Sultan Knish

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Dredging the Bottom

2012-01-27T14:46:00.003-05:00

Republican primaries are like visiting embarrassing relatives, no matter how bad you think it's going to be, it always turns out to be even worse. After months of this we're going to have a convention where we will be asked to believe in one of these men.

The latest attack is that Gingrich was actually anti-Reagan or at least had strong differences with Ronald Reagan. That is a serious attack or would be, if the conclusion to be drawn from even the heavily censored and selected quotes are that Gingrich thought Reagan was being too liberal.

So far the revelations are that Gingrich wanted budget spending frozen, Reagan refused because it would undermine defense. Gingrich said of Reagan's meeting with Gorbachev that it was, "the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich." And overall that the United States lacked a comprehensive dedicated strategy for defeating the USSR.

The takeaway is that Gingrich was attacking Reagan from the right. Which is not all that damning unless you assume that any deviation from Reagan's positions in any direction is treason. It seems to help Gingrich's conservative credentials more than it hurts him.

If you actually look at the context of some of the remarks, then the tone changes a great deal.

"The fact is that George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Irving Kristol, and Jeane Kirkpatrick are right in pointing out the enormous gap between President Reagan's strong rhetoric, which is adequate, and his administration's weak policies, which are inadequate and will ultimately fail."

Was Gingrich wrong? His views on sitting down with Gorbachev were not all that unusual for many conservatives at the time. Freezing spending might not have been that bad of an idea, whether it was workable is another question. And the United States did not have much of a strategy for defeating the USSR, which spared us the trouble by defeating itself.

When Romney distanced himself from Reagan he appeared to be doing it from the left, the Gingrich attacks appear to have come from the right. The only way they work is if we detach Reagan from conservative principles and place him above them.

As a bonus. Misleadingly edited videos always help make the case. More at The Hayride

Jeffrey Lord at the American Spectator has a piece putting some of the quotes in context, but he doesn't provide the complete floor statement either. It would be good if he did, to avoid all these snippets and see what Gingrich actually said in full so we can decide for ourselves.

SMOKING A KORAN

Pakistan’s largest real export is its off-the-books heroin trade and its economy runs on heroin. The ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, which backed the Taliban, also took a cut of Afghanistan’s highly profitable opium trade. Iranian and Pakistani interference in Afghanistan marry their Islamic initiatives with the drug trade as Sunnis and Shiites compete for the lucrative traffic in the world’s leading source of opium which is smuggled through Pakistan and Iran.

Speaking of Iran, the Islamic Republic has the world’s highest percentage of heroin addicts, and the traffic is run by the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution which acts as the religious thugs of the ayatollahs. One of their means of smuggling heroin out of Iran is piggybacking the trade on Shiite Muslim pilgrims visiting holy sites abroad.

The Muslim world doesn’t have much to export besides oil and drugs. Countries that don’t have oil export drugs. Countries that do have oil, export drugs anyway. Terrorist groups with their secret cells, forged documents and covert funding sources make perfect drug smuggling networks until it is impossible to tell whether they are Islamic terrorists who smuggle drugs to fund their operations or drug smugglers who kill people to religiously justify their drug smuggling. When the commanders and the foot soldiers have spent enough time in the drug trade and are sampling their own product then they stop knowing the difference.

See my entire piece on the Islamic drug connection at The Islamic Paradise of the Needle and Powder

LOOK TO THE FUTURE

The good news is that our economy is recovering. We have not only broken the back of the recession, but kicked in the spleen of its brother the depression, and karate chopped the wrist of its uncle, the complete economic meltdown. The stock market is riding high thanks to its transformation from an index of companies, to an index of racehorses and greyhounds. I have been told by GE CEO Jeff Immelt that his horse, Foreseeable Disaster is coming up 4th, behind Microsoft's Blue Nag of Death, GM's Safety Issues and EcoTech's Al Gore. Betting is high and anyone who wants to get in on the action, please come see Vice President Biden in the cashier's cage to the right.

And there is still more good news. After yesterday's speech commemorating those killed in the Seattle Polar Bear Invasion, my popularity has shot up all the way to 27 percent. This puts me ahead in the polls, in front of my rivals, Republican challenger, George Prescott Bush III and my Neo-Monarchist challenger, the King of Nebraska, but still well behind Chinese Supreme Leader Hu Jintao, who has seized control of several key states.

Additionally with my new proposal to take all our remaining money and bury it in Michelle's vegetable garden, we may finally have a plan to cut spending that really works. At least until we dig it up that same night and spend it on one of those really bad ideas that I and my advisers come up with when we get high together.

How I saw the State of the Union Address 2012 shaping up. It could still happen...

THE WORDS... THEY HAVE NO MEANING

"To talk with Gingrich supporters is to enter a world where words have no meaning... Romney is now the only remaining candidate for president who opposes amnesty for illegals."

From Coulter's "Re-elect Obama: Vote Newt"

"Romney described immigration proposals by McCain and others as 'quite different' from amnesty, because they required illegal immigrants to register with the government, work for years, pay taxes, not take public benefits, and pay a fine before applying for citizenship. 'That's very different than amnesty, where you literally say, 'OK, everybody here gets to stay,''

Boston Globe, 3/16/07

THERE ARE NO ATHEISTS IN MUSLIM FOXHOLES

The trajectory of persecution is not very difficult to calculate. In the UK, Muslims outnumber Jews six to one. In France, Muslims outnumber Jews ten to one, and in Sweden by as much as twenty-five to one. These are not just numbers; they also accurately chart the trajectory of religious persecution, with the Muslim persecution of Jews spiking horrifyingly in Sweden, high in France, but not as high in England. One reason why the situation is not yet as bad as in the United States is because Jews still outnumber Muslims at least two to one.

