intervention — was as much a fantasy as hopes for a swift and easy transition to democracy.

Iraq was on its way to an explosion in 2002. The U.S.-led intervention brought that explosion forward in time, and exposed Americans and allies to the shrapnel wounds. But the intervention may also have accelerated Iraq’s post-Saddam stabilization — opening the way to internal reconciliation and Iraq’s return to the community of nations.

Critics of the Iraq war often compare it to Vietnam. I wonder if the better comparison is not Korea: a war that once looked like a pointless stalemate, but that gained a strategic rationale as South Korea grew into a wealthy democracy. I remember a conversation I had with an American officer when I visited Iraq in 2005.

“What do you hope to achieve here?” I asked. “I mean, you personally?”

He answered: “Someday I’d like to bring my kids to visit a successful Iraq and tell them, ‘I made this possible.’” It’s early yet for this officer to begin planning his return trip. But comparing Iraq today to Iraq then — that trip has come a lot closer. – Frum Forum

The world will not even listen to the son of a Hamas leader when he says “Islam is a lie … Islam’s god is a god of hate”:

Andrew C. McCarthy @ NRO writes an excellent and knowledgeable piece:

‘Secularism can never enjoy a general acceptance in an Islamic society.” The writer was not one of those sulfurous Islamophobes decried by CAIR and the professional Left. Quite the opposite: It was Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual guide and a favorite of the Saudi royal family. He made this assertion in his book, How the Imported Solutions Disastrously Affected Our Ummah, an excerpt of which was published by the Saudi Gazette just a couple of months ago.

This was Qaradawi the “progressive” Muslim intellectual, much loved by Georgetown University’s burgeoning Islamic-studies programs. Like Harvard, Georgetown has been purchased into submission by tens of millions of Saudi petrodollars. In its resulting ardor to put Americans at ease about Islam, the university somehow manages to look beyond Qaradawi’s fatwas calling for the killing of American troops in Iraq and for suicide bombings in Israel. Qaradawi, they tell us, is a “moderate.” In fact, as Robert Spencer quips, if you were to say Islam and secularism cannot co-exist, John Esposito, Georgetown’s apologist-in-chief, would call you an Islamophobe; but when Qaradawi says it, no problem — according to Esposito, he’s a “reformist.”

And he’s not just any reformist. Another Qaradawi fan, Feisal Rauf, the similarly “moderate” imam behind the Ground Zero mosque project, tells us Qaradawi is also “the most well-known legal authority in the whole Muslim world today.”

Rauf is undoubtedly right about that. So it is worth letting it sink in that this most influential of Islam’s voices, this promoter of the Islamic enclaves the Brotherhood is forging throughout the West, is convinced that Islamic societies can never accept secularism. After all, secularism is nothing less than the framework by which the West defends religious freedom but denies legal and political authority to religious creeds.

It is also worth understanding why Qaradawi says Islam and secularism cannot co-exist. The excerpt from his book continues:

As Islam is a comprehensive system of worship (Ibadah) and legislation (Shari’ah), the acceptance of secularism means abandonment of Shari’ah, a denial of the divine guidance and a rejection of Allah’s injunctions. It is indeed a false claim that Shari’ah is not proper to the requirements of the present age. The acceptance of a legislation formulated by humans means a preference of the humans’ limited knowledge and experiences to the divine guidance: “Say! Do you know better than Allah?” (Qur’an, 2:140) For this reason, the call for secularism among Muslims is atheism and a rejection of Islam. Its acceptance as a basis for rule in place of Shari’ah is downright apostasy.

Apostasy is an explosive accusation. On another occasion, Sheikh Qaradawi explained that “Muslim jurists are unanimous that apostates must be punished.” He further acknowledged that the consensus view of these jurists, including the principal schools of both Sunni and Shiite jurisprudence, is “that apostates must be executed.”

Qaradawi’s own view is more nuanced, as he explained to the Egyptian press in 2005. This, I suppose, is where his vaunted reformist streak comes in. For private apostasy, in which a Muslim makes a secret, personal decision to renounce tenets of Islam and quietly goes his separate way without causing a stir, the sheikh believes ostracism by the Islamic community is a sufficient penalty, with the understanding that Allah will condemn the apostate to eternal damnation at the time of his choosing. For public apostasy, however, Qaradawi stands with the overwhelming weight of Islamic authority: “The punishment . . . is execution.”

The sad fact, the fact no one wants to deal with but which the Ground Zero mosque debate has forced to the fore, is that Qaradawi is a moderate. So is Feisal Rauf, who endorses the Qaradawi position — the mainstream Islamic position — that sharia is a nonnegotiable requirement. Rauf wins the coveted “moderate” designation because he strains, at least when speaking for Western consumption, to paper over the incompatibility between sharia societies and Western societies.

Qaradawi and Rauf are “moderates” because we’ve abandoned reason. Our opinion elites are happy to paper over the gulf between “reformist” Islam and the “reformist” approval of mass-murder attacks. That’s why it matters not a whit to them that Imam Rauf refuses to renounce Hamas: If you’re going to give a pass to Qaradawi, the guy who actively promotes Hamas terrorists, how can you complain about a guy who merely refuses to condemn the terrorists?

When we are rational, we have confidence in our own frame of reference. We judge what is moderate based on a detached, commonsense understanding of what “moderate” means. We’re not rigging the outcome; we just want to know where we stand.

If we were in that objective frame of mind, we would easily see that a freedom culture requires separation of the spiritual from the secular. We would also see that sharia — with dictates that contradict liberty and equality while sanctioning cruel punishments and holy war — is not moderate. Consequently, no one who advocates sharia can be a moderate, no matter how well-meaning he may be, no matter how heartfelt may be his conviction that this is God’s will, and no matter how much higher on the food chain he may be than Osama bin Laden.

Instead, abandoning reason, we have deep-sixed our own frame of reference and substituted mainstream Islam’s. If that backward compass is to be our guide, then sure, Qaradawi and Rauf are moderates. But know this: When you capitulate to the authority and influence of Qaradawi and Rauf, you kill meaningful Islamic reform.

There is no moderate Islam in the mainstream of Muslim life, not in the doctrinal sense. There are millions of moderate Muslims who crave reform. Yet the fact that they seek real reform, rather than what Georgetown is content to call reform, means they are trying to invent something that does not currently exist.

Real reform can also be found in some Muslim sects. The Ahmadi, for example, hold some unorthodox views and reject violent jihad. Witness what happens: They are brutally persecuted by Muslims in Pakistan, as well as in Indonesia and other purported hubs of moderation.

Meanwhile, individual Muslim reformers are branded apostates, meaning not only that they are discredited, but that their lives are threatened as well. The signal to other Muslims is clear: Follow the reformers and experience the same fury. As Qaradawi put it in the 2005 interview, public apostates are “the gravest danger” to Islamic society; therefore, Muslims must snuff them out, lest their reforms “spread like wildfire in a field of thorns.”

Today, “moderate Islam” is an illusion. There is hardly a spark, much less a wildfire. Making moderation real will take more than wishing upon a star. It calls for a gut check, a willingness to face down not just al-Qaeda but the Qaradawis and their sharia campaign. It means saying: Not here.

Let Me Translate: We Don’t Believe Him — or You

Memo to the ruling class media: We are not ignorant or stupid. We’ve not forgotten Jeremiah Wright. It’s not that we don’t “know” what faith Obama subscribes to — it’s more that we don’t believe him. Or you. Sorry. Not buying.

Besides, sometimes we just like to tweak you with our poll answers — and use any poll as an excuse to “vote against Obama” in any way, shape, or form.

***

Frankly, it has been equal parts comedy and insult to watch the ruling-class media haplessly wrestle with the reality that millions of Americans believe Obama to be a Muslim. They are so clueless.

As if we needed any more proof — this is simply another positive dose that the ruling-class media and the country are divided by a huge gulf of philosophy, reality, and experiences. And they are just beside themselves that a country that was concerned that Obama’s (Christian?) pastor is a crazy nut in the spring and summer of 2008 can totally forget about all that in the summer of 2010 and call Obama a Muslim.

They so miss the point. We have forgotten none of that. If fact, apparently, now more Americans are deciding to look into all of this and process it in light of Obama’s actions.

So allow me to help the media out on this thorny, confusing issue:

We know you claim him to be a Christian. We know Obama has at times claimed to be a Christian. We know Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity Church claims to be some kind of Christian denomination. We simply doubt it. And the more we watch all of you, the less we are inclined to believe any of it.

(And by “we,” I mean folks who would respond “Muslim” or “not sure” to your poll questions.)

We also know Obama’s father was a Muslim. We know his stepfather was a Muslim. We know that under Sharia Law, he is a Muslim, and that much of the Muslim world regards him as a Muslim. We know his mother was an atheist. We know Obama sent a bureaucrat out to claim that NASA’s top mission was Muslim outreach. We know he skipped the Boy Scouts’ 100th Anniversary bash. We know he’s had a couple Freudian slips pertaining to his faith. We know he has called the Islamic call to prayer the most beautiful sound on earth.

We know that in light of all of this, some sycophantic White House spokesperson has the gall to say how “obvious” Obama’s Christianity is. Depends on what the meaning of “obvious” is, I guess.

There’s more. So much more:

We know Jeremiah Wright rejects America’s founding principles — which are consistent with what we call Christianity — and many of us believe our founding principles were divinely inspired. Moreover, we know that Obama is on board with Wright on this — at least to the point of claiming that our Constitution is flawed in how it grants individual rights and liberty. We happen to think that rights Obama wants to curtail come from our Creator.

We know Obama has appointed proud and unabashed Marxists into his government. We happen to know that Marxism is by definition anti-Christian. We know he has confiscated the wealth of others to redistribute to his union thug friends under false pretenses. We know he turned his back on Iranian protesters in favor of an Islamic regime. We know he publicly defers to folks like Chávez and Saudi royalty more than he does Texas and Arkansas governors. On and on we could go here.

So what is so blamed obvious?

The only thing obvious here is that if Obama is a Christian, he is absolutely awful at walking out his faith. Or — as might be said at any basic tent revival — he done “backslid.” (Does anyone in the media have any idea what either of those phrases mean?)

In other words, we are paying attention to what is real and to what you are reporting — and the two aren’t jiving.

Answering a Poll

Another dynamic here is how the average person contemplates poll answers. I know that in the isolated, sanitized, academic world of the ruling class — you tend to look at every poll answer as an equal entity. You tend to look at every answer as a window into the soul and understanding of each responder — and you assume each responder has given equal thought to your little poll.

You overestimate your importance in our lives.

