07.27.10
Shirley Sherrod’s husband
Whooeee, does this guy ever get ripe with the Marxist liberation rhetoric.
07.26.10
It’s about time somebody did
Quin Hillyer at The American Spectator gives E.J. Dionne a first-rate smackin’.
07.12.10
It’s one more way they can go after who we all are
I’m very reluctant to ascribe the motive of bigotry to anyone’s public policy orientation. I think it’s mainly due to my feelings on how vile, not to mention ridiculous, it is for leftists to hurl the “racism” charge at any and everyone who speaks up for basic principles like the rule of law and free-market economics.
So that’s why I’m just now getting on board with the observation that anti-semitism is proliferating and gaining acceptibility in this country. I knew it was infecting other areas of the West, particularly Europe, but I hadn’t come in contact with much of it personally.
Then a certain frequent commenter here at BN – who seems to have gotten permanently mad and decided to stay away – began demonstrating a clear pattern of having his buttons pushed big-time whenever a post dealt with Israel. He ususally kept his argument at the level of “Why-are-we-risking-nuclear-Armageddon-over-a-sliver-of-land-set-aside-for-point-zero-two-percent-of-the-world’s-population-most-of-whom-have-a-secular-view-of-their-identity-anyway,” which was bad enough – it amounts to caving in to Iran’s blackmail, and would not alleviate the mullahs’ hatred of the Great Satan anyway - but he sometimes showed signs of a less savory set of motivations.
These usually came in the form of quoting from the report of Walt and Mearsheimer, or defending Jimmy Carter. He even clearly hoped I’d get my hackles raised at being called a Zionist. (Alas, I took it as a compliment.)
This commenter had such a long history of generally trying to poke holes in the overall BN stance and the conservative worldview that I mostly chalked it up to personal quirkiness born of half-baked ideology resulting from exposure to the cultural rot that characterized the coming of age of all of us baby boomers. But now I’m seeing such an attitude in the comment threads of several blogs. I’m always heartened to see several other commenters jump all over such remarks, but they are getting more, not less, frequent.
What makes for this inclination? What could cause these people to insinuate – in some cases, outright claim – that Israel has a set of national interests at odds with ours and is actually working harder than those forces us “neocons” call enemies of the West to undermine US security and well-being? They can’t come up with a solid list of what these specific Israeli interests would be, but they speak in tones of utter certainty that such a list exists.
I think it comes down to their exhibiting a symptom of nihilism in which the ability to recognize genuine good is so damaged as to be inoperable. They have lost the capacity to contemplate the founding of a modern nation on the primacy of Mosaic law, prophetic admonishment, and the adoration that the land’s ancient kings had for their God. I have no problem conceding the erstwhile BN commenter’s point that many if not most modern Jews are secular. Jewish voting trends in the United States bear that out. It’s the subject of Norman Podhoretz’s latest book. This actually proves my point about nihilism, however. It’s not these secular Jews that stick in the craw of the leftists whose stuff is brought up by the basic questions of Israel and Judaism’s place in the world. Rather, it is precisely the ones who look deeply into why the existence of a modern Israel is good who bring up the lefties’ stuff so vehemently.
The perfectly normal human quest for revealed truth and basically stated definitions of virtue so enrages these nihilists that they are driven to conspiracy theories about AIPAC’s sinister intent and the traitorous aims of a cabal of perfectly up-front Zionists who also consider themselves patriotic Americans.
The broadest scope of what is going on here must inform our discussions of it. This new wave of antisemitism is but one manifestation of the overall contempt the left has for any basic notion of Western civilization.
In the 1960s and 70s, the term “counterculture” sounded so exotic and slightly enticing to us kids who saw the Summer of Love, the rock festivals of the day, and, yes, even political mayhem like the August 1968 riot in Chicago’s Grant Park and said “I’d like to get in on that.” It sounded like such a juicy sociocultural pehenomenon for the ostensibly detached pointy-heads in the worlds of journalism and academe to sink their teeth into. It sounded utterly perplexing to the hardworking, family-focused small-business person in flyover country, who read about communes, love-ins and student strikes in Newsweek or saw it on the CBS Evening News.
Well, this is what the term meant. It’’s what the Most Equal Comrade was talking about in The Audacity of Hope when he said that he sought out the Marxists, post-punk structural poets and avant-garde actors to hang with in order to avoid looking like a “sellout.” Those who, for the last fifty years, have set up a utopian foil in juxtaposition to a monolithic establishment based on what they’ve depicted as materialism, phony social constructs, stodgy cultural forms, and hubris exhibited in every international relationship, now have their hands on the levers of power. When they threatened “blows against the empire,” they meant it.