Muslim persecution of a hated minority group increases proportionally in relation to their numerical advantage. Atheists are a larger percentage of the population in Europe, but demographics are still catching up to them. In the United States the demographic race may already be done, as far as atheists are concerned.

In the United States approximately 0.7 percent of the population identifies as atheist and 0.8 percent of the population as Muslim. If these surveys are correct then the number of Muslims in the United States has already exceeded the number of atheists. While not a single member of Congress identifies as an atheist, two identify as Muslims.

from my article, The Most Dangerous Place to be an Atheist

BUT HE ONLY SUPPORTS RAPING US AT THE STATE LEVEL

Whether you like a state-wide insurance mandate or not, it's a world of difference when the federal government does it... It was on account of the difference between state and federal powers that the Supreme Court overturned the federal Violence Against Women Act. The court was not endorsing rape, but reminding us that states make laws about rape, not Congress.

Romney supported the idea of other states doing something along the lines of his health care bill, but always opposed insurance mandates from the federal government (just as I oppose the federal government issuing general laws about rape, but support state laws against rape.)

From that same bulletin from CoulterWorld.

So Coulter's proposal is that we nominate a rapist because his rapine instincts are governed by the Constitution and though he supports rape at the state level, he will oppose it at the Federal level.

The only thing keeping Romney from raping us at the Federal level (Coulter's metaphor, not mine) is that he's apparently solid on State's Rights. Probably as solid as he is on immigration, the second amendment, abortion, gay rights and well any other issue.

If we do put our faith in Romney as a rapist within the Constitution, then he'll hand out the state waivers on ObamaCare. But what if he prioritizes rape over constitutionalism just like every other president from both parties going back further than we would like to think about?

If a candidate opposes a policy, then regardless of his Constitutional integrity, we at least have some confidence that he will not implement it. But if a candidate supports a policy, but opposes it only at the Federal level, then we have to put our faith in his restraint to not use the powers of the office that he has, or in this case to actively use them to undermine a policy that he supports in practice, but not in legal principle.

Ron Paul might have an inkling of credibility arguing that he would not enact a policy that he supports at the Federal level. Considering his earmarks dance, it's a small inkling, but he at least has some credibility on the issue.

With Romney, his establishment defenders have been reduced to arguing that Romney may support the practice of ObamaCare, but he will oppose it to protect states rights. Not only is this position ridiculous, not only does it ask us to take so much on faith that it's downright mindboggling. In Coulter's own metaphor it asks us to elect a rapist and trust that his principles will prevent him from raping us.

Worst of all Coulter has conceded and even defended the mandate, and is now just arguing against it on a Federal level.

"In a world where words have meaning, Mitt Romney is not the "moderate" in this race. He is the most conservative candidate."

The problem is that in CoulterWorld, the words mean something different than they mean here. It's entirely legitimate to state that none of the remaining three candidates are conservative. That is a defensible view.

Billing a man who called himself progressive and repeatedly disavowed the conservative label until it came in handy, who is conservative is demeanor, but has no consistent conservative record on the issues, as the most conservative candidate is a head spinner.

To seriously believe that Romney is more conservative than Santorum isn't the worldview of a world where words have meaning, it's a world where the word conservative has no meaning.

BUFFALOED SPENDERS

Yesterday, the Republican-controlled House passed HR 1022, a bill that would require the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a study of the history of Buffalo Soldiers in the establishment of national parks. The study will cost $400,000.

Voting in favor of this fantastic piece of budget cutting legislation was budget cutting hero, Paul Ryan. Michelle Bachmann voted against.

In between various bills about the importance of the budget, Ryan voted to authorize the Secretary of the Interior to study the suitability and feasibility of designating prehistoric, historic, and limestone forest sites on Rota, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, as a unit of the National Park System.

The bill was co-sponsored by five Democrats and one Republican. Can we really afford to be extending the national park system into the Northern Mariana Islands. Is that really the priority now?

SOROS MANUFACTURED CHAOS IN ISRAEL

In the warm summer of 2011, a twenty-something Israeli named Daphne Leef set up a Facebook protest page agitating against the high cost of housing in Tel Aviv. She pitched a tent and helped touch off a social protest movement that received national and international attention.

While the protests were billed as grassroots, there was nothing grassroots about them. The protests had been organized and funded by the New Israel Fund. Daphne Leef worked as a video editor for the New Israel Fund.

In the winter of that same year, as the protests had died down, a woman named Tanya Rosenblit boarded a bus which runs through religiously hyper-conservative neighborhoods and staged an incident with the passengers. Rosenblit was dubbed an Israeli Rosa Parks and her stunt helped generate waves of articles about major social problems in Israel.

Rosenblit was associated with One Voice, an organization funded by the New Israel Fund, whose board included Alon Liel, the husband of New Israel Fund director Rachel Liel. Hardly had the NIF gotten through manufacturing one phony social protest movement than it was hard at work on another.

See the entire piece at Front Page Magazine in Soros Manufactured Chaos in Israel

AND NOW THE ROUNDUP

Western Rifle Shooters has found a truly fantastic illustration to go with my SOTU parody. This should be Obama's presidential portrait.

Dress for success and the going rate for a 99 percent secretary

Romney hearts Hezbollah's health care system from Pamella Galler at Atlas Shrugs The takeaway here is that Romney operates on truisms from the same foreign policy experts who helped put the Brotherhood into power. He really does not get it.

Hezbollah and Hamas and the Brotherhood in Egypt are not popular because they offer health services or food. Those are bonuses that help lock in people. It's their Islamic beliefs that are popular and Romney is foolish to think that if America provided health care to them that it would swing them around.

... in other good news

The inauguration of Egypt's new parliament is an important step toward fulfilling public demands for the establishment of a regime based on Islam, said Ali Larijani, speaker of the Iranian parliament, in a letter on Wednesday. The letter was sent to Saad al-Katatny, People's Assembly speaker.