Frankly, we like to mess with your head sometimes. Had I been polled by Time or the Pew Research group, I’m sure I would have said “Muslim.” Do I really believe he is a Muslim? I frankly hadn’t given it a lot of thought until now — but I know he’s not a Christian under any definition with which I am familiar.

I know he’s a Marxist. I know he hates America. I know he is at the very least sympathetic to Muslims. He has a Muslim-sounding name, by the way.

Further, I know that for all of your bashing of George Bush and Sarah Palin over their overt Christianity, it will tick you off if I say I don’t believe Obama to be a Christian. For all of your protestations that there’s nothing wrong with being a Muslim, you will panic if we think your guy is one. I know you better than you know us.

So to register my displeasure with Obama’s “Christianity” and to simply irritate you, I would have answered “he’s a Muslim” to your precious poll. It’s my way of voting against Obama before November 2010 and 2012.

And certainly I am not alone in this thinking.

And none of us are stupid or ignorant or forgetful. We simply understand that we “shall know them by their fruits.” Of course, many in the ruling-class, ignorant media probably think we are gay-bashing when we say that. More proof of how out of touch you are.

Can you hear us now? – C. Edmund Wright @ American Thinker

Bravo!

I am not so “sucked-in” by the political talking hosts I listen to … Mostly Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, but I do look to a couple others occasionally. In the last couple years I have veered away from Sean Hannity, as he seemed to be a broken record of overly repeated talking points, and found him falling short of stronger face to face challenges of liberals when they have mad asinine remarks or assertions. Above all of this I CAN and DO think for myself. This is the incorrect assertion the left tosses out regarding those who tune into Limbaugh … “Ditto Heads”. They never present the correct meaning of that term in reference to Limbaugh listeners. Just present it as “mind-numbed robots” programmed by Limbaugh. Far from the meaning of “Ditto-Heads”. (It means, BTW, “Great show, Rush.”) But why confuse the debate with, um, facts? Eh??

I find Beck’s emotional moments 50% of the time *sigh*-fully unnecessary, but the other 50% I can feel what he’s feeling. And I really find it despicable that the left insists the man is acting when he cries, allegedly using Vicks to tear-up. I can easily accuse the leftist/liberal critics of shoving a roll of barb wire up their asses to appear so vile and angry in their presentation of opinions, especially against those who don’t share their collective Marxist hive-think of convert or die. While anything they highlight regarding one of the conservative-talkers as hate speech or racist or violence invoking, they always seem to take a small piece of dialog completely out of context and present it as whole. Yet, if you dare listen to a lib-talker’s entire show for any stretch of time your ears and nerves would allow their context on whole IS hate speech or racist or violence invoking. The difference is, that while the mainstream media eagerly collects the surgically carved fax papers of talking points from these liberal/leftist sources and willingly presents them to the public as ‘fact’ the same MSM seems to have two blind eyes and two deaf ears and a cut-off tongue regarding the incessant bile the leftist talkers on radio and even on cable network TV spew so easily at their mindless viewing audience. I liken it to a criminal trial where one side (usually the defense) throws out some information in the court trial, the other side objects, the judge sustains and then instructs the jury to discount what they just heard that should not be a consideration in their deliberating the guilt or innocence in the case. Yeah, like THAT’S gonna happen …

This is exactly how today’s media rolls. They used to correct or retract a non-fact in a story, but today they toss the flaming bag of crap on the public porch and run. Actually, Limbaugh is oh-so correct in terming them “The Drive-By Media”. Right now the supposed “watch dog” media is unaccountable to anybody … especially themselves.

Media Research Center has a report on this deliberate journalistic/reporter/media malpractice being committed on the consuming public everyday. Here are some of the examples MRC offers:

# Conservatives Want to Kill Barack Obama: “I really think there are conservative
broadcasters in this country who would love to see Obama taken out.” (Ed Schultz)

# Conservatives Are Terrorists: “Do you not understand that the people you hold
up as heroes bombed your goddamn country? Do you not understand that Glenn
Beck and Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly are as complicit of the
September 11, 2001 terror attack as any one of the dumbass 15 who came from Saudi
Arabia?” (Mike Malloy)

# Conservatives Want You to Die: “If, in fact, the GOP doesn’t like any form of
health care reform, what do we do with those 40 to 60 million uninsured?…When
they show up in the emergency room, just shoot ’em! Kill them!…Do we have
enough body bags? I don’t know.” (Montel Williams)

# Conservative Congresswoman Would Have Liked the Holocaust:
“[Representative Michele Bachmann is] a hatemonger. She’s the type of person that
would have gladly rounded up the Jews in Germany and shipped them off to death
camps….This is an evil bitch from Hell.” (Mike Malloy)

# Dick Cheney Eats Babies: “Cheney, by the way, looks very ruddy. I couldn’t get
over that. Like, he must have feasted on a Jewish baby, or a Muslim baby. He must
have sent his people out to get one and bring it back so he could drink its blood.”
(Mike Malloy)

# Dick Cheney Should Die: “He is an enemy of the country, in my opinion. Dick
Cheney is an enemy of the country….Lord, take him to the Promised Land, will you?
See, I don’t even wish the guy goes to Hell, I just want to get him the hell out of
here.” (Ed Schultz)

# Rush Limbaugh Should Die: “I’m waiting for the day when I pick up the
newspaper or click on the Internet and find that he’s choked to death on his own
throat fat, or a great big wad of saliva or something, whatever. Go away, Limbaugh,
you make me sick.” (Mike Malloy)

# Michele Bachmann Should Die: “So, Michele, slit your wrist! Go ahead! I mean,
you know, why not? I mean, if you want to — or, you know, do us all a better thing.
Move that knife up about two feet. I mean, start right at the collarbone.” (Montel
Williams)

You can find most, if not all, the above comments in audio/video form online.

You see, the bigger picture here is this current administration’s, and the ruling class in Congress, push for full government control over the media, most especially the conservative media … well, ONLY the conservative media. Just way too much :”hate speech” goin’ on out there, doncha know! The “Fairness Doctrine” can be translated into “if you don’t shut-up We’ll shut you up”. This is being presented to the sheeple as it should have been done a long time ago. Even Obama warned in a college commencement speech this year that we’re just exposed to too much news/information … and we should, if we insist on informing ourselves, look to the sources he uses to guide his hand. Obviously not conservative sources … or even “fair and balanced” ones at that.

Over the last few years I have said FOX News pisses me off 45-50% of the time. To me that proves they are “fair and balanced” in covering topics, stories, issues. This is why they are attacked. The powers that be, and want to be for a very very long time, don’t want the unwashed masses having the facts or deciding for themselves.

Right now, in an effort to possibly squelch the other side’s opinion via the new media, democrat stranglehold Pennsylvania is slapping a $300 fee (see “tax”) on bloggers in that state. This is just the beginning. They will seek, in this new era in this country, to go through whatever window, backdoor, mouse hole, private fence to get what they want, and that is censoring conservative voices. We have already been told by this elected political class ruling over us that they can and will do this sort of governing whenever it fits their agenda. This might be why the American people, in growing numbers, feel their current government not only is a runaway train, but that the train has left the tracks and is smashing everything in its path … without even the slightest regard for the American people. And the lib-talking useful idiots are gladly greasing their wheels and cheering them along.

As I look at the poll numbers of growing disapproval every day/week/month, I am haunted by the realization that the numbers were possible very much the same at another time in our country … just prior to our Revolution. Now, as then, there are those who don’t want to be bothered, but will soon find themselves in the thick of it …

I imagine some of you are old enough to remember a 1960 movie called “The Time Machine” from the H.G. Wells story. A ruggedly handsome Rod Taylor as the curious time-tripping scientist H. George Wells in Victorian England. The petitely sultry but hesitatingly demure Yvette Mimieux as Weena of the future, a pretty little juicy Eloi hors d’oeuvres-in-waiting for the next roar of the ghetto blaster call to the cannibal cave of the disgustingly smelly and unshaven socialist underground dwellers the Morlocks. Weena welcomes this disheveled but eager traveler from a world she has no possible concept or context of knowing, but he sparks her dormant imagination in a childlike manner. However, Wells will come to discover the whispery-spoken blonde as the only living human in the future with an ounce of brains. (Go figure.)

At first, Wells is intrigued by this overly simplistic collective of carefree youth in the deceptively comfortable distant future. He’s even a bit celebratory of it. Nothing to do. No work. Freedom to meander about life aimlessly with no want or need because some unseen entity provides all to the Eloi collective. No need to learn to read, write, figure mathematics, or cipher history and its relationship to the present and future. As a matter of fact, history lies decaying into oblivion on the shelves of a dusty and abandoned museum that at one point the “no alpha and omega” generations of Eloi just lost complete interest in. There is no concept of memory. No value of life or a measured cost of death. There was no elderly generation to learn from or reflect with, and no juvenile generation to share hopes and dreams and life-milestone experiences with. The foundations and accomplishments that the millenniums of civilization had built, destroyed, and documented had no purpose in the Eloi world. Wells’ intrigue turns to disdain and disgust for the welfare lazy and dependent Eloi. However, his anger then soon turns to astonishment at the Eloi’s abscense of concern, compassion, and chivalry as they idly sit-by while one of their own drowns during an afternoon swim. Human nature, and more importantly survival instincts, had been completely bred out of them. The misplaced man of science realizes he holds the only hunger for knowledge in all of mankind. It has been replaced by the hunger of the all powerful and controlling entity that has full charge over the designedly hapless and clueless commune of lovely kibbles `n bits. They fear the dark but have no mental means to create the light. Do herds of cattle, horses, sheep or goats have the need to acknowledge or even learn from their ancestors’ history and mistakes? Even our domestication of them leaves them subject to our acquiescence to their demands of feeding and breeding … as it suits our bellies. Wells is the only human in the future aware of his soul. He is an alien on his own planet.

The deafening siren wails the demand from the masters, and the Eloi drop what they are doing to march as a collective to the open hungry mouth of the Morlock cave. And when enough Eloi cattle have mindlessly filed inside the cave the heavy and ominous doors slam shut between the outside and inside worlds … all the while Wells is desperately trying to reason, alert, warn, and dissuade the collective to resist, realize, and react to save themselves from the total consumption awaiting them inside. He fails. The conditioning had taken generations, an indoctrination of enslavement so subtle so as never to have been resisted or refused, no doubt beginning with prior generations of the very young while the older generations filled the Morlock cooking pots first in order to silence any residual knowledge of fascism’s history they might hold and pass on to the young as forewarning and defense. Why, the Morlock must be benevolent despots. They provided everything equally that the Eloi could possibly need or want without a sweaty brow or a dirty fingernail under someone else’s employ. But they were without liberty, free will, and individual exceptionalism. Even Wells’ time machine, his means of escaping the nightmare, had been confiscated inside the cave. For all his bellowing against man’s conflicts and wars of the past Wells finds a need for such aggression in the future. False peace only creates slaves.