Those blows come daily now, in the form of wealth redistribution, ubiquitous propaganda, the perpetuation of societal division by race and class – and, to make sure this counterculture is reaching the deepest roots of what the “establishment,” that is, the West, stands for, antisemitism.
07.09.10
You have to hand one thing to him: he’s committed to his principles
Dick Morris’s column today is full of the kinds of observations that can only be made by a seasoned political insider. He notes that the Most Equal Comrade is at a very similar juncture to the one Bill Clinton found himself at in 1994, but due to a different set of motivations. Clinton, who basically pursued a political career as a way to meet chicks, wasn’t driven by core principles. He had nonetheless found himself, by the time of his first midterm elections, way off in lefty-land due to a perceived need to shore up the support of that base. Authenticity was never his strong suit. The Most Equal Comrade, on the other hand, is indeed a committed ideologue, a radical leftist through and through, and that’s why he is where he is. Clinton sized up his situation and moved to the center. The Most Equal Comrade will do no such thing, and it will eat, like a cancer, what’s left of his credibility, goodwill and ability to survive.
To the recent examples of this regime’s commitment to leftism that Morris offers (the DOJ whitewash of the New Black Panther voter-imtimidation case, the federal lawsuit against Arizona over its immigration law), I would add this chillingly totalitarian recess appointment of Donald Berwick.
07.06.10
No moon missions, but plenty of patty-cake for the kiddies and the “international community” and self-esteem therapy for those who would like to subject us to sharia law
Isn’t it creepy to live in an age when hearly every news item ought to be prefaced with “You can’t make this stuff up?”
The Most Equal Comrade has told the new head of NASA that his three highest priorities for the agency are to inspire young peeople to study science and math, do general international outreach – whatever the hell that has to do with space exploration, and make Muslim cultures feel better about their contributions to math, science, and engineering.
Seriously.
06.25.10
As long as lunacy is treated as a legitimate viewpoint, we’ll continue our slide into oblivion
Also, read his link to the post at Zerohedge on exactly where our economy stands – or doesn’t.
06.18.10
Good ideas get refined and bad ideas get jettisoned
Bookworm Room on the difference between the right side of the blogosphere and any other arena in which ideas are examined and argued (left side of blogosphere, academia, journalism, politics, entertainment).
05.20.10
“We are not defined by our borders”
The Most Equal Comrade actually said that at yesterday’s presser.
05.10.10
The Kagan nomination
My understanding is that she is personable, even affable. Her rise over the last fifteen years through the Clinton administration, her position as Harvard Law dean and now Solicitor General is remarkable. Still, there is much to be deeply disturbed about: her banning of military recruiters from the Harvard Law School, her position on don’t ask don’t tell. Apparently she has a brother named Mark who has been involved in radical causes and she has written somewhere that she’s grateful to him for opening her eyes to a wider spectrum of American ideology. I’ll try to find the exact excerpt, because when I heard it on the radio a little while ago, it sounded like her take on the breadth of that spectrum was decidedly not objective.
The main point here is that BN would be posting something similar about anybody the Aquarian Totalitarian nominated. It’s one of the top five reasons why it’s crucial to never do what we did in November 2008: elect an America-hating socialist as president. Even if we have learned our lesson, it remains to be seen whether we can reverse the damage.
05.04.10
The core motivation of those who use terms like “inequities,” “privilege” and “social justice”
04.19.10
When they start dissing Zo, BN gets involved
As I’ve said a few times recently, I’m really trying to keep my take on our national divide rooted in ideas and principles. This is, after all, a struggle for the understanding of the efficacy of free-market economics, a streetwise foreign policy, and the restoration of a culture based on decency, dignity, common sense and acknowledgement of God’s centrality. Getting mired in distractions takes time we don’t have. Plus, as we skirt the edges of a “teacher-he-called-me-a-name-first” level of struggle, we run the real risk of losing sight of that decency, dignity and common sense we want to have informing our culture.
Still, it’s getting to where one can’t avoid addressing the juvenile, vulgar and supremely disingenuous – and occasionally violent – level to which the left has taken this conflict. There were Bill Clinton’s disgusting insinuations about tea-party-ism boiling over into Oklahoma City-style anarchy. There was the savage beating of the Bobby Jindal campaign stafffer and her boyfriend in the French Quarter. Just today, I ran across a truly idiotic column by effete east-coast simpering pointy-head E.J. Dionne that I won’t even bother to link to; you can probably accurately guess its content. Tea-partiers are “privileged” and mainly concerned with protecting their “privileges.”