Shouldn't he have sent the letter to Obama who deserves much of the credit for the Caliphate?

New York Times now outsourcing its stories to CAIR

Learn about the legal claim to the State of Israel, from Eli Hertz, who has done a great deal of research on the topic at a Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors event in February

Another way

Yes, I am an Arab and despite that I love the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. I believe in the responsibility of Arabs to be loyal to the State of Israel and I believe that Jews should be able to settle everywhere in Israel,

With a predictable ending

State of Disunion

2012-01-25T23:06:00.002-05:00

We know that the state of the union is good no matter how many Americans are out of work, how many families are counting every penny, how many industries are falling off a cliff and how high the national debt gets. We know it's good so long as another politician takes a victory lap up to the podium and tells us that it's all good because he's here.

Iraq? Nothing to worry about. We just brought all the troops home. Sure it's breaking up into a civil war, but you won't hear about it on the news. Osama bin Laden is no longer a threat, but his allies have taken over Egypt and Tunisia, and are moving on Libya. The Taliban's momentum has been broken and they are on the verge of taking over the government which means they will finally have been defeated. These achievements are a testament to a military which is facing the biggest budget cuts in decades.

The American soldier is a role model to us. I take away his weapons, fire him, put him on trial and force him to marry his bunkmate to show his tolerance, and he never complains because he's not allowed to. The rest of you need to take a lesson from him. Stop complaining or I'll send you to a military tribunal.

Now it's time for an applause break. We need to spend more money funding college degrees and political indoctrination for everyone. More applause. Only by creating more unemployed people with six figure student debts working at McD's will we be able to restore the post WW2 economy that was built on manufacturing jobs which my administration is working hard to completely eliminate.

More applause? No you shouldn't have. And I didn't get you anything but a monopoly for my buddy Warren Buffett's rail line. Sure it cost a 100,000 American jobs, but who needs them anyway. We need to keep the promise alive and fight the rich whose irresponsible investing tanked this economy. And the only way we can do that is by going deep into debt with irresponsible investments. That's why we've put new rules in place to hold Wall Street accountable in case they ever borrow more money than they can pay back and we've also put new rules into place so the government can borrow as much money as it wants.

The economy is great right now. There are millions of jobs everywhere, even if you can't see them because they're invisible jobs. They only come out at night and during State of the Union addresses. In the last 5 minutes over 3 billion jobs have been created. The auto industry used to be on the verge of collapse. It's still on the verge of collapse but now it's being subsidized by taxpayers. Now the auto industry is too big to fail, no matter how many Volts it makes and how few people buy them. And just wait till you see the GM Lada that uses Soviet manufacturing processes to create a car that only works one day a month and runs entirely on hot air. Just like me.

I will work with anyone who agrees with me, but fight anyone who disagrees with me through executive orders, appointments that I have no right to make and any other way that I can find to violate the Constitution and appoint myself King of America. Applause? Damn right you should be applauding. Your applause just created 300 trillion jobs and eliminated all our debt. Why? Because I said so! I'm the King of America!

What we did in Detroit, we can do in Philly, Raleigh and any other place where a bunch of working class white people are worried about their jobs. As long as they are represented by unions and as long as I need the support of those unions, and as long as my good buddy Warren Buffett can't make any money by putting them out of work, and as long as the Chinese keep lending us money, then I will subsidize every industry until we beat the Chinese.

I don't know why you're all applauding, even I think that's stupid and I used to own a Zune. I still haven't learned how many states there are and even I know that's not going to work. I believe money is made by leprechauns which is why it's so green, but even I'm not serious about the crap I just said. If I was really into creating white working class jobs, I wouldn't have killed Keystone XL. Look Warren Buffett's secretary is applauding. Isn't that sweet?

The real problem is that we're outsourcing too many jobs, that's why I just signed a bunch of trade agreements that will make it easier for South Korea to sell their products here. It's time we stopped giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas and start subsidizing them, like my stimulus plan which created more jobs in China than it did here. Applause? I didn't know Beijing had their own congressional delegation. Hell we invested 2 billion in Brazilian offshore oil drilling in support of my left wing buddies in the gov over there. If that doesn't create American jobs, I don't know what will.

And hey, you guys are gonna think this is funny, but remember when we loaned half a billion to make electric cars in Finland. Yeah Al Gore loved that one, he was an investor. But don't pay attention to anything I'm saying. As I stand here today, I vow that I will bring the jobs back to America. They just have to go through China, South Korea and Finland first. When they're done with them, we get first dibs. Indonesian scout's honor.

I will go anywhere to open up new markets to American products. Like Martha's Vineyard and the golf course. Thanks to my inability to hit a golf ball anywhere besides a lake, a thousand Americans are hard at work in Shanghai making new golf balls for me to hit. And it doesn't end there. German companies are forming partnerships with community colleges to shoot lasers. Chinese wind turbines are making Finnish cars grow Arugula. All we need is more teachers unions to make it happen.

We have told every state to raise their standards which means more kids who can't read or add being promoted from class to class so the schools don't lose Federal funding. And now we need to start paying teachers more. I don't care if you can't afford to keep your home and pay property taxes, the teacher's unions need more Viagra benefits. Statistics show that a great teacher can teach her students how to cheat off each other's tests just like I did at Harvard. If we just pay teachers 250,000 a year, then every student will be able to cheat their way to Harvard just like me.

The best way to create more American jobs is by legalizing illegal aliens and paying for their college educations. Applause? By the Prophet's beard, you people really will applaud anything. We need to kill puppies. Applause. It's time to start burning down more churches. Applause. If we kill every tenth person there will be more jobs for the survivors. Applause. Sometimes I'm embarrassed at how easy this is.

