03.02.10
However you define it, it’s obviously getting closer
Ryan Mauro at Pajamas Media asks, Just what consitutes the “red line” concerning Iran?
02.18.10
The national security pillar is as important as the other two
Michelle Malkin says conservatism had better deal with its Grover Norquist problem.
01.20.10
TCM’s having another one of those bad weeks
Southers withdraws his name from TSA chief nomination.
Hurt and damaged, that’s how you want your Freedom-Haters.
01.08.10
We’re truly on our own now
Founding Bloggers on how the Homeland Security Department has become completely worthless.
01.03.10
TCM may call it vision; our enemies see it as weakness
One senses, from a perusal of top news stories from the past couple of weeks, a dark momentum gathering.
There was the forward-base bombing in Afghanistan that killed several top CIA field officers. There was the suicide bombing of the volleyball game in northwest Pakistan that killed at least 98. There was, of course, the incident with Great Balls of Fire in Detroit on Christmas.
Now, in a rich bit of irony, Iran, having run out the clock on TCM’s December 31 deadline for compliance with IAEA requirements to quit enriching uranium, is issuing an ultimatum to the West.
And the latest headline this morning is that the US and the UK are closing their embassies in Yemen on some tips about an al-Qaeda attack.
Rocket science isn’t required to, as they say, connect the dots. Jihadists are much like pirannhas.
TCM, the consummation of all Western leftist aspirations for a century, may see his approach to the world as some kind of grand sweeping-in of an age of “international community” and “fairness” and “hope” and eradication of poverty and such, but jihadists of all stripes – and residual communists, it’s useful to add – see it as the kind of opening they’ve been waiting for.
They see the several-days-gap between the rhetoric of “the system worked” and “isolated extremist” and “the system failed” and “apparently trained by al-Qaeda” and rightly conclude “ineptitude.” They see KSM get a civilian trial and Great Balls of Fire get lawyered up and think “idiots.” They read about John Kerry’s plans for a trip to Tehran and think “handing victory to us.”
It’s hard enough for the American people to maintain a sense of urgency in a situation that goes on for years. An infantile utopian vision like TCM’s can really muddy it. But then, when a series of developments comes along and those developments happen in ever-faster succession, maybe the public – polls on specific questions related to our war indicate this – gets out in front of its increasingly wobbly overlords and begins to reclaim common sense and the self-preservation instinct as its birthright.
12.31.09
The American people may have a grown-up attitude about the current world war
. . . but not our infantile FHer overlords.
12.30.09
The slow, fitful awakening of Maureen Dowd
At the current juncture in her tentative dance with reality, she comes to understand that TCM is completely worthless as far as keeping us safe.
And another New York paper not known for kicking FHer tail, the Daily News, tells the Most Equal Comrade to get a grip.
12.28.09
The whole blame-W meme was getting tiresome and pathetic beforehand; now it’s scary
The TCM administration whines about DHS procedures from the previous era as the reason this al-Qaeda looney nearly blew up an airplane in Detroit.
Memo to my fellow American citizens: No one has our back in this current war.
11.22.09
The way the truth ought to be articulated
Brit Hume is one of those observers of the world who brings a seasoned and tempered demeanor to his spot-on assessments of key developments. Always a gentleman, with a sincere desire to know God in his heart, leavened with a bit of worldly-wise humor, he says without hoke or hype what is thunderously true.
Case in point, what he had to say today on Fox News Sunday about TCM’s foreign policy.
Money line: “America is not what’s wrong with the world.”
11.15.09
Still scary, even in its cluelessness
I’m starting to come to a conclusion about the worldwide post-communist left: It’s really not very effective, even on its own terms. A recent example on the international level would be the increasing likelihood that those convening in Copenhagen next month will put off signing anything binding regarding “climate change.” An example here in America would be TCM’s continued dithering on Afghanistan, even as its consequences reach to the point of a rift between General McChrystal and Ambassador Eikenberry.
This phenomenon is partly explained by the fractious nature of the modern left. Its various elements have some common objectives – most notably controlling people – but they have divergent interests aplenty, too. That’s what we see in cases such as those described above. The “developing” nations – basically those that have been habitually governed dictatorially and therefore remain mired in historical intertia – want all the cool stuff that the big shots have – modern industry and technology – but reluctantly understand, when they make themselves admit it, that they can’t avail themselves of the knowhow for obtaining it if they destroy successful nations’ capacity for sharing it, which is what the effect of all that carbon-cap hooey would be. Regarding Afghanistan, this was going to be TCM’s big chance to act on his vision of a gloriously flat, grey egalitarian world in which we ever-so-non-judgementally brought peace to troubled lands with scarely a shot fired, and our troops then able to come back home promptly and en masse.