When Wells gets to his machine he returns to his own time and tries to warn his fellow thinkers of the dangerous path man is paving for the future. But he isn’t taken seriously. He’s ridiculed, doubted and abandoned. His mission and purpose in life is now clear. The paradox of trying to change the future by changing the past is futile at best, his fellow Victorians as lamebrained and self-consuming as the Eloi. He must return to the future and start over. He takes with him the weapons of knowledge in three books. Which three books of “too much information” would possibly be useful in rebuilding individual exceptionalism and liberty, and battling tyranny? It’s left to you to ponder. But what you do know is that they are still within reach in our time. But not for long.

Cross-Posted @ Babalu Blog

A Test of Tolerance
The “Ground Zero mosque” debate is about tolerance—and a whole lot more.

Two weeks ago, I wrote that the arguments against the construction of the Cordoba Initiative center in lower Manhattan were so stupid and demagogic as to be beneath notice. Things have only gone further south since then, with Newt Gingrich’s comparison to a Nazi sign outside the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum or (take your pick from the grab bag of hysteria) a Japanese cultural center at Pearl Harbor. The first of those pseudo-analogies is wrong in every possible way, in that the Holocaust museum already contains one of the most coolly comprehensive guides to the theory and practice of the Nazi regime in existence, including special exhibits on race theory and party ideology and objective studies of the conditions that brought the party to power. As for the second, there has long been a significant Japanese-American population in Hawaii, and I can’t see any reason why it should not place a cultural center anywhere on the islands that it chooses.

From the beginning, though, I pointed out that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf was no great bargain and that his Cordoba Initiative was full of euphemisms about Islamic jihad and Islamic theocracy. I mentioned his sinister belief that the United States was partially responsible for the assault on the World Trade Center and his refusal to take a position on the racist Hamas dictatorship in Gaza. The more one reads through his statements, the more alarming it gets. For example, here is Rauf’s editorial on the upheaval that followed the brutal hijacking of the Iranian elections in 2009. Regarding President Obama, he advised that:

He should say his administration respects many of the guiding principles of the 1979 revolution—to establish a government that expresses the will of the people; a just government, based on the idea of Vilayet-i-faquih, that establishes the rule of law.

Coyly untranslated here (perhaps for “outreach” purposes), Vilayet-i-faquih is the special term promulgated by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to describe the idea that all of Iranian society is under the permanent stewardship (sometimes rendered as guardianship) of the mullahs. Under this dispensation, “the will of the people” is a meaningless expression, because “the people” are the wards and children of the clergy. It is the justification for a clerical supreme leader, whose rule is impervious to elections and who can pick and choose the candidates and, if it comes to that, the results. It is extremely controversial within Shiite Islam. (Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq, for example, does not endorse it.) As for those numerous Iranians who are not Shiites, it reminds them yet again that they are not considered to be real citizens of the Islamic Republic.

I do not find myself reassured by the fact that Imam Rauf publicly endorses the most extreme and repressive version of Muslim theocracy. The letterhead of the statement, incidentally, describes him as the Cordoba Initiative’s “Founder and Visionary.” Why does that not delight me, either?

Emboldened by the crass nature of the opposition to the center, its defenders have started to talk as if it represented no problem at all and as if the question were solely one of religious tolerance. It would be nice if this were true. But tolerance is one of the first and most awkward questions raised by any examination of Islamism. We are wrong to talk as if the only subject was that of terrorism. As Western Europe has already found to its cost, local Muslim leaders have a habit, once they feel strong enough, of making demands of the most intolerant kind. Sometimes it will be calls for censorship of anything “offensive” to Islam. Sometimes it will be demands for sexual segregation in schools and swimming pools. The script is becoming a very familiar one. And those who make such demands are of course usually quite careful to avoid any association with violence. They merely hint that, if their demands are not taken seriously, there just might be a teeny smidgeon of violence from some other unnamed quarter …

As for the gorgeous mosaic of religious pluralism, it’s easy enough to find mosque Web sites and DVDs that peddle the most disgusting attacks on Jews, Hindus, Christians, unbelievers, and other Muslims—to say nothing of insane diatribes about women and homosexuals. This is why the fake term Islamophobia is so dangerous: It insinuates that any reservations about Islam must ipso facto be “phobic.” A phobia is an irrational fear or dislike. Islamic preaching very often manifests precisely this feature, which is why suspicion of it is by no means irrational.

From my window, I can see the beautiful minaret of the Washington, D.C., mosque on Massachusetts Avenue. It is situated at the heart of the capital city’s diplomatic quarter, and it is where President Bush went immediately after 9/11 to make his gesture toward the “religion of peace.” A short while ago, the wife of a new ambassador told me that she had been taking her dog for a walk when a bearded man accosted her and brusquely warned her not to take the animal so close to the sacred precincts. Muslim cabdrivers in other American cities have already refused to take passengers with “unclean” canines.

Another feature of my local mosque that I don’t entirely like is the display of flags outside, purportedly showing all those nations that are already Muslim. Some of these flags are of countries like Malaysia, where Islam barely has a majority, or of Turkey, which still has a secular constitution. At the United Nations, the voting bloc of the Organization of the Islamic Conference nations is already proposing a resolution that would circumscribe any criticism of religion in general and of Islam in particular. So, before he is used by our State Department on any more goodwill missions overseas, I would like to see Imam Rauf asked a few searching questions about his support for clerical dictatorship in, just for now, Iran. Let us by all means make the “Ground Zero” debate a test of tolerance. But this will be a one-way street unless it is to be a test of Muslim tolerance as well. – Christopher Hitchens @ Slate

Republicans enjoy a 50 percent to 43 percent advantage over Democrats among registered voters, the highest yet in Gallup’s weekly tracking of the 2010 midterm elections. But a Republican victory in November will mean nothing if it means more GOP business as usual. That is why it is critically important for congressional Republicans to put forward a concrete agenda before the election as an alternative to that of big-spending congressional Democrats. Instead, Republicans appear satisfied to fall back on a one-plank platform: “We’re not the Democrats.” That won’t cut it because, as pollster Scott Rasmussen recently told the Wall Street Journal, the GOP will benefit from voters’ desire to oust the party in power, but “75 percent of Republicans say their representatives in Congress are out of touch with the party base. Should they win big this November, they will have to move quickly to prove they’ve learned lessons from the Bush years.”

Those Bush years too often displayed little difference between Republicans and Democrats in Washington. Much of the vast expansion of the federal government by Democrats was previewed by the Bush-led Republicans. Obamacare’s overreach? Don’t forget the Republicans’ entitlement-expanding and budget-busting Medicare Part D. In fact, Republicans were off the reservation long before Bush ever entered office. The 1994 Republican revolution marked the first time in more than 40 years that Republicans held a congressional majority. They won while pledging specific policy goals in their Contract with America, including term limits, a balanced budget amendment, and welfare reform. Some significant progress was made but in a few years the revolution was all but abandoned. The Cato Institute’s Ed Crane recently noted that the “combined budgets of the 95 major programs that the Contract with America promised to eliminate … increased by 13 percent.”

Today, most Americans are ready as never before to shrink government and stop the spending madness. This presents the GOP with an opportunity it didn’t have in 1994: an electorate exhausted by Washington politicians and their doubletalk. But the GOP so far seems unwilling to lay out specifics about how it plans to respond to what Americans are saying if they restore the party to majority status in the House and perhaps the Senate. House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va., boasts of the Republican “YouCut” Web site that solicits ideas from voters, but that effort barely rises above window dressing. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has proposed a “Roadmap to Economic Recovery” as a serious program for entitlement reform, yet the party leadership has not embraced it. Similarly, the Heritage Foundation has compiled 128 policy recommendations across 23 major policy areas for shrinking government and making it work better. The Examiner will be offering a number of ideas on this page in coming days as well. Republican leaders risk squandering a historic opportunity by ignoring such recommendations. The voters are waiting. – The Washington Examiner

Weasel Zippers had a contact at the protest.

Rasmussen Reports -- Monday, August 23, 2010: A lot more voters are paying attention to the plans to build a mosque near the Ground Zero site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City, and they don’t like the idea.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 85% of U.S. voters say they are now following news stories about the mosque planned near Ground Zero. That’s a 34-point jump from a month ago when only 51% said they were following the story.

The new finding includes 58% who are following the story very closely, up from 22% in mid-July.

Now 62% oppose the building of a mosque near where the World Trade Center stood in Lower Manhattan, compared to 54% in the previous survey. Twenty-five percent (25%) favor allowing the mosque to go ahead, and 13% more are not sure.

Sixty-eight percent (68%) of the Political Class, however, favor building the mosque near Ground Zero. Seventy-seven percent (77%) of Mainstream voters are opposed.

Since the July survey, the local New York City zoning debate over the planned 13-story Cordoba mosque has escalated into a national controversy. It has even been addressed by President Obama, who supports the building of the mosque in the name of religious tolerance. Opponents of the project, including many who lost loved ones in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, see the mosque as a deliberate provocation that dishonors the memories of the 3,000 people who died that day.

In mid-July, most voters in New York (58%) opposed the building of the mosque near Ground Zero. Twenty percent (20%) supported it, and 21% were undecided.

The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on August 19-20, 2010 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

Sixty-three percent (63%) of voters nationwide say the building of the mosque near the 9/11 site is insensitive. Just 23% disagree.

Only 22% say they are at least somewhat confident that the mosque is being built to honor those who died in the 9/11 attacks, as some have suggested. That’s down eight points from last month.

Sixty-seven percent (67%) are not confident that the mosque is intended to honor those killed by the terrorists. This includes eight percent (8%) who are Very Confident and 41% who are Not At All Confident.

Still, just 49% say the mosque issue is at least somewhat important in terms of how they will vote, with 27% who say it is Very Important. Forty-six percent (46%) view the mosque as unimportant to their vote, including 20% who say it is Not At All Important.

There’s a high level of interest in the mosque story across all demographic categories.

Yet while 85% of Republicans and 62% of voters not affiliated with either party oppose the building of the mosque near Ground Zero, Democrats are evenly divided on the question. There’s a similar division of opinion in the president’s party over whether the location of the mosque is insensitive, while Republican and unaffiliated voters believe strongly that it is.

But most Democrats like the majority of GOP voters and unaffiliateds are not very or not at all confident that the mosque is being built to honor those who died on 9/11.