The rate of crossings from Mexico has gone down ever since I tanked the economy and I pledge to you if you give me another four years, every Mexican who doesn't work for the government will be back home trading in his dollars for pesos before American currency is completely worthless. That's why we need to legalize them right now and ply them with benefits so they don't run away before they get a chance to vote for me a third time as El Dictador.

But that's not all. I am opening millions of acres for offshore oil drilling. Not. I am also investing more money in training children to harness the power of positive thinking. Scientists at Federally funded labs estimate that every child who thinks positively can create enough power to light up an entire city. The only problem is figuring out how to stick the plugs into his head while we stick him in some sort of Matrix. And that's where our Federally funded labs come in. That is why I am asking Congress not to gut funding for the Matrix.

Take a look at Wilson E. Picket-Rammsby over there. Born in a shack in an up for grabs district in North Carolina, he had no arms or legs. Ever since my stimulus plan he works at the Buffett-Gore Wind Turbine Making Co. which is entirely financed by taxpayers. Wilson's job is to take 'Made in America' stickers and affix them with his mouth to imported Chinese wind turbines.

I promised Wilson that I would not walk away from workers like him. I will not allow China to buy more Chinese wind turbines than we would buy Chinese wind turbines with their money. I will not allow Germany to seize the lead from us in wind turbines or paper kite manufacturing or aura beaming technology. We've subsidized oil companies long enough. It's time to start subsidizing Al Gore.

Best of all while the Navy will be losing a whole bunch of ships and Marines, they will be purchasing all that clean energy so that our armed forces will have even less money and Al Gore will have even more money.

Now that I spent 15 minutes discussing tax credits and incentives for companies owned by my friends and my supporters, let me completely switch topics and state firmly that it's time to stop the bailouts, the handouts and the copouts. After we pass my Bailouts, Handouts and Copouts plan to force the Navy to buy Finnish electric submarines from a company co-owned by some guy who hosted a fundraiser for me last week. It's possible the submarines don't work underwater, but they're painted green which means they're good for the environment.

We've all paid the price for lenders who sold mortgages to people who couldn't afford them. And by that I mean the lenders paid me money and helped finance my campaign. That's why we need smart regulation. Regulations that are so smart that they automatically exempt me.

Rules that prevent Gibson from making guitars, prevent Canada from selling us cheap oil and prevent businesses from creating new jobs don't destroy the free market. They make the free market work better by taking it out back and putting a bullet in its head, just like my stepfather, the Colonel, used to do to dissidents back home in Indonesia.

Four years after the economic meltdown, I am asking my Attorney General to take some time from being investigated by Congress for shipping assault rifles to Mexican druglords in a plot to subvert the Constitution, and form a special super commission of fact finding investigators to root out financial corruption that we're not responsible for and make them give us our cut.

This proposal is in no way belated election pandering or a way to shake down Wall Street firms into donating to us. They're already donating to us. Applause. Oh yeah, they're donating to us like a Mexican drug dealer with a brand new AK-47.

Because of all the loopholes and shelters and basements in the tax code, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Unfortunately other people besides Warren Buffett are also benefiting from these loopholes and we need to close them so that only Warren Buffett benefits from them.

I'm a Democrat, but I believe what Abraham Lincoln believed, that habeas corpus should be suspended, First Ladies should be able to spend as much money as they want during a war and that some races are inferior to others. But most of all I believe that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time-- but I am hoping that I can do it at least long enough to get reelected.

Losing the war in Iraq has allowed me to shift the war to Afghanistan where we are losing the war from a decisive position of strength. A wave of change has washed across the Middle East. Women are running for their lives and the Al Qaeda flag is flying in Libya. Iran is on the verge of getting the bomb. And I just want to take credit for all of it.

The renewal of American leadership can be felt around the globe. Now the world knows that they don't have to take us seriously anymore. We're not even paper tigers, we're more like paper tigers who set themselves on fire and then the chief paper tiger gets up and makes a speech about how much fire has done for the standing of paper tigers in restoring human dignity around the world.

To keep pace with our new global role, I have called for eliminating most of the parts of the military that don't buy clean energy from my supporters or bomb the people that the President of France orders me to bomb as incidental to my core mission of destroying America.

And I would just like to finish by invoking the inspirational words of a truly great American. Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party who wrote in his his autobiography, Soul on Ice, that he began his career as a rapist by practicing on black girls in the ghetto before moving on to other prey. Like him I began practicing on Chicago and then moved on to the Great State of Illinois and then to America.

Thank you and God Damn America.

Food Fights and Class Warfare

2012-01-24T23:20:00.001-05:00

There was a time when full tables signified prosperity and thick waistlines were considered attractive. The ability to eat one's fill was what separated the gentry from the peasant making do with a few crusts and salted leftovers. Fat was in because it represented leisure and wealth. Thin meant you were on the road to the poorhouse or to consumption, which meant your body was being consumed, not that you were the one doing the consuming.

Then feudalism went the way of the dodo, agriculture was revolutionized and starvation went extinct in the West. Between the widespread availability of cheap food and social welfare programs covering everything from soup kitchens to food stamps, it became hard to starve. Not only was the availability of food no longer associated with prosperity, but even the poor had begun to eat so well that fat began to carry working class and lower class associations.

Fat was no longer wealth, instead conscientious fitness became a mark of prosperity. The laden table made way for micro portions and exotic but barely edible foods. Thin was in on the plate and the waistline.

In Third World countries where feudalism never ended and the agriculture revolution never mattered, the values often never flipped. Instead of anorexia, teenage girls suffer from being force fed to make them more marriageable. The wealthy are fat and the feasts at the top never end.

In the West, weight stands in for class, at a time when explicit classism has become politically incorrect. When Europeans sneer at how fat Americans are, and American coastal elites sneer at the rest of the country for being fat, it's a class putdown that dressed up longstanding contempt in the colors of the welfare state.