BN readers know one of the pet terms in the BN lexicon is “Aquarian Totalitarian.” It’s a moniker for the current president, but it really sums up much about the way the left has been headed since the days of William Appleman Williams and C. Wright Mills. The New Left differed from the solid commitment of Communism with a capital “c” in that it was so nearly anarchistic that its various attempts at party-forming always led to hopeless factionalizing and splnterings-off, such as the Weather Underground’s break with SDS. Even in the early days of SDS, its youthfully whimsical ways alarmed old-schoolers like the League for Industrial Democracy.
New Left types and post-New Left types became so enamored of identity politics beyond basic class struggle – think here of ethnic balkanization, feminism, gay activism, and increasingly silly developments like transgenderism – that it became easy to the point of unavoidable to step on someone’s toes, no matter what one did. That is at the root of the paralysis that keeps TCM and his ilk from actually delivering on all those revolutionary schemes.
This is not to say that the (post?) modern left isn’t dangerous. As I said, all the constituent interest groups within it share a common goal, which is the same as was the goal of their actual Communist forbears – totalitarian rule. They harbor great zeal for this in their hearts, however flower-power the form it takes in their self-manipulated minds. They have their ways of moving towards this; witness the thirty-nine “czars’ in the current regime who answer to no one but TCM.
Also, because of the gentle-hippie, we’re-doing-this-to-make-the-world-safe-for-hugs-and-rainbows nature of the way they’ve gussied up the totalitarian impulse, and the everybody-bumping-into-each-other chaos that has resulted, a vacuum has developed into which some real totalitarians who do indeed have supreme focus and discipline and who don’t take a second to worry about coddling aggrieved identity groups has rushed. And that bunch, because the United States and the West have become a half-assed giant Woodstock with Castroite overtones, is having quite an easy time of acting on its agenda.
11.14.09
Not becoming inured just because there’s so much of it
How to deal with the ever-gathering momentum of evidence that the TCM regime has interests other than America’s security, prosperity and leadership at the core of the way it’s proceeding is becoming something of a quandary. I suppose I could go on posting about each individual development, linking to source reportage and adding some kind of “can-you-believe-what-they’re-doing-now” commentary, but, with such developments coming along nearly hourly now, the sameness with which such posts would read, and a desire to avoid the risk of numbing myself or readers to the alarming nature of it all, I must consider how best to treat it.
This week, for instance, we’ve seen TCM’s abysmal treatment of Benjamin Netanyahu on the prime minister’s visit to Washington, the TCM / Holder decision to put KSM and his colleagues on civilian trial in New York City, concern expressed at the highest levels for “diversity” and “not jumping to conclusions” in the wake of the jihadist attack at Fort Hood, as well as continued dithering in the Afghanistan situation and continuing pattycake in the Iran situation.
Not only is the sheer volume of hair-raising TCM foreign policy moves sufficient to numb an observer, but it’s only half the story: He’s doing an equally great number of equally alarming things domestically.
At least there’s a chance that those measures can die legislatively. Foreign policy is conducted by the legislative branch. It’s now clear that the White House, the Justice Department, the State Department, and even the Pentagon are infected with this weird post-New Left mindset that sees the United States, as conceived up through January of this year, as an obsolete entity falling daily to the revolution being waged against it, while seeing the new entity occupying the same geographic space as having a useful role to play in some kind of grey new relativistic world. Whose office do you call to make anybody sweat about their job security in the realm of world affairs?
I suppose I’m grateful for small blessings – such as the absence so far of huge damage resulting from this madness – but that’s hardly all that’s needed to maneuver us through this unprecedentedly perilous passage.
10.22.09
His latest thunderbolt
The towering Richard Cheney’s address to the Center for Security Policy. Video or text, take your pick.
10.18.09
“Diplomacy is a technique, not a policy”
The indispensible John Bolton on the precipice to which TCM has led us.
10.13.09
A great new resource
Glad to see this development. A new organization called Keep America Safe. Board members: Bill Kristol, Elizabeth Cheney and Debra Burlingame.
09.20.09
We can’t afford three and a half more years of this
The Aquarian Totalitarian, the America-Hater-in-Chief, has ordered the Pentagon to go back to the well; says its first review of what the US needs in terms of a nuclear arsenal is “too timid.” This treasonous maniac wants the number slashed more radically.