Fifty-two percent (52%) of the Political Class, on the other hand, are confident that the mosque will honor those killed by the terrorists. Eighty-two percent (82%) of Mainstream voters don’t share that confidence.

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of Mainstream voters say the mosque issue is important to how they will vote, with 34% who say it is Very Important. Political Class voters say overwhelmingly that the issue is not important to their vote.

For the first time this year, the number who believe America is safer today than it was before the 9/11 terrorist attacks is slightly higher than those who disagree.

Voters are now as pessimistic about America’s relationship with Israel as they are about relations with the Muslim world.

Iran’s first nuclear plant has just gone online, and some speculate that Israel will take military action against it. Fifty-one percent (51%) of U.S. voters believe the United States should help Israel if it attacks Iran. [...]

From A Romanian Newspaper
by Cornel Nistorescu
August 17, 2010

We rarely get a chance to see another country’s editorial about the USA

Read this excerpt from a Romanian Newspaper. The article was written by Mr. Cornel Nistorescu and published under the title ‘C’ntarea Americii, meaning ‘Ode To America ‘) in the Romanian newspaper Evenimentulzilei ‘The Daily Event’ or ‘News of the Day’.

An Ode to America

Why are Americans so united? They would not resemble one another even if you painted them all one color! They speak all the languages of the world and form an astonishing mixture of civilizations and religious beliefs.

On 9/11, the American tragedy turned three hundred million people into a hand put on the heart. Nobody rushed to accuse the White House, the Army, or the Secret Service that they are only a bunch of losers. Nobody rushed to empty their bank accounts. Nobody rushed out onto the streets nearby to gape about.

Instead the Americans volunteered to donate blood and to give a helping hand.

After the first moments of panic , they raised their flag over the smoking ruins, putting on T-shirts, caps and ties in the colors of the national flag. They placed flags on buildings and cars as if in every place and on every car a government official or the president was passing. On every occasion, they started singing: ‘God Bless America !’

I watched the live broadcast and rerun after rerun for hours listening to the story of the guy who went down one hundred floors with a woman in a wheelchair without knowing who she was, or of the Californian hockey player, who gave his life fighting with the terrorists and prevented the plane from hitting a target that could have killed other hundreds or thousands of people.

How on earth were they able to respond united as one human being? Imperceptibly, with every word and musical note, the memory of some turned into a modern myth of tragic heroes. And with every phone call, millions and millions of dollars were put into collection aimed at rewarding not a man or a family, but a spirit, which no money can buy. What on earth unites the Americans in such way? Their land? Their history? Their economic Power? Money? I tried for hours to find an answer, humming songs and murmuring phrases with the risk of sounding commonplace, I thought things over, I reached but only one conclusion… Only freedom can work such miracles.

For some reason, now more than in the past, people have lost perspective on what is and isn’t a religion, as opposed to a political ideology. Consistently socialism/communism/Marxism has always had the need to stifle or obliterate established religion, especially Judeo-Christian religions. The intent is for the masses to completely relinquish all their individual faiths/beliefs and follow the restrictions put forth by a one controlling government entity that demands the masses follow blindly and without question. Hence, the government is not only the religion of the collective, but takes the place of “god”. Just as people of religion believe if they pray for the ability to do and provide for themselves through strength, health, wisdom, opportunities and good weather, etc, a fascist government entity wants those same people to look only to them for anything and everything, including how and what to think and believe. All else is wrong, illegal, and even evil. There can be no “outside the box” … only the box.

Kermit brings this interesting read to my attention:

[...] Modern fanaticisms are often called “secular religions” — pro-”choice” abortionism, environmentalism, belief in man-made global warming, etc. — because their advocates are impervious to falsifying evidence. But they aren’t true religions, for if they were, the qualifier “secular” wouldn’t be necessary.

A true religion requires worshipful belief in a non-natural realm inhabited by one or more consciousnesses not subject to physical laws but rather capable of controlling those laws and thus events in our world and lives.

So here’s the thought experiment: What if Nazism wasn’t just a political ideology, wasn’t just a secular fanaticism, but a true religion instead?

What if its believers actually and religiously worshipped Hitler as God, or as the Prophet of God — the Nazi Deity being the reified Aryan Soul who created the universe for the benefit of his followers?

What if Nazis preached totalitarianism, the subjection of everyone to Nazi law, as a religious doctrine giving them the holy right and sacred duty to wage Holy War upon all unbelieving non-Nazis by any means?

In other words — is an ideology of hate and violence any more acceptable and excusable if it is disguised as a “religion”?

The answer is yes – in terms of what people accept and excuse in practice, because this is precisely the moral slack they cut for Islam.

[...]

For it does not matter whether Islam is a religion or not, as it is also and at the same time a totalitarian political ideology. Until it abandons that ideology, abandons not just hate and violence but the imperialism of sharia – the constant attempt to force Islamic law into a non-Islamic society – we must stop according Islam the respect due any normal religion, and look upon it with no more regard or respect than one would towards Communism or Nazism.

For Islam is poisoned with a moral virus, a moral sickness of hate and violent totalitarianism that has been there from its inception. It is up to believers in Islam to purge their religion of this virus, this sickness, before it can be accepted in civilized society.

Until then, until “mainstream Moslems” rehabilitate their religion, the Koran should be looked upon no differently than Mein Kampf. [...]
(Read in full @ IF HITLER WAS GOD)

The next article was kicked to me by friend and CW reader BK:

Obama Is Colluding with a New Fascist Imperialism

Nothing is more like the fascist Axis of the 1930s than Islamist expansionism today. Like the Hitler-Tojo-Mussolini Axis of the 1930s, Islamic fascists are fundamentally imperialistic, with an explicit order from on High to subjugate civilized people or turn them to ashes. Mohammed himself famously threatened the cultured Persian and Byzantine Emperors of his time, and in the following years, his followers knocked those empires over like devouring army ants.

The peace-loving Buddhist monasteries of India were consumed by invading Muslim armies, with the result that there are no Buddhist monasteries left in India today. Not a single one. Only Hinduism survived the Muslim invasions, because Hindus are not pacifists. You can ask any Sikh about that; they are a huge warrior religion that arose as a buffer between Hindu India and its many Muslim invaders, who now hold Pakistan and Afghanistan. In India, the Buddhist monks just died or fled to Tibet. So much for the glorious results of peaceful resistance against Muslim armies.

Wherever Islamic fascists go, they first like to frighten and intimidate less warlike peoples — as in London today, where any BBC criticism of Islamic fascists is streng verboten. That’s what the Ground Zero Mosque and the Mohammed cartoon uproar have in common: They are purposeful agitprop campaigns to scare and intimidate all the weak-willed liberals in the West, a standard Islamist tactic to conquer by intimidation, just as Muslim conquerors have always done. Why bother to wage war when you can win by terror? Putin understands that, the Chinese understand it, and it’s clear enough around the Middle East. Only American liberals and European socialists are in denial. That’s why they are the biggest round-heels in the world. They will happily collude in their own subjection and degradation.

Islamic practice has always required mosques to have the highest towers in any subjugated city. No Jews or Christians were ever allowed to build higher places of worship, to ride higher (on horses or mules), or even to raise their heads higher while walking the streets than any Muslim. If you were a Jew or a Christian, you would duck your head deep down as you passed a Muslim, who was allowed to spit on you at will. As recently as the Ottoman Empire (crumbled in 1917), all dhimmis were unceremoniously beaten to the ground if they dared to raise their heads higher than a passing Muslim. Modern Westerners deny the obvious, but that is because they are wishful idiots, self-inflicted ignorami, and dead meat to all the predators of this world. It’s Little Red Riding Hood skipping into the dark forest again, but this time nobody told her about the Big Bad Wolf.

Islamic fascism is committing African genocides here and now, as in the Sudan, where a radical Muslim murder regime has been enabled by the “international community” to persecute and kill animist and Christian Africans since the 1990s. Rather than stopping the horrors by simply arming Africans who are killed for Allah, the Sudan has been gloriously elected to the Human Rights Commission of the U.N. General Assembly with the active connivance of the Left. That is just another fact that is understood by anybody who cares to open their eyes. The U.N. has been conquered without a shot by the new fascists, so that U.N. “peacekeeping” forces are rendered impotent in the face of genocide.

Kofi Annan stood by during the Rwandan genocides in the 1990s and then was elected Secretary General of the U.N. partly as a reward; Islamic regimes and the Euro-Left knew he wouldn’t make trouble for them. Annan earned his by using the Food for Oil conspiracy to skim billions off “humanitarian” Iraqi oil sales to help Saddam Hussein, in criminal collusion with French President Jacques Chirac and Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin. The U.S. press, filled to the brim with useless idiots and suckers, celebrated the bad guys and attacked the good guys. The biggest liberals always fall for the worst tyrants.

You think that evil is safely dead and in the past? You must be a liberal and self-deluded. But I repeat myself, as Mark Twain said in similar circumstances.

Islamofascists constantly threaten genocide against the Jews, as in the daily fulminations of that little Twelver freak Ahmadinejad — but also in the words just reported by our good friend the Saudi King of the Arabian desert: “There are two nations that do not deserve to live: Israel and Iran.”

This is the 7th-century king of the camel-raiders that the President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, publicly bowed down to — in a universal gesture of submission that was instantly understood throughout the Muslim world.

Neville Chamberlain gave Adolf Hitler only a half-bow after the Munich appeasement summit of 1938. Liberals are forever thus.

To complete the bleak parallels to the horrible 1930s, we see the Left-Fascist alliance together again. If you think Bill Ayers and Jodie Evans were just accidentally whipping up a PR stunt with the Turkish suiciders off the coast of Gaza a few months ago, then you, too, were taken in by classic agitprop collusion between the radical Left and Islamic fascists. Those were Muslim Bro suiciders (Turkish allies of Hamas) on board the tourist ship Mavi Marmara, under the direct command of the new Islamist fascist regime in Turkey. Like the recent Lebanese border assassination ambush of a senior Israeli military leader, this was a murderous setup. The assassination team in Lebanon Army uniforms had their snipers all set up with 50-caliber long-distance weapons, conveniently provided by U.S. military trainers.

But don’t expect any JournoListers to grok those facts any time soon. They are too busy looking for evil among American conservatives. The Left is half-deluded and half-Machiavellian, and each half constantly lies to the other. The lefty media desperately want to be deluded, of course, like the abused wife of a violent alcoholic. It’s a sort of token of love.