Just because the left and its class warfare worldview, which pretends to be concerned about the plight of the underclass, dominates Western societies does not mean that it is not classist. The left is elitist and its underclass protectionism creates a new wave feudalism with a vast government funded upper and middle class dedicated to caring for the underclass, subsidizing it, caring for it and taxing it to pay for all those services.

The obesity concern trolling is a combination of classism and nanny statism that brings to mind the days when their ideological forebears thought that the way to deal with the poor was to sterilize those who seemed less capable than the rest to improve the breed. There is something equally Darwinian in the sneers aimed at Paula Deen. The breed being culled while the elites try to teach their less evolved cousins to survive by eating their arugula.

The nanny state is built on a technocratic confidence in the ability to create one size fits all solutions, overlaying that on a map of the current medical wisdom leads to the creation of single standards, which often have less to do with health than they do with the status symbols of the leisure class. 19th century popularized medicine created so many of these fads that some of them are still around today. The 20th century created even more.

Death though is not only inevitable, but it cannot be dodged with a one size fits all standard. Fitness guru Jim Fixx who helped kickstart the running craze died in his early fifties of a heart attack. Fixx had quit smoking and lost weight, and still died at an early age. Jackie Gleason who spent his life looking like a walking health attack, smoking and drinking, outlived him by nearly twenty years.

Medicine is individual and the collectivization of medicine is a technocratic solution that leads nowhere except to few doctors and ranks of unionized medical personnel nudging patients into following the script handed down to them by professors who have never actually practiced medicine a day in their life. This is the outcome of a nanny state outlook that sees individuals as dispensable, that is concerned only with group outcomes.

This view requires seeing all people as endowed with certain problems that require broad stroke solutions, like adding calories to menus and other rats in a maze tactics designed to modify human behavior on a national level. The targeting of fast food restaurants, public school meals and food stamps reeks of the same elitist arrogance that drives the nanny state.

The politicization of food by the elites of the left always comes down to class, no matter how it may be disguised in liberal colors. From exotic to locally grown, the trajectory of food politics follows the upselling of food prices The only difference is that the dominance of the left has wrapped the added cost with no added value in their own politics. The more affordable food becomes, the more the left finds ways to add cost to food, without adding value.

But the politicization of food goes beyond the fair trade and locally grown fetishes of the politically correct elites, the more politics ends up on your plate, the more the elites are driven to involve everyone else in their food fights. What begins as a way of raising prices while diminishing value to assert wealth and privilege becomes imposed on everyone in the name of their political morality. Once everyone else is paying more and getting less, then the classist left demands new ways to set its superior moral eating habits apart. Instead of everyone ending up with more food, everyone ends up with less.

The cultural ascendance of the left has meant that instead of conspicuous consumption, the consumption has to be disguised with conspicuous political pieties. The food may cost twice as much, but it's locally grown on a farm run by handicapped union workers who visit Cuba to receive free health care or by the indigenous peoples of Tuba-Tuba with the proceeds going to a complete sonic library of their chants and ceremonies. The entire thing is meaningfully meaningless, but it disguises the consumption in a hairshirt, which is the entire point.

Conspicuous consumption is now for the poor while conspicuous conservation is for liberal elites. Al Gore may live in a mansion but he still has the carbon footprint of a mouse. The problem is the truck driver whose vehicle emissions are killing the planet. Whole Foods is just fine, but we need to do something about McDonald's.

Conspicuous conservationism has made America a poorer country, destroyed millions of jobs and outsourced them overseas. Now it's beginning to make America a hungrier country. In a moment of horrifying tone deafness that makes Marie Antoinette seem enlightened, the left is cheering that fewer Americans are eating meat, without seeming to understand that it's because fewer Americans are able to afford it because of their economic policies.

What the left's food police can't accomplish with nudges and shaming, they can finish off with policies and regulations that end up raising the price of food or by making it too difficult to sell. As the left tries and fails to sell the general public on conservation as a status symbol, it moves in the heavy bureaucratic artillery.

It isn't unusual for elites to use the legal system to enforce their own values on the general public, though it was the kind of thing that the universal franchise was supposed to put a leash on, but there is something grim about their growing preoccupation with the habits and mortality of the population. It's the kind of concern that has a habit of ending in eugenics and the more medicine is universalized, the easier it is to start cutting off access to medical treatment for those who haven't been nudged far enough in the right direction.

Social medicine politicizes food consumption and a globalized economy politicizes food production. And the politicized American plate has less on it and at a higher price. While the left obsessively pursues its mission of destroying fast food in the name of lowering social medicine costs and being fairer to farmers, what they are truly accomplishing is to take affordable and filling food off the shelves, as they have done with countless other products that they have targeted.

By the time the left was done with Russia, it had gone from a wheat producer to a wheat importer and many basic food staples were hard to come by even in a country filled with collective farms. Finding modern day examples of that isn't hard. We only have to look as far south as Venezuela to see empty store shelves under the weight of government food policies. But one day that may be the local grocery store if the left gets its way.

There's Something About Mitt

2012-01-23T23:24:00.003-05:00

So far Mitt Romney has lost two out of three primaries, twice to candidates that the establishment didn't even feel were worthy of their attention. In his biggest victory in New Hampshire he barely managed to take 40 percent of the vote.

Like it or not Republicans voters are not particularly thrilled about Romney. But how ecstatic can anyone be about a candidate whose main draw is electability. Electability is an excellent strategic calculation, but it garners about as much enthusiasm as any other form of expediency. Most people who vote the big 'R' recognize the importance of getting Obama out at any cost, but they are not going to get very fired up about a man whose only credential is that of being able to win.