09.11.09
The enemy speaks on the anniversary of its biggest attack
No, I don’t mean any of the surviving al-Qaeda leaders. I don’t mean any of the other foreign forms of our enemy in this twilight struggle for the survival prospects of the United States of America, either. I mean the embodiment of the domestic form of the enemy. I mean Barack Hussein Obama.
Yes, he holds the position of President of the United States. That’s precisely what makes him so dangerous.
His remarks this morning in “commemoration” of the 9/11 attacks were a deliberate attempt to eviscerate the nation he presides over, kill its essential character and make certain its transformation into a totalitarian state based on the perverse vision of a handful of delusional utopians.
“National day of service.” Could he have been any more disgusting? Could he have been any more insulting to the memories of Todd Beamer, Barbara Olson, the thousands trapped in the World Trade Center? Could he have shown any greater disdain for you and me, who watched, horrified and terrified, the entire attack live on television that day?
I want to make sure I get to the core of why this is supremely obscene and un-American. I don’t want to start with any secondary or tertiary levels of its significance.
I think the core of it is to be found in the word “service.” It speaks volumes about the totalitarian nature of the leftist mindset. It has much to tell us about the impetus behind the push for socialist health care, behind “green” zealotry, behind the push for “tolerance” and egalitarianism and moral relativism and the jucial activism that imposes that on our society.
From time to time I have considered that there may be different types, or perhaps degrees, of leftism, but now I’m not so sure. Certainly, the friendly sprout-munching Sierra Club / Unitarian / Human Rights Commission / Democrat-voting person you say hello to on the dog-walking path does not exhibit the single-minded totalitarian determination of a TCM, Nancy Pelosi, Van Jones, Mark Lloyd or Cass Sunstein, nor the nearly universally unappealing histrionics of the Code Pink / International Answer crowd. If pressed, however, the nice liberal down the street will forthrightly stand behind an approach to public life – and private life, which amounts to the same thing when their vision becomes reality – based on hatred for basic human freedom.
Leftists profess to care. In a sense, they do care, but it’s about general principles that do not conform to human nature or anything else about reality. Examples of this would be some kind of blanket “fairness,’ which is supposed to uniformly characterize all human activity. Another is “need,” which opens the door to all kinds of assumptions about the actual situations of individual human beings. Another is “equality,” which leads to not only feminism and its denial of the profound differences between males and females in the human species or any other, but quite mad notions such as the normality of transgenderism and even rights for animals lower than humans.
If our current juncture were merely a matter of seeing such perversion in our fellow human being and saying to ourselves, “Some people sure have some funny ways about them,” and going on about our lives, this would be of little significance. The problem is that, in the leftist formulation, one is not allowed to disagree with their sense of what’s right and important. This is the core of what this blog means by the term “Freedom-haters.” They are angling for the day when putting forth a different view of what a human being is and why life is sacred will be unthinkable.
That degree of totalitarianism has been brought into being before. We saw many ghastly examples of it in the previous century. It is still the order of the day in North Korea, Iran, Cuba – well, all the nations that have declared themselves our enemies.
It is happening here now.
What will cheer the hearts of do-gooder finger-wagging sprout-munchers across the country about TCM’s call to “service” is that they will have confirmed their perception of certain wrongs and unfairnesses and needs and beleagured demographic groups and have in their arsenal a new weapon by which to shame and intimidate anyone who takes exception. If you’re not with the program of helping to make things more “fair” and “equal,” you are really some kind of outsider.
Let me come back to this mention I made of feminism and the notion of gender “equality.” Implicit in TCM’s call to “service” is a gentleness with which he wants us to respond to a savage act of war. He sees the kind of response that patriotic Americans deem appropriate to barbarity of 9/11 magnitude as out of place in the post-American state he is fashioning.
When Rudyard Kipling said that we sleep well in our beds because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf, his choice of gender was deliberate. It is the men among us who have the capacity for the requisite ugliness to defeat evil. God made it so.
If TCM can sufficiently obliterate the notion that men have particular qualities and capacities that serve a righteous and free nation in times of grave peril, he’s well on his way to implementing the kind of Aquarian fantasy that he and his ilk have nurtured for a century.
The shorthand version of all this is that the leftist vision is one of nicey-nice and patty-cake – until there’s disagreement about who somebody is or what they need. Then it’s God help the disagreer.
I have no service to offer such a state.