Socialist Europeans are knocking each other out like bowling pins today in their hurry to kowtow to the rising Fascist powers, who have bought all three British Parliamentary parties with their oil billions. Tony Blair is working for Libya’s Muammar Khadafi today, which tells you where the Labour Party’s heart really is. Eurosocialists have for decades imported hundreds of thousands of fundamentalist Muslims from the badlands of Pakistan with promises of lifelong welfare and four wives apiece, a promise that an ambitious young Islamofascist from Peshawar can hardly be expected to resist. As a result, Muslim fundamentalists now virtually control parts of Europe’s major cities, including Rotterdam, Hamburg, and Paris. Socialist Europeans know that their countries are coming to an end as Western states. They are not as idiotic as they constantly pretend to be. But they are drunk on the perks of power — and let tomorrow be damned. After us, the deluge.

Like the demonic 1930s, the Left is again a lot more interested in sabotaging freely elected governments than in fighting rising fascist tyrannies that delight in oppressing millions of women, in persecuting and hanging homosexuals, and in practicing sadistic violence toward a host of other victim groups. Sadistic violence — an intense delight in inflicting pain on innocent people — was a huge and now-forgotten feature of the three big Fascist powers of the 1930s: the Nazis, the Japanese Imperial Army, and even Mussolini’s Italians in North Africa.

Some people define Fascism as a corporatist economic system, like Obama Motors today. It could just as well be defined as the public celebration and practice of massive sadism against enslaved peoples. Mussolini practiced massive sadism in Africa. Hitler practiced systematic sadism against inferior peoples wherever he could — against Russians, Poles, Jews, Gypsies, German social democrats, on and on. Imperial Japan was horrific in its sadistic treatment of non-Japanese — American and European prisoners, Chinese people as a whole, black Americans, Filipinos and other Malay peoples in Asia, on and on. Even the Soviets did not celebrate sadistic torture of its enemies in public, as far as I remember, though they certainly practiced it in private, as the Russians still do today in Chechnya.

Ideologically rationalized sadism and cruelty is not even acknowledged today by such lowlife organs as the New York Times. The Times mostly ignored and thereby colluded in Hitler’s and Stalin’s industrialized sadism in the 1930s. Some things change, but the New York Times always enables the very worst regimes in the world. It is one of those constants that give one faith in the basic stability of things. Tyrannies change names, but the Times always kowtows to the most bloodstained nastocrats it can find. They may even teach it in Journalism 101 at Columbia.

The historic fact is that the Left always enables fascist monsters. I don’t claim to understand that fact, but it’s easy enough to see it over and over again. It seems to be part of their deep moral cowardice and weakness of character. The prophet Jeremiah saw it in the sixth century BCE and roundly attacked those who pretended to heal “the broken daughter of my people, saying Peace, Peace, but there is no Peace.” Listen to our liberal friends, and they are constantly saying it over and over again, a mantra that makes them feel better even if it is a flagrant lie.

Liberalism is just the self-delusion of moral cowards throughout history. It is not a modern ideology, as it always claims to be — now it’s “progressive” again. They can’t even think of new labels. It’s is just a form of denial, a pop fantasy that allows them to avoid thinking scary thoughts. That is why liberalism can be found over and over again in human history, under a thousand different labels.

We can see that delusional thinking right now in Barack Hussein Obama and in Hillary, just as we saw it in the Carter administration — which gave Islamic fascism its first taste of real power in 1979. It’s important to remember that reactionary Islamic fascism was mostly gone after the Ottoman Empire crumbled in 1917. A number of Muslim countries desperately tried to modernize for sixty years — until Jimmy Carter gave the pre-medieval throwback Ayatollah Khomeini his first big chance in 1979. That started a race among all the suppressed Islamofascists in Sunni and Shiite countries. Nobel Peace Prize-winner Jimmy Carter’s dysfunctional politics was not an accident, nor his love affair with Hamas and Khomeini; it is an obsessive-compulsive psychopathology, and it happens over and over again in human history.

That’s why the Norwegian politicians keep handing out that the Nobel Appeasement Prize. It’s why Obama got it just for getting elected. The Left and the Islamic fascists figured out who Obama was long before the people of America were told. After all, he’s one of them. – James Lewis @ American Thinker

Consider the core of Islam, fascism, communism and perhaps liken them to a hive situation/mentality. The “queen” is the all consuming governing body. Everything belongs to that body. The rest are worker drones, subject to the governing body’s thoughts, beliefs, demands. The drones of the society are carefully allotted only that which they need to carry on day to day to remain a cog in the hive’s functioning wheel. Any sign of weakness or even resistance is viewed as detrimental to the hive and that ‘drone’ is eliminated.

If the exact same book of ideology (the Koran) had been actually written today (as something completely new, of course and not already established in the world’s psyche) a sane-thinking individual would not only find the writings uncivilized, inhuman and lawless, but deem the writer an evil raving lunatic. Some do view it that way. Others choose to follow it. While others choose to appease it in hopes of the sword not passing by their neck. But it will … Islam and fascist Marxism cannot coexist with any other ideologies/religions. It’s in their DNA, as we say. But as I stated, both are self-serving brothers who will seek to destroy the other once the other’s purpose has been spent and the other’s individuality becomes apparent.

Time To Admit Obamanomics Has Failed
Wasington Examiner Editorial
August 8, 2010

It’s no coincidence that Christina Romer, chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, announced her retirement the day before Friday’s brutal unemployment report. With 131,000 more jobs lost in July, and downward revisions of 97,000 for the previous two months, it’s easy to see why she would start looking for the exits.

Romer is best known for drafting the February 2009 report “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan,” which the White House used as an ammunition belt in the fight to gain passage of its $862 billion economic stimulus bill (the actual cost of which exceeds $1 trillion when interest is included). Romer predicted that following passage of the stimulus bill, unemployment would plateau below 8 percent last fall and by this month register at 7 percent. That’s not close enough for government work, as unemployment stands at 9.5 percent today. It would be higher except that hundreds of thousands of frustrated job seekers have given up looking for new jobs and dropped out of the labor force.

Predictably, the stimulus bill has proven to be an extraordinary waste of borrowed money that has failed to create jobs, generate economic growth or do much of anything other than line the pockets of White House political allies. That and give $308 million in subsidies to BP before the Gulf oil spill disaster, and subsidize a study on what happens when monkeys snort coke.

As Romer fades back to her teaching post at Berkeley, Obama is adding to the economic misery by creating an environment of regulatory uncertainty. The Wall Street reform law Obama recently signed potentially requires 533 new regulations, 60 studies and 93 reports, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has 29 active rulemakings, and there are 100 new rules on the Labor Department’s agenda and 26 at the Transportation Department.

Add Obama’s determination to raise everybody’s taxes by allowing the Bush cuts from 2001 and 2003 to expire Jan. 1, 2011, and it’s easy to see why banks, businesses and consumers are hoarding trillions of dollars that could otherwise spur economic growth. And we haven’t even addressed the destructive effect on economic growth of Obama’s nationalization of major portions of the economy, including the banks, health care and the auto industry.

The economy is stalling, unemployment seems stuck at European levels of idleness, the federal deficit and the national debt are at historic highs, public confidence in Congress is at its lowest-ever level and big majorities of Mainstream Americans say Obama has the country on the wrong path. Obamanomics has failed miserably and it’s time for everybody in this town to admit it so we can move on.

I feel faith is the most personal thing humans have. To believe or not to believe. To be forced into it is not true faith. Perhaps part of Hitchens’ non-faith is his contention that ‘religion’ is a big cause of unrest and war for mankind, I don’t know, whatever he rationalizes it to be. I’ve heard him say as much.

One final thought, Hitchen’s last public exposure was the insistence that he and another bloke wanted to have the Pope arrested when he visits Great Britain is quite ironic. Now, as he states in his interview here, he states there are those praying for his death. Yet, knowing his history, there are those who are praying for him. Maybe the answer will not be his cure from the cancer but his cure of his soul and mental acceptance of something greater than everything our eyes can and cannot see.

It’s coming up on five years since I lost my Aunt/Godmother to the exact same cancer Hitchens has. She was a consistent smoker and beer drinker (from noon until bedtime) for as long as I could remember of her. She had the reconstructive surgery that cut the cancerous area of the esophagus out and reattached what remains to the stomach. The surgery, if successful, gave a bit greater survival rate … but the surgery itself has a VERY low success rate. There were complications to the surgery itself involving blood vessels to the lower GI resulted, causing even more problems. Meanwhile the cancer spread. I watched for roughly a year or more my Aunt waste away, not able to eat much due to no appetite and the inability to digest properly. She had a “port” in her chest, by which a high nutrient solution was pumped a couple times a day, and that’s pretty much what delayed the inevitable end of her life. Her depression was great.

While I do not agree with Hitchens on all things, I do know he recognized the evil (even if he doesn’t call it that) that the world is facing in this Islamic enemy today and he has voiced that over the past ten years, to his credit … especially when the rest of the people with the media access choose not to out of their own fear of the enemy’s response.

I wish Hitchens well, and a comfortable and peaceful journey through the rest of this life. His ‘conversion’, simply put, is his … and nobody else’s business.

Kermit: Please note how ignorant folks are inside the beltway in DC about the importance of oil & natural gas. As long as doofusses keep referring to it as “energy” it will remain that way. True they are “energy” but more important both of them are pretty much the feedstock for almost each and every manufacturing process in the U.S. Without them, steel, farming, pharmaceuticals, electronics (computers, chips, etc…) soap and a whole host of other things will be ALL made overseas.

From what I’ve seen even in “conservative” articles since this spill began, the VAST MAJORITY of Americans have absolutely no clue as the strategic importance of oil & natural gas for our nation’s very survival. Offshore in the Gulf of Mexico has more than Alaska, and all of the shale finds. Outside of coal, there is no substitute except the vast kerogen (immature oil) deposits in the Rocky Mountains.

Hayride:

Back from D.C.

Yesterday was a long, hot, sweaty day tromping around Washington and telling anybody who would listen that Obama’s moratorium on offshore drilling is a really lousy idea. Whether we did any good is a difficult question to answer, but the 50-odd folks from Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Alabama who traveled up to the nation’s capital certainly covered some ground.

[...]

I can’t speak to how the meetings with congressmen and senators went from personal knowledge, as what I was doing was a bit different. After a press conference on the Capitol Hill lawn (and it was REALLY hot out there) at which several members of our traveling group took turns explaining the damage the moratorium is doing, I and a few others broke off for a lunch meeting with Grover Norquist from Americans for Tax Reform at their offices, and following that a “press breakfast” at those same offices hosted by The American Spectator.

What was said was little different than our readers have seen on The Hayride for weeks. The moratorium is a stupid policy, it’s destroying the economy of the central and western Gulf Coast, it has little basis in science, it affects national security, our trade deficit, energy prices and most of all high-paying American jobs.