Winning may be everything, but to win a battle you have to remember what it is that you are fighting for. If we are out to win, then what do we win with Romney? Hopefully we win four years of Obama not being in office. That's a pretty solid prize right there and people will turn out for it, but is it enough to win in order to win? And can we win by fielding a candidate who exists only to win?

As the ugly parade of accusations winds its way down Main Street in a ticker tape parade of SuperPAC ads and smears, the ideas have mostly been lost in a clash of personalities. The overriding impression of the campaign is of a few angry men locked together in a room and trying to undermine each other when they aren't outright berating each other. Non-issues rule the day. Tax returns, college records, affairs and anything that avoids dealing with the economic meltdown.

The hostages here are Republican voters who are once again told to choose between professional politicians who have spent so much time tearing down each other that all of them look bad in one way or another. If you believe the various supporters of one candidate or another, then their opponents are Communist supporters of big government who are mentally unstable and given to kicking guinea pigs around the house.

Romney was the establishment's choice for them. He still is. And he's still the candidate that voters are uncomfortable with because he appears to stand for nothing. The more he smiles and the better his hair looks, the more you wonder who is this man on stage. Does he have any purpose besides touring the country, ruffling the hair of nearby youngsters and commenting awkwardly on the economy?

Even Huntsman managed to convincingly believe in something, even if that something was that his party needed to be more like the Democrats. Throughout this season we have had a parade of candidates who seemed to compellingly believe in something. Romney is the exception. It's not just his flip flops, few professional politicians have gone more than a few years without changing some political positions. It's that cheerful vacuum that he projects into the television screen, the event horizon of a politician surrounding a gaping black hole.

Romney must believe something, but it's hard to say what. His career is that of a salesman pitching a product. The products have gotten more and more upscale and the sales pitch is aggressive, but what does the product actually do? We don't really know. It looks good, it's very salable, but what is it for besides winning elections?

The biggest advantage that Romney brings to the ticket is the lack of a personality. That is what makes him electable in a general election. Not because he has any real depth of appeal, but because he will seem like a safe bet for a country that wants change, but is less eager to commit to radical change this time around. But that is also what makes him so unappealing in primary elections that appeal to voters who actually want a candidate to stand for something.

It's as if Romney has spent so much time perfecting his persona, from his missionary days to his political and corporate period, that he projects a perfectly seamless and shiny outer shell, but without the passion and personality that would make him seem human. That would make us believe that he is more than a political machine in human form desperately seeking to get elected.

There's no doubt that there is an inner Romney, but it's more doubtful whether that inner Romney really cares about issues. Romney's career has been post-ideological, which may not be such a bad thing, except that what it really means is that he is a great compromiser and his compromises in the past have trended to the left.

Huntsman believed that the Republican Party was wrong and was man enough to go out there and say it. Romney wouldn't say it even if he did believe it, but it's doubtful that he believes it. Romney does not appear to think about issues in terms of political positions, only in problem solving terms. And that's not nearly as good as it sounds. What it means is that if voters want gay rights, then he will fight for gay rights. If global warming seems to be a concern, then he will work out a way to reduce carbon emissions without impacting business too much. If guns are an issue, then he will work together with gun control and gun rights advocates to draw up another compromise which may undermine the Second Amendment, but does solve the "problem".

The problem with Republican politicians like this is that they fail to consider who is framing the terms of the problem. Instead they are too busy solving manufactured problems while frowning impatiently at conservatives who stand in the way of the problem being solved.

Romney is not stupid, but neither is he insightful. If Santorum and Gingrich see massive culture wars in which they want to play a commanding role, Romney believes that most ideological arguments would go away with sane reasonable management at the top. And he would like to provide that management. If his opponents are mocked as running for Cromwell or Napoleon, he sees himself as going through a headhunting process to become the CEO of America.

If America's problems were only those of mismanagement, then Mitt might be the guy. But the mismanagement is ideological and the massive national debt is the result of too many compromises and backroom deals between the ideologically corrupt and the just plain corrupt. Anyone who recognizes that feels an instinctive antipathy to those politicians who just don't get it. And they see Romney not as the King of Bain, but as the king of those who don't get it.

Romney doesn't understand why he is hated, either by his opponents or by many of the voters. Like most reasonable but clueless people, he knows that he is the adult in the room because he is the one speaking calmly, dressing professionally and following the right procedures to move forward. He has done everything he was supposed to and appears alternately frustrated and bemused to see the primaries slipping away from him.

The problem is that Romney doesn't understand. He doesn't understand why you don't try to clumsily empathize with things you can't relate to, or why his association with the establishment has made his already toxic image even more toxic. His air of competence belies a supreme cluelessness to the currents around him.

Romney is an excellent salesman, but people have an instinctive dislike of salesman, of a slickness that is too slick, a patter that is too good and a willingness to say anything that will make the sale. In art it is often the blotch, the mar and the smear that lends a piece its depth and authenticity. Perfect pieces are a dime a dozen, it's the imperfections that make it seem real.

Gingrich's imperfections, his ego and his bellicosity, lend him an authenticity that Romney can't have. Equally Santorum's nerdiness makes him seem real in a way that Romney can never be. The issue isn't class. It's just the wrong time for salesmen, especially when the salesman looks like the representative of an equally clueless establishment that many voters blame for the existing state of affairs.

Underneath Romney's poise a sense of hurt and frustration seems to bleed through. The angst of a man who has a ragged copy of How To Win Friends and Influence People under the pillow, who practices his smiles in front of a mirror and has learned all the habits of highly effective people by rote, but who cannot understand why the other kids don't want to play with him at recess.

To the establishment Mitt is perfect for the same reasons that he is toxic to the base. His blandness means that he has no threatening ideas. His flexibility will allow him to adopt any position and his post-ideological thinking will mean no difficulties with switching gears. Best of all he looks the part. After a series of problematic candidates, he is perfect. Perfectly unobjectionable.