But now comes Charles Blow, one of the New York Times’s simpering pointy-heads, giving the most dismissive account of a Texas tea party you can imagine. He has the gall to try to denigrate the motives and effectiveness of AlfonZo Rachel, who has more character, insight, common sense and ability to communicate plain truth than Blow could cultivate if he lived another thousand years.
There really are two universes occupying the geographic space occupied by the United States of America. They cannot coexist for long.
04.18.10
Desperate to extinguish the light that exposes the brokenness of their souls
Robin of Berkeley is one of the most intriguing contributors to The American Thinker. She’s a Bay Area psychotherapist. It’s pretty clear she used to swallow the Kool-Aid, but she’s solidly conservative now. Her articles have evolved in tone over the time I’ve been reading them. She has become less scrappy. She now probes into her own motives for her thought processes in a more methodical way. What I didn’t know is that she’s been exploring Christian faith, attending churches of various kinds. In her latest piece, she discusses how talking to one minister of the “social justice” variety shook her up and got her thinking about why a significant portion of American Christianity is so keen on remaking Jesus in the image of a left-wing activist. It’s good reading, and I sense that she’s going to have more insights to share on the matter.
04.16.10
We’ve always known Bill Clinton was repulsively vulgar . . .
. . . but he keeps providing fresh confirmation.
04.15.10
Number trends don’t happen in a vacuum
I know lots of MSM stories have appeared lately cheerily reporting signs of recovery. Free-market champion Larry Kudlow has even gotten into the act. He even predicts an out-and-out boom.
Yes, commodity prices are rising, but it’s the same old grind in areas like jobless figures, foreclosure rates, and industrial output.
I’ve been thinking about this since I came across the Kudlow piece the other day. His outlook is both admirable and annoying. I think it’s endemic to his profession. Economists tend to be a bit nerdy, to view the world through the very circumscribed lens of monetary laws and results that past trends of various kinds have produced. Kudlow is so convinced, as are lay folks such as myself, that the principles of free-market economics are key to human well-being and societal advancement and that they work wherever and whenever the yare applied that he can’t see how anyone wouldn’t be a true believer. It’s like his view is that, gosh darn it, as soon as the TCM administration sees the efficacy of the capitalist approach, it will reverse course and provide an environment for the precarious green shoots to thrive.
The only problem with that view is that it fails to account for the other levels of consideration: the totalitarian socialist ideology of the FHer regime, cultural factors such as a widespread paucity of economic literacy as well as denial about the implications of the debt we’ve amassed, and America’s palpable decline on the world stage.
No one wants a turnaround more than me. Counting on our present overlords to come to their senses, though, is an exercise in unfounded hope.
04.04.10
The NYT might as well merge with The Nation
It’s one thing to populate your op-ed pages with the likes of Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, Charles Blow, Bob Herbert and Maureen Dowd, but the utter lack of legitimacy of a major newpaper’s reportage sections is made plain by features on a 17-year-old suicide bomber’s devotion to her jihadist husband and a comparison of 1969 Weathermen and 2010 tea partiers, based on the “extremism” of each.
So far I’ve avoided the current national conversation on violence and allegations of it – which, I guess it needs pointing out, even though it’s obvious, are two different things – that have transpired since passage of FHer-care. I really strive to keep the debate at the level of ideas and principles. In a time of national peril, “Teacher-he-called-me-a-name-first”-type polemics is unproductive to say the least.
Still, this latest move by the NYT gets to the heart of what is at stake here. Those of us who hate FHer-care and who understand that the whole agenda of the FHers is an unprecedented assault on the essence of the United States of America are motivated by an unwavering fealty to freedom and the finest ideas to be distilled over thousands of years of Western civilization. Leftist radicals are motivated by a desire to dismantle that civilization as rapidly as possible.
I’d never seen the Ayn Rand quotes about extremism and consistency that Pam Gellar offers here, but they pretty much provide what’s necessary as a counter to the Grey Lady’s disingenuousness. Make that extreme disingenuousness.
03.27.10
The pattern becomes more clear with every move he makes
TCM’s self-satisfaction at having reached a nuclear arms reduction agreement with Russia fits into a recent pattern of foreign-policy moves that further confirms the conclusion that his zeal is for a left-wing vision of utopia, in which all cultures and ideologies have equal merit and that the power of the idea of humankind’s unity can surmount the cumulative lessons of history.
As Jamie Fly at the link above says, TCM is preoccupied with a 1980s-era problem in a 2010 world in which rogue players pose the really pressing threat. A mutual reduction in US and Russian strategic force doesn’t mean squat to the Kim regime, the Iranian mullahs, or any of the world’s myriad jihadist networks eager to get their hands on what an increasing number of states have.