But for all of the jaw-jawing which went on, what struck me was how blindingly ignorant so many of the D.C. denizens seem to be on energy. There is an attitude that oil as a whole is no good, that those who deal in oil are somehow dirty, that times are changing and there is no future for fossil fuels. When those with that attitude are challenged to provide a solution for replacing oil and gas – and coal, for that matter – they shrug. “We’re Americans. We can find something.”

This is dangerous stupidity, and it seems to cover Washington like a shroud.

Norquist, in our lunch meeting, offered up some interesting advice. He says Mary Landrieu is the key to the moratorium going away. He says that Landrieu is playing her constituents in Louisiana by talking the talk about oil and gas and lifting the moratorium, but until she stops being a vote Harry Reid and President Obama can count on in the Senate she’s not helping. Norquist says if Landrieu really wanted to help Louisiana she would withhold her cooperation on ANYTHING the administration or Democrat leadership wants done until there is no moratorium.

I don’t know if it’s that simple, but it certainly seems like Norquist’s is a hypothesis worth testing. And it’s clear that Landrieu, and Charlie Melancon (whose staffers got an absolute earful from several members of the Louisiana delegation yesterday) are not fully engaged in this fight as they should be.

For example, there was this quote Landrieu gave on Monday about Melancon’s CLEAR Act amendment debacle on Friday:

“Charlie Melancon’s efforts to get the House of Representatives on the record against the moratorium is extremely significant and is a positive step to getting the oil and gas industry up and running,” Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said. “Protecting the jobs of the 330,000 Louisianians who work in the oil and gas industry should not be partisan issue.”

Melancon’s legislative director Chris DeBosier, I’m told, said in a meeting with Louisiana members of our group that he was responsible for the language in the amendment and that the “Section F” which has generated such controversy in that it gave statutory power to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to reimpose a new moratorium at any time for virtually any reason was language that had been in place in federal statutes since 1959 and was nothing new.

The delegation didn’t like that much, I’m told, and they would have liked it a lot less had they known that Melancon’s initial proposed amendment didn’t have a “Section F.” It only extended to a “Section C.” And Section C said this:

Which is pretty good language, as to us it sounds like Salazar is directed to stop screwing around with de facto moratoria on shallow-water drilling by dragging his feet on issuing permits. (CONTINUE)

More Hayride coverage of the D.C. visit here.

Meet the Ground Zero Mosque Imam’s Muslim Brotherhood Friends.
Rauf’s Dawa from the World Trade Center Rubble
by Andrew C. McCarthy
Press Release From: Act For America
August 2, 2010

Meet the Ground Zero Mosque Imam’s Muslim Brotherhood Friends.

Feisal Abdul Rauf is the imam behind the “Cordoba Initiative” that is spearheading plans to build a $100 million Islamic center at Ground Zero, the site where nearly 3,000 Americans were killed by jihadists on 9/11. He is also the author of a book called What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America. But the book hasn’t always been called that. It was called quite something else for non-English-speaking audiences. In Malaysia, it was published as A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of America Post-9/11.

Now it emerges that a “special, non-commercial edition” of this book was later produced, with Feisal’s cooperation, by two American tentacles of the Muslim Brotherhood: the Islamic Society of North America and the International Institute of Islamic Thought. The book’s copyright page tells the tale:

Both ISNA and IIIT have been up to their necks in the promotion of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s ruthless Palestinian branch, which is pledged by charter to the destruction of Israel. In fact, both ISNA and IIIT were cited by the Justice Department as unindicted co-conspirators in a crucial terrorism-financing case involving the channeling of tens of millions of dollars to Hamas through an outfit called the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. For the last 15 years, Hamas has been a designated terrorist organization under U.S. law.

Dawa, whether done from the rubble of the World Trade Center or elsewhere, is the missionary work by which Islam is spread. As explained in my recent book, The Grand Jihad, dawa is proselytism, but not involving only spiritual elements — for Islam is not merely a religion, and spiritual elements are just a small part of its doctrine. In truth, Islam is a comprehensive political, social, and economic system with its own authoritarian legal framework, sharia, which aspires to govern all aspects of life.

This framework rejects core tenets of American constitutional republicanism: for example, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom to govern ourselves irrespective of any theocratic code, equality of men and women, equality of Muslims and non-Muslims, and economic liberty, including the uses of private property (in Islam, owners hold property only as a custodians for the umma, the universal Muslim nation, and are beholden to the Islamic state regarding its use). Sharia prohibits the preaching of creeds other than Islam, the renunciation of Islam, any actions that divide the umma, and homosexuality. Its penalties are draconian, including savagely executed death sentences for apostates, homosexuals, and adulterers.

The purpose of dawa, like the purpose of jihad, is to implement, spread, and defend sharia. Scholar Robert Spencer incisively refers to dawa practices as “stealth jihad,” the advancement of the sharia agenda through means other than violence and agents other than terrorists. These include extortion, cultivation of sympathizers in the media and the universities, exploitation of our legal system and tradition of religious liberty, infiltration of our political system, and fundraising. This is why Yusuf Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and the world’s most influential Islamic cleric, boldly promises that Islam will “conquer America” and “conquer Europe” through dawa.

In considering Imam Rauf and his Ground Zero project, Qaradawi and the Muslim Brotherhood are extremely important. Like most Muslims, Rauf regards Qaradawi as a guide, and referred to him in 2001 as “the most well-known legal authority in the whole Muslim world today.” And indeed he is: a prominent, Qatar-based scholar whose weekly Al Jazeera program on the subject of sharia is viewed by millions and whose cyber-venture, Islam Online, is accessed by millions more, including Muslims in the United States. Not surprisingly, his rabble-rousing was a prime cause of the deadly global rioting by Muslims when an obscure Danish newspaper published cartoon depictions of Mohammed.

Qaradawi regards the United States as the enemy of Islam. He has urged that Muslims “fight the American military if we can, and if we cannot, we should fight the U.S. economically and politically.” In 2004, he issued a fatwa (an edict based on sharia) calling for Muslims to kill Americans in Iraq. A leading champion of Hamas, he has issued similar approvals of suicide bombings in Israel. Moreover, as recounted in Matthew Levitt’s history of Hamas, Qaradawi has decreed that Muslims must donate money to “support Palestinians fighting occupation. . . . If we can’t carry out acts of jihad ourselves, we at least should support and prop up the mujahideen [i.e., Islamic raiders or warriors] financially and morally.”

Qaradawi’s support for Hamas is only natural. Since that organization’s 1987 founding, it has been the top Muslim Brotherhood priority to underwrite Hamas’s jihadist onslaught against the Jewish state. Toward that end, the Muslim Brotherhood mobilized the Islamist infrastructure in the United States.

The original building block of that infrastructure was the Muslim Students Association (MSA), established in the early Sixties to groom young Muslims in the Brotherhood’s ideology — promoting sharia, Islamic supremacism, and a worldwide caliphate. As Andrew Bostom elaborated in a New York Post op-ed on Friday, Imam Rauf, too, is steeped in this ideology.

In 1981, after two decades of churning out activists from its North American chapters (which now number over 600), the Brotherhood merged the MSA into ISNA. In its own words, ISNA was conceived as an umbrella organization “to advance the cause of Islam and service Muslims in North America so as to enable them to adopt Islam as a complete way of life.” That same year, the Brotherhood created IIIT as a Washington-area Islamic think tank dedicated to what it describes as “the Islamicization of knowledge.”

After Hamas was created, the top Brotherhood operative in the United States, Mousa Abu Marzook — who actually ran Hamas from his Virginia home for several years in the early Nineties — founded the Islamic Association for Palestine to boost Hamas’s support. One of his co-founders was Sami al-Arian, then a student and Muslim Brotherhood member, later a top U.S. operative of the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which he helped guide from his perch as a professor at the University of South Florida. In 2006, al-Arian was convicted on terrorism charges.

Marzook and other Brotherhood figures established the Occupied Land Fund, eventually renamed the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), to be Hamas’s American fundraising arm. The HLF was headquartered in ISNA’s Indiana office. As the Justice Department explained in a memorandum submitted in the HLF case:

During the early years of HLF’s operation, HLF raised money and supported Hamas through a bank account it held with ISNA. . . . Indeed, HLF (under its former name, OLF) operated from within ISNA, in Plainfield, Illinois. . . . ISNA checks deposited into the ISNA/[North American Islamic Trust] account for the HLF were often made payable to “the Palestinian Mujahideen,” the original name for the Hamas military wing. . . . From the ISNA/NAIT account, the HLF sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook . . . and a number of other individuals associated with Hamas.

Ultimately, the HLF raised over $36 million for Hamas. At the height of the intifada, this was not about the social-welfare activities Hamas touts to camouflage its barbarism. As the journalist Stephen Schwartz of the Center for Islamic Pluralism has observed, “Ordinary Americans should be shocked and outraged to learn that Hamas was running its terror campaign from a sanctuary in the U.S.” In addition, prosecutors showed that ISNA was central to a 1993 meeting of top Brotherhood operatives, who were wiretapped “discussing using ISNA as an official cover for their activities.”

Meantime, in 1992, the IIIT contributed $50,000 to underwrite an al-Arian venture, the World & Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE), a front for Palestinian Islamic Jihad that ostensibly employed several members of the PIJ governing board. IIIT has been under federal investigation since 2002 — and after his terrorism conviction, al-Arian went into contempt of court rather than honor a grand-jury subpoena in the probe.

In 1991, the Muslim Brotherhood’s American leadership prepared an internal memorandum for the organization’s global leadership in Egypt. It was written principally by Mohamed Akram, a close associate of Sheikh Qaradawi. As Akram put it, the Brotherhood

We must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

The memorandum included a list described by Akram as “our organizations and the organizations of our friends,” working together to implement this sabotage strategy. Prominently included in that list were ISNA and IIIT.

The Ground Zero project to erect a monument to sharia overlooking the crater where the World Trade Center once stood, and where thousands were slaughtered, is not a test of America’s commitment to religious liberty. America already has thousands of mosques and Islamic centers, including scores in the New York area — though Islam does not allow non-Muslims even to enter its crown-jewel cities of Mecca and Medina, much less to build churches or synagogues.

The Ground Zero project is a test of America’s resolve to face down a civilizational jihad that aims, in the words of its leaders, to destroy us from within.

Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Will Washington’s Failures Lead To Second American Revolution?
by ERNEST S. CHRISTIAN AND GARY A ROBBINS

The Internet is a large-scale version of the “Committees of Correspondence” that led to the first American Revolution — and with Washington’s failings now so obvious and awful, it may lead to another.
People are asking, “Is the government doing us more harm than good? Should we change what it does and the way it does it?”