And they might be right. Romney might be the most electable of the bunch. Maybe he is the only one who can win. Most of us have had thoughts like that, but even if we have to settle for the Prius of politicians, voters are still interested in test driving something big and mean which spews up a lot of smoke and scares everyone off the street. Or maybe a classic model which might look silly today but reminds us of the America that used to be, the America of the sweater vest, the traditional family and the pipe, rather than the America where we settle for the Prius and try to make it to the cash register without having to hear another Lady Gaga song.

Romney doesn't do the vision thing. And maybe he doesn't need to win an election. But then again maybe a candidate without a vision is too plastic to do more than recite bland slogans and stand out there like a wax mannequin waiting for someone to take a photo with him. If his backers were honest, they would strip out all the stuff about his opponents being Communists and focus only on his electability. After South Carolina, that seems to be the way they are headed.

As the electoral terminator, the ballot killing machine whose only purpose is to give the idiots who voted for Obama a non-threatening alternative, he might pass. But then again he might not, because there is a reason that people voted for Obama. It may have been a terrible mistake, but millions still saw something there. What they saw was a lie, but it doesn't mean that they won't see it again unless there is a compelling alternative to snap them out of the daze.

If Romney largely keeps his image intact, he may win the general election. But how well will he actually do under the sustained fire of the media establishment, its comedian flunkies and all the hate and hostility of a liberal establishment with a white knuckled grip on power? It might be wiser to look at survivors, at two opponents who have survived and won when they weren't supposed to. Who have stood up and beaten back their own local establishment.

This election will be a hard and ugly fight. And Romney may be the most electable robot for the job, but if we're going down a hard road maybe it's best we take a car that can handle the roads and leave the Prius at home.

The Great Internet Blackout

2012-01-22T22:28:00.001-05:00

"This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud." For people who grew up at a certain time with a thick glowing monitor casting light on their faces these were the closing words of their own Declaration of Independence. For those people the internet was not a layout of graphics and flash videos blaring from every website, but amalgams of text. The internet before the internet was an elitist place, like Linux, it was part puzzle and part love of taking intangible things apart and putting them back together again.

Like most revolutionaries they were doomed to be made irrelevant by the consequences of the forces that they had set in motion. The curiosity that was their code of honor has been overtaken by the world that they helped open up. And that world is an amazing place.

Freedom of information is no longer an idealistic slogan, it's a commonplace reality. So commonplace that it's hardly worth mentioning. People once fought and died to protect libraries. Now you can take every single library within a hundred miles of where you live, whether it's a metropolis or a small town, and dangle it from the end of your keychain as a flash drive. Books, articles, vast troves of information, even classified diplomatic cables. Everything is available.

While the back ends of the system have become more complex, the end user experience has become trivially simple. With the iPad and the Kindle Fire, and Android and Windows 8 spreading the experience across generic tablets, the user experience comes down to touching the screen of a locked down system which is actually a disguised storefront to sell the user content through a carefully controlled, but fun to use environment. That is an overstatement, but it's also the trend. It has been a long journey, but we finally have the technology that movies told us to expect wrapped in a simple package without any of the depth or complexity. Without most of the freedom that was at the core of how the technology got started.

The economics of the internet are based around it as a vehicle for the delivery of goods and services. That transformation is slowly destroying American retail, it is doing so at a snail's place as big box retailers struggle to adapt, but the shopping mall and the big box store are still dinosaurs and their day is swiftly coming. Retailers who sold anything that can be digitized and delivered over the internet are already gone. Music stories, video rental places and now bookstores are vanishing into the past. An era when we get many of our goods out of CAD/CAM printers is not entirely inconceivable.

Virgin, Blockbuster and Borders have been sucked into the vortex as the middlemen in the marketplace that the marketplace no longer needed. The megacorporations which actually produce the songs, movies and books have been making their last stand since the nineties and their last stand invariably involves lawyers and lobbyists, rather than intelligently adapting to the marketplace. It is hard to feel sorry for these massive behemoths stomping and roaring about, bellowing about thievery everywhere. They have a point, but they are so thoroughly unsympathetic in their character and conduct that it is a point which no one but congressmen listen to.

The new middlemen of the internet distribute access to the content by filtering it through search engines, email social media networks while charging advertisers for access to their trove of passing eyeballs and the data that comes with them. Some of these giants actually sell digital content, but mostly they make money from the internet as a shopping mall. They don't need to run the stores, though they do run some of them, all they need to do is sell ad space to stores who want to pitch their products to the customers looking for the store they want or where they parked or the nearest bathroom.

The SOPA/PIPA debate is not really about the freedom of the internet. It's a battle between massive corporations seeking to protect their own interests. The megacorporations who create content want to empower law enforcement to go after content theft. The megacorporations who sell ads don't care if the content they are selling ads around is legitimate or not. This is naked self-interest and greed on both sides and neither side looks particularly pretty. Neither set of corporate combatants cares if the internet is "free" or not. Neither actually believe in a free internet. The difference between a Time Warner and a Google is the way they go about making money from the internet.

There's plenty of hypocrisy to go around on both sides. Time Warner, not too long ago, got together with some of the same "Save the Internet" lobbyists to legalize content theft, so long as the people being stolen from were small time. The Orphan Works Act united big content corporations and free internet activists and if you ever wrote or drew anything without obvious copyright attached to it, then your work is one of those orphans.

On the other side the corporations which are blase about content from entertainment corporations being distributed online, react quite differently when it's their own source code being leaked. It's fine when someone else's information is free and can be used to sell ads on YouTube. It's fine when classified diplomatic cables are leaked and distributed while they sell ads on the sidebar. But when it's their source code, then that's a bridge too far.