When one considers TCM’s blatant humiliation of Benjamin Netanyahu, leaving Bibi to cool his heels while he went upstairs for dinner with his family (and saying, “If there’s anything new [as in any reconsideration of Jerusalem home-building], let me know”) and the decision to go for less-than-maiximum sanctions against Iran, in the context of his excitement about this new treaty with Russia, it becomes hard to muster any encouragement about a safer and more just world. This is a worldview that got a foothold in our society some fifty years ago, when red-diaper babies sat in coffee houses listening to guitar-strumming folk singers. This is the worldview of those whose highest priority is feeling good about how much they care for “humankind” in the collective, who have no use for the particular, lest some pesky detail of history reveal a glitch in the notion that endless peace is plausible.
TCM finds the whole business of foreign policy boring compared to his grand plan for the regime that will occupy the land mass known for 234 years as the United States of America, but to the extent he deals with it, his moves are of a piece with his domestic thrust. The idea is that egalitarianism will be the order of the day on every scale. On the world stage, the country known until recently as the United States of America will be just another place on the globe where a certain percentage of the world’s comrades happen to reside. Nothing special about it.
And that means that there will be no room for a different vision, one which invites the possibility of free and sovereign individuals, unhampered by the state as they go about the achievement of their own dreams. No one anywhere will have a place to which he or she can go to see if such a vision can work.
No place left to stand, that’s what The Aquarian Totalitarian has in mind for those of us who harbor the audacity of freedom.
Sounds like he just considered himself too cool to show up at the office like everybody else
Daily Beast looks into the differing explanations AEI and David Frum have for the latter’s departure. He claims it happened over his Pubs-are-stupid-for-not-compromisisng-with-FHers blog post. The Institute says he wasn’t doing enough to warrant pulling down $100K a year.
03.18.10
Though the result is the same, tactics for dealing with those striving for that result must be fine-tuned to fit the situation
As we proceed into the grim thick of endgame week for the Freedom-Haters’ push for socialist health care, a confluence of impulses long embraced by leftists comes to the fore once again, and gives us a fresh opportunity to ponder the relationship between them. I’m speaking of pity, contempt and the lust for raw power.
I still believe there are two basic levels of leftism – the level that is mainly pity-driven, which you see on display at Unitarian coffee hour, “environmental justice” rallies, “fact-finding” missions to the West Bank and Gaza and the like, and those who see this collective (in both senses of the word) mindset as an opportunity to rise to the top of the state apparatus and control other human beings’ lives on a mass scale. This second type is the group that is generally motivated to go into politics, or run the big foundations that are in a position to wield great cultural influence.
The everyday leftists, the ones who live up and down your block and whom you see in the produce department at Whole Foods, really believe in some kind of nearly-insurmountable class and power-bloc structure to our society, that there is some layer of our culture, some old-boy network, that perpetuates exclusion and bigotry and rapacious materialism, and believe, like their populist Democrat cousins, that some proverbial “little” or “common” person needs to be championed in this scenario.
I’m still examining the outlook of those in the second group – and, believe me, there are plenty of opportunities to so examine it, all day every day – to amass enough data to draw a conclusion. Based on what I’ve observed so far, I think the hard-core activist statists, such as everyone in the TCM administration, and the Dems in Congress, are situated along a continuum. Some, at heart, harbor the pity of the leftist on the street, that desire to be so full of “compassion” (actually pity) for the less fortunate as to assure oneself of a positive self-image. At the other end of the spectrum is the hopelessly cynical dictator-in-training who sees all this as an instrument for rising to the top of the state machine.
The question arises, “If the end result of both levels’ activity is the same – that is, totalitarian socialism, why parse the differences between them?” I think the answer is that we get insights into what tactics are useful in combatting the threat in particular situations. In dealing with the everyday leftist, the old adage that “I personally know lots of them and they are generally nice people with whom I have a lot in common outside of ideology” is applicable. I know I have engaged in conversations – that quickly turn into heated debates, to be sure – with such folks, generally initiated by them in awkward social situations of questionable appropriateness, and left them with valuable nuggets of insight that they would then go forth and ponder. You can do that with them.
What’s involved in engaging the power-obsessed statists? You start with the kinds of things we’re doing now, as the struggle for freedom in the health-care realm reaches a denoument. Melt the phones. Go to townhalls and tea party rallies. Blog. Comment at blogs. Write columns and letters to the editor. Sign petitions. Contribute to groups.
The statists’ contempt for those they claim to pity, as currently evidenced by their railroading this health-care initiative past a public that overwhelmingly hates it, may be such that these tactics are insufficient. In that case, we’ll just have to remember that this is a war, and begin considering what other means of waging it we have at our disposal.