Pruning the power of government begins with the imperial presidency.

Too many overreaching laws give the president too much discretion to make too many open-ended rules controlling too many aspects of our lives. There’s no end to the harm an out-of-control president can do.
Bill Clinton lowered the culture, moral tone and strength of the nation — and left America vulnerable to attack. When it came, George W. Bush stood up for America, albeit sometimes clumsily.

Barack Obama, however, has pulled off the ultimate switcheroo: He’s diminishing America from within — so far, successfully.

He may soon bankrupt us and replace our big merit-based capitalist economy with a small government-directed one of his own design.

He is undermining our constitutional traditions: The rule of law and our Anglo-Saxon concepts of private property hang in the balance. Obama may be the most “consequential” president ever.
The Wall Street Journal’s steadfast Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote that Barack Obama is “an alien in the White House.”

His bullying and offenses against the economy and job creation are so outrageous that CEOs in the Business Roundtable finally mustered the courage to call him “anti-business.” Veteran Democrat Sen. Max Baucus blurted out that Obama is engineering the biggest government-forced “redistribution of income” in history.

Fear and uncertainty stalk the land. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says America’s financial future is “unusually uncertain.”

A Wall Street “fear gauge” based on predicted market volatility is flashing long-term panic. New data on the federal budget confirm that record-setting deficits in the $1.4 trillion range are now endemic.
Obama is building an imperium of public debt and crushing taxes, contrary to George Washington’s wise farewell admonition: “cherish public credit … use it as sparingly as possible … avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt … bear in mind, that towards the payment of debts there must be Revenue, that to have Revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised, which are not … inconvenient and unpleasant … .”

Opinion polls suggest that in the November mid-term elections, voters will replace the present Democratic majority in Congress with opposition Republicans — but that will not necessarily stop Obama.
A President Obama intent on achieving his transformative goals despite the disagreement of the American people has powerful weapons within reach. In one hand, he will have a veto pen to stop a new Republican Congress from repealing ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank takeover of banks.
In the other, he will have a fistful of executive orders, regulations and Obama-made fiats that have the force of law.

Under ObamaCare, he can issue new rules and regulations so insidiously powerful in their effect that higher-priced, lower-quality and rationed health care will quickly become ingrained, leaving a permanent stain.

Under Dodd-Frank, he and his agents will control all credit and financial transactions, rewarding friends and punishing opponents, discriminating on the basis of race, gender and political affiliation. Credit and liquidity may be choked by bureaucracy and politics — and the economy will suffer.
He and the EPA may try to impose by “regulatory” fiats many parts of the cap-and-trade and other climate legislation that failed in the Congress.

And by executive orders and the in terrorem effect of an industrywide “boot on the neck” policy, he can continue to diminish energy production in the United States.

By the trick of letting current-law tax rates “expire,” he can impose a $3.5 trillion 10-year tax increase that damages job-creating capital investment in an economy struggling to recover. And by failing to enforce the law and leaving America’s borders open, he can continue to repopulate America with unfortunate illegals whose skill and education levels are low and whose political attitudes are often not congenial to American-style democracy.

A wounded rampaging president can do much damage — and, like Caesar, the evil he does will live long after he leaves office, whenever that may be.
The overgrown, un-pruned power of the presidency to reward, punish and intimidate may now be so overwhelming that his re-election in 2012 is already assured — Chicago-style.

• Christian, an attorney, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Ford administration.
• Robbins, an economist, served at the Treasury Department in the Reagan administration.

What on earth are you doing here, in the western world? … You have looked at magazine girls, wishing that they were you …

TIME Magazine runs a starkly honest cover picture about who/what we’re dealing with and their merciless and barbaric ideology … then spends much of the write-up pressing the apology-type angle and half-hearted rationalizing for running the picture because of readers’ possible negative reactions:

Our cover image this week is powerful, shocking and disturbing. It is a portrait of Aisha, a shy 18-year-old Afghan woman who was sentenced by a Taliban commander to have her nose and ears cut off for fleeing her abusive in-laws. Aisha posed for the picture and says she wants the world to see the effect a Taliban resurgence would have on the women of Afghanistan, many of whom have flourished in the past few years.

[...]

I’m acutely aware that this image will be seen by children, who will undoubtedly find it distressing. We have consulted with a number of child psychologists about its potential impact. Some think children are so used to seeing violence in the media that the image will have little effect, but others believe that children will find it very scary and distressing — that they will see it, as Dr. Michael Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital Boston, said, as “a symbol of bad things that can happen to people.” I showed it to my two young sons, 9 and 12, who both immediately felt sorry for Aisha and asked why anyone would have done such harm to her. I apologize to readers who find the image too strong, and I invite you to comment on the image’s impact. [...]

Yeah, traumatic … Sounds more like TIME sensationalizing, if you ask me. Keep in mind, these are the same people in the boat with those who angrily and loudly insisted, no … demanded we needed more images of U.S. troops dying or lying dead on the battlefield, and their Flag-draped coffins arriving home from Iraq so that the American people could experience the truth about the cost of the war. Give them time and the same nagging press will be demanding the same for the Afghanistan War KIAs.

The fact is, THIS kind of barbaric and horrific injustice was going on long before we went into Afghanistan. It obviously continues while we are there (here … here … here … OH! yes, and here, just to toss out a few). Is TIME insinuating this sort of treatment of Afghan women/girls in the Islamic culture/faith only comes about as a result of our military and policy interloping in their country for a decade? Somehow it would be our fault Muslim men treat their women … their own people and families in such an inhuman and evil manner? We’ve pissed them off so badly by freeing their females, giving them back their lives and dignity by making an education and security possible? But then even the Afghan leadership has no “Golden Rule” where its women are concerned.

The much publicized release of classified documents by WikiLeaks has already ratcheted up the debate about the war. Our story and the haunting cover image by the distinguished South African photographer Jodi Bieber are meant to contribute to that debate. We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it. We do it to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground. As lawmakers and citizens begin to sort through the information about the war and make up their minds, our job is to provide context and perspective on one of the most difficult foreign policy issues of our time. What you see in these pictures and our story is something that you cannot find in those 91,000 documents: a combination of emotional truth and insight into the way life is lived in that difficult land and the consequences of the important decisions that lie ahead.

Sounds a bit to me as if TIME is debating throwing up its hands on Afghanistan. You know the, It’s ‘unpleasant’, but it’s their culture and we might just have to leave them to it, meme of the left. After all, Obama defends the culture we lowly Westerners, we infidels, always so misunderstand.

Once again the question demands re-asking: Exactly where are the Western world’s feminists and women’s rights groups in support and defense of the oppressed , tortured and executed women/girls in the Muslim/Islamic/Arab world? I guess they are letting the United Nations handle it, eh?

Tammy Bruce (11/28/07): “The American feminist movement has not taken one stand to support the women of Iraq, the women of Afghanistan, the women of Iran … It is the United States Marines who have been doing the feminist work by liberating women and children around the world.”

Something else to chew on about all of this … The Western world (particularly European countries and especially Great Britain) have appeased the Islamic culture that has migrated to their land(s) by permitting Sharia Law and courts to be practiced outside their own territorial jurisdiction(s) and in spite of indigenous “rule of law”. Under the current mind-set in this country of accommodating and enabling any and all outside influences contrary to our own laws and structured republic, how long until we hear our states permitting Sharia Law/courts jurisdiction to carry out their own kind of justice-served that runs completely contrary to life, liberty, and justice in the United States? We have seen elements of it that have lead the news headlines, yet, not outraged the population or the American feminists of this bastion of 21st century modernity. We are cutting off our nose to spite our own face. As for TIME Magazine, what took them so long? This isn’t anything I, and our troops, haven’t seen in the last ten or more years.

Cross-Posted @ Babalu Blog

After Shirley Sherrod, we all need to slow down and listen

President Obama has called and chatted with Shirley Sherrod. Tom Vilsack and Ben Jealous have issued heartfelt apologies. There is talk of a “Chardonnay summit” in the Rose Garden. The subtext to all this? Let’s wrap up this incident quickly so we can all go on our vacations guilt-free, secure in the knowledge that our “post-racial society” remains intact.

Once again, in the midst of the cacophony, calls abound for a national “dialogue” on race. Yet our nation cannot muster the patience or stamina to sustain such a discussion beyond a single news cycle. In some ways, Sherrod’s tale is a metaphor for this country’s aborted efforts to address race. In its entirety, her deeply moving story was about transformation and reconciliation between blacks and whites. It contained the seeds of progress and healing. She spoke of blacks and whites working together to save farms and to end poverty and suffering. But Sherrod, and those listening to her story, could get to her hopeful conclusion only by first wading through painful admissions of racial bias and struggle.

Unfortunately, our news and political cycles make it impossible for any of us to stay in a room long enough to reach that transformative moment. At the barest suggestion of race, we line up at opposite corners and start hurling accusations. Attorney General Eric Holder was widely criticized last year for suggesting that we are a “nation of cowards” when it comes to such discussions. The reaction to his comments is a reminder that we cannot continue to ignore this challenge. Yet Americans refuse to acknowledge that, in today’s society, racial attitudes are often complicated, multi-layered and conflicted.

Racial inequality is perpetuated less by individuals than by structural racism and implicit bias. Evidence of structural inequality is everywhere: in the grossly disproportionate numbers of young black men and women in prison; in the color of students shunted into remedial and special education tracks; in the stubborn segregation of our neighborhoods and schools; in the lack of recreational and academic opportunities for children of color in poor communities; in the inferior medical treatment that people of color receive; and in the still appallingly small numbers of men and women of color in law firms, corporations and government. It is evident, too, in the history of blatant discrimination against black farmers practiced by the Agricultural Department.

But that does not make doctors, nurses, police officers, judges, teachers, lawyers, city planners, admission officers or others prejudiced. Most are well-intentioned professionals who believe themselves to be free of racial bias. From their perspective, it is not easy to connect individual actions and decisions to broader structural conditions and environments built up over decades and even centuries.

Implicit bias is a reality we must confront far more openly. A growing mass of compelling research reveals the unconscious racial stereotypes many of us harbor that affect our decisions. Such attitudes do not make us prejudiced; they make us human. Those who take the Implicit Association Test often express shock when results show that their unconscious biases conflict with their explicit egalitarian values and ideals. Nonetheless, white and black test-takers match black faces more quickly than white ones with words representing violent concepts and are more likely to mistake a harmless object for a gun when it is carried by a black person. One study found that the more stereotypically black the features of a criminal defendant, the harsher the sentence he or she is likely to receive. Implicit bias has been shown to factor into hiring decisions and into the quality of health care that individuals receive. Mazharin Banaji and Jerry Kang, leading scholars on implicit bias, have noted: “As disturbing as this evidence is, there is too much of it to be ignored.”

The good news is that structures can be dismantled and replaced and unconscious biases can be transformed, as happened to Shirley Sherrod and the family she helped, the Spooners. First, though, they must be acknowledged. We and others researching race and justice are committed to untangling the web of structures, conditions and policies that lead to unequal opportunities. Our nation has to stop denying the complexity of our racial attitudes, history and progress. Let’s tone down the rhetoric on all sides, slow down and commit to listening with less judgment and more compassion. If Americans did so, we might find that we share more common ground than we could have imagined. – Charles J. Ogletree Jr. and Johanna Wald @ Washington Post

Powerline: [...] Ogletree (a long-time race man) and Wald use the Sherrod affair as their starting point. They claim that the incident demonstrates how “at the barest suggestion of race, we line up at opposite corners and start hurling accusations.” They thus pretend that race is the only issue as to which liberals and conservatives fail to exercise caution, or recognize nuance, when they clash.

From this silly premise, Ogletree and Wald call for a more thoughtful discussion of race. And, naturally, they attempt to define the parameters of a “thoughtful” discussion.

According to Ogletree and Wald, the key to a thoughtful discussion lies in a recognition of “structural racism.” The evidence they cite of such racism consists of unequal outcomes — blacks don’t do as well as whites in school, they end up in prision in disproportionate numbers, they don’t get the good jobs. Ogletree and Wald want us to “tone down the rhetoric on all sides,” and admit that the nation is plagued by racism.

But Ogletree and Wald are charitable. The structural racism they posit isn’t due to the overt racism of white gatekeepers, such as “doctors, nurses, police officiers, judges teachers, lawyers, city planners, and admission officers.” Rather these whites are engaging only in “implicit racism.”

The key, then, is for whites to acknowledge their biases and then to “dismantle” the “structures” that allegedly are producing the unequal outcomes. But since Ogletree and Wald infer these structures from the unequal outcomes, theirs is really a call for forcing equal outcomes in all important spheres of our society. The radicalism of this call could hardly be more obvious.

Ogletree and Wald are something like what Shelby Steele has called “challengers” — those like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who say, in effect, that whites are racist until they prove otherwise by conferring tangible benefits. Ogletree and Wald modify this formula slightly, claiming that the racism of whites is only “implicit” and placing much of the blame on “structures.” But deviation from the Jackson-Sharpton formula is mostly cosmetic, a means of issuing the familar racially radical challenge in a less hostile-sounding tone. [...]

After Obama’s longstanding relationship with Rev. Wright was exposed, Obama became more of a challenger. In his famous speech about Wright, he admitted that his election alone would not satisfy the yearning for a post-racial America. To the contrary, he declared, that he has never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy. Obama was also clear that without understanding Wright’s views and taking seriously the complexity they reflect, America cannot get on with solving its other problems, such as health care and education.

To me, this sounds quite a bit like Ogletree-Wald. Obama stopped short of calling America racist. But he was clear that Wright was no crackpot and that, to the contrary, getting beyond our racial divisions requires taking some of what he said seriously. And getting beyond racism is closely related to conferring better outcomes in areas like health care and education.

Obama also stopped short of calling for a “dismantling of structures.” But now that he is in office, he is no longer bashful on this front.

It would be interesting to know which portions of the Ogletree-Wald piece, if any, Obama disagrees with. I think he agrees with substantially all of it. And I bet Shirley Sherrod does too.

I disagree on one point early on here … and I may be in that minority of people who actually watched and listened to, and more importantly translated … and BELIEVED …, exactly what this guy was saying beyond the ‘clean articulate‘ words: I NEVER expected or anticipated or even hoped Obama would govern as “centrist, pragmatic and reasonable, nonideological and relatively bipartisan“. I knew exactly what he was going to do, and long before the five days he mentions below. He told me right here:

fundamentally -- adv 1. in a way that affects the basis or essentials; utterly, 2. (sentence modifier) in essence; at heart

Our US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are this Republic’s “utterly” “basis” and “essential” essence and heart.

transform -- v 1. To change markedly the appearance or form of, 2. To change the nature, function, or condition of; convert

In other words, completely different and unrecognizable after the ‘transformation’.

I heard him … loud and clear … But maybe THAT’s because I was a Billy Jack fan … really:

Everything you needed to know about Obama could have been learned from his campaign.

During the 2008 campaign, it was clear that Barack Obama would govern as a liberal on several important issues. But it seemed possible that, at least in other areas, he might govern as what he insisted he was: something of a centrist, pragmatic and reasonable, nonideological and relatively bipartisan.

It was not to be. And it turns out that there were several moments in the campaign that revealed what an Obama presidency would be like. They were not the result of grand policy pronouncements or statements made in major speeches. Rather, they were more often than not words spoken off-the-cuff, in a more informal setting, and in several instances they were not meant to be made public. But they were; and they provided an insight into Obama’s core beliefs, a sneak preview of coming attractions.

Here are three such moments.

‘I think when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.’

Obama said those words to Joe Wurzelbacher in an unscripted exchange in Ohio on October 14, 2008. They opened a window into Obama’s view of the role of government and his conception of social justice. He seems to be inclined toward equality of results, not just equality of opportunity—and he sees government as the instrument to bring that about.

Like many modern-day liberals, Obama seems to resent wealthy people—or at least those wealthy people who don’t support him or who earned their wealth through enterprises other than, say, multimillion dollar movie deals. Taxing the well-to-do is not simply an economic policy; Obama views it as a moral good, a social virtue, a noble sacrifice. The role of the state is to reduce inequality even if it comes at the expense of growth and prosperity.

The president and his administration’s unyielding attacks on the “rich,” on CEOs, corporations, and wealth creation, are therefore predictable and inevitable. They are a manifestation of his economic and social views. Although it was late in coming around, the Chamber of Commerce has finally realized that Obama’s policies constitute a “general attack on our free enterprise system.”

‘For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country.’

These words were uttered not by Barack Obama but by his wife Michelle in a campaign appearance in Milwaukee on February 18, 2008, in support of her husband’s presidential bid. It’s reasonable to conclude, however, that this statement represented both of their worldviews.

We have seen their attitude toward America play out in different ways, most especially in Obama’s worldwide apology tour, where he criticized America for actions past and present, for reasons real and imagined. He has criticized America on everything from committing “torture” to dragging our feet on global warming, from our selective promotion of democracy to unilateralism, from disrespecting Europe to showing lack of respect to the Muslim world. Even the attacks on September 11, 2001, count against America. According to Obama, they “led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights. All this has bred more fear and more mistrust.”

The belief that America is run-of-the-mill is also reflected in Obama’s April 2009 statement in France when he was asked if he believed in American exceptionalism. “I believe in American exceptionalism,” Obama said, “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” That is a skillful politician’s way of saying he doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism.

When the Iranian regime was crushing the freedom movement, Obama explained his reluctance to “meddle” in the affairs of Iran because of what America did there more than a half-century ago. And so it is no surprise to find a critical view of America reflected in the words of Obama diplomatic aides such as Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner who, when asked if he brought up the Arizona immigration law in his discussions with the Chinese, said, “We brought it up early and often. It was mentioned in the first session, and as a troubling trend in our society and an indication that we have to deal with issues of discrimination or potential discrimination, and that these are issues very much being debated in our own society.”

What’s more, Obama constantly places himself above his country; the text and subtext of his remarks send an unmistakable message: President Obama understands the grievances other nations (including our sworn enemies) have against America, and he’s acting as swiftly as he can to move us from darkness into light. If we “occasionally confess to having strayed from our values and our ideals,” Obama has said, “that strengthens our hand.” But the president’s more-than-occasional confessions are why dictators such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez have applauded Obama’s portrayal of America.

‘It’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.’

Obama made this off-the-record comment about people in small towns in Pennsylvania and the Midwest to a group of wealthy donors in San Francisco on April 6, 2008. What we learned is that Obama is an elitist. He feels superior to and sorry for the unenlightened masses. And sometimes, when they oppose his policies, he and his top aides get downright nasty.

Consider the White House and Democratic reaction to the town hall meetings in the summer of 2009, when Americans registered their strong opposition to Obamacare. These citizens were described as “angry mobs,” as Nazis and clones of Timothy McVeigh, who employed “un-American” tactics. White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said the contrast between Obama—whom Emanuel described as “reasoned, calm, looking like an adult in the room”—and the protesters would work to the administration’s advantage. “I think the public looks at screaming, swastikas, attacks.  .  .  .  It’s not a persuasive argument,” Emanuel said. “If anything, it is the opposite.”

Then, in August 2009, a USA Today poll showed that the town hall meeting made Americans more, not less, sympathetic to the protesters’ views—with the margin a staggering 2-to-1 among independents. In response White House adviser David Axelrod questioned the survey’s methodology.

Obama’s comments in San Francisco also revealed a man who views small town Americans as somewhat crude and bigoted, harboring racist sentiments. When things don’t go well for them, they turn on “people who aren’t like them.” Obama’s party has displayed this attitude in responding to the Tea Party movement, which it has repeatedly attempted to link to racism.

The view from Obama and his team seems to be that no rational person could possibly oppose his policies; they are self-evidently and by definition right and wise. And so there must be some other explanation for what is happening—ignorance, foolishness, partisanship, bigotry, or some combination of these. Obama clearly believed it was his job, if he became president, to lead people out of their benighted state to broad, enlightened uplands.

Doubtless many factors have contributed to shaping the Obama outlook. But if there is one thing above any others that explains it, it is that he is a product of the academy—in his case Columbia University, Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago.

It is hardly a secret that the ethos of modern universities is hostile toward America and in favor of redistributing wealth and centralizing power. The academy is inhabited by people of considerable, if insecure, arrogance. They are often closed to alternative points of view. The predominant view among academics is that we should transcend country, nationality, and religion. They tend to be contemptuous of mainstream American values and of the general public.

By academic standards, Barack Obama is mild in his views. He is no Ward Churchill or William Ayers. No successful national politician could be. Still, Obama’s years on elite campuses left a deep imprint on him. They helped shape his attitudes, his mindset, and his presuppositions. And so it is not surprising that Obama is drawn to a negative narrative of America’s history and its role in the world; that he has an instinctive antipathy toward business and the free market; and that he is emotionally distant from, and in his unguarded moments somewhat contemptuous of, small-town Americans—the kind of folk who cling to their guns and their Bibles in times of distress.

The warning signs were all there. -- Peter Wehner @ The Weekly Standard