Finally to the left of them is a free internet lobby which insists that intellectual property shouldn't exist and that actually giving content creators rights is just a barrier to creativity. Creativity being other people remixing their content. They have plenty of points, but the largest point that weighs against them is simple enough. People choosing to contribute their content copyright free to a creative community is a beautiful thing, while people being compelled to work for free by having their content stolen is slavery.

A world in which creating content has diminishing returns is a world with diminishing content. We are already entering that world now. A world where the content consumed has been chewed over, remixed and turned out again. Where few new things are being made, but a great many old things are being used as ironic commentary. Entertainment has become meta-entertainment, language is a code, everything comments on itself and on the absurdity of life and on the absurdity of its own structure. It may be art, but it's the art of a decadent and dying culture which mocks itself because it no longer believes in itself.

The old hackers are also a fading myth. The new black hat hacker is not an explorer, he uses tools that someone else made to make money or for pure malice wrapped in absurdist clothing, which for all its pretensions is nothing more than the gangs of A Clockwork Orange with a keyboard. If the old viruses were at least made out of some degree of curiosity, today's malware is a mostly for profit tool. It's another extension of the ubiquitous advertising that is splattered over every website everywhere, no matter how trivial or serious. And when it isn't done for profit, then it's done for the sheer thrill of being able to hurt and humiliate others.

The old elitist idea that the world of cables pumping bytes in and out of cathode ray monitors would lead to a world where knowledge mattered more than anything else was not entirely wrong, but like most elitist ideas it failed to take into account what would happen when the world migrated to their little utopia.

The internet is a forum for corporate land-grabbing and range wars, which is what SOPA is really about. It's a forum for international wars to be fought in its darker territories. It is a place where nations, causes and terrorist groups spread their propaganda. Where criminals and gangs run free. It is not a self-regulated society. It is a loosely regulated corporate run anarchy backed by some laws. Given time that will change. The last two years when the internet became a tool for overthrowing governments and leaking classified information wholesale have made that inevitable. It is not a question of if it will happen, but when and how.

The corporations who have lined up to fight for internet freedom will not object so long as it does not affect their business model. Their lobbyists have probably already been thinking of various plans that will address the problem. But the temporary gatekeepers are also a passing phase. As control of the internet leaves American hands, it will pass into the hands of alliances of governments which do not believe in freedom of speech or political freedom. And which do not have a Silicon Valley lobby knocking at their door.

Ignorance has been the only delay as politicians have spent a generation nodding sagely about computers being the future, and then the internet being the future. And no one wanted to stand in the way of the future. Newer generations of politicians will not crack down because the MPAA or the RIAA or some other content publishers lobby them to. They will have grown up with the internet, but with no commitment to freedom of speech. They will have come out of an environment where any forum that is not controlled becomes intolerable. And they will crack down.

The internet has changed our society, but our society has also change the internet. It is a reflection of the best of what we can do, but also the worst. The freedom that we have today may also be a passing phase, like places where you could go rent a video at 12 o'clock in the morning and modems heavy enough to be used as doorstops. In pushing the technology to the limits, we have also pushed ourselves to the limits, and it is only a matter of time before we surrender the power to the authorities to push back.

Gingrich and Arafat - Anatomy of a Smear

2012-01-21T22:06:00.001-05:00

Two photos are being circulated of Gingrich shaking hands with Arafat, one from 1993 and one from 1998, with the context stripped away, to imply that Newt was formerly friendly with Arafat and then "changed" his position.

The 1998 photo is the easiest to address because it is the most amply documented. That photo was taken during Gingrich's trip to Israel and I will let the news stories from the time speak for themselves.

After days of angering Palestinians by publicly siding with Israel, House Speaker Newt Gingrich was upbeat about his talks yesterday with Yasser Arafat and insisted he was just trying to help move the peace process forward.

Later, the Georgia Republican alluded to his outspoken speech Tuesday to Israel's parliament, when, veering from U.S. policy, he declared Jerusalem "the united and eternal capital of Israel." Yesterday, Gingrich said it was his guess that Arafat himself knew Jerusalem would always be the capital of Israel.

From the clean AP version

The first fracas erupted Sunday when Rep. Gingrich accused chief Palestinian peace negotiator Saeb Erekat of fomenting violence and demanding that Mr. Erekat not attend the meeting with Mr. Arafat.

At issue was a planned Gingrich visit to a proposed site for the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. Palestinians vehemently oppose any formal recognition of Israel's claim to all of the city, and Mr. Erekat warned there would be body bags if the visit went ahead.

Or the New York Times

Mr. Gingrich was greeted in Israel with unusual honors, including long hours spent with Mr. Netanyahu and an address to the Parliament. His appearance there on Tuesday prompted heckling and a walkout by Arab legislators. ''You are anti-Arab!'' screamed Abdulwahab Darawshe, leader of the Democratic Arab Party.

So any notion that this was an enthusiastic embrace of Arafat doesn't fly with the news stories of the day. Gingrich was reasonably friendly with the Palestinian Arab side, he welcomed visits by PA officials to the United States and suggested more fact finding missions. He was supportive of a peace process, but he also took a clear and unambiguously pro-Israel line.

"No Palestinian official should talk about or threaten bloodshed, but yet it is a routine pattern in this region for the Palestinian Authority to in effect, incite violence. I think it is totally wrong, and the United States frankly should condemn it routinely and point out to the world who it is who is suggesting violence," Gingrich said on CNN's "Late Edition."

None of these statements are altogether extraordinary, a number of Republicans have said similar things, but in the late nineties the peace process had clearly broken down, Netanyahu's victory was a sign that Israelis were tired of the surrender process under Rabin and Peres. They wanted some measure of security, even while the Clinton Administration was doing everything possible to get Netanyahu out. Something they even succeeded in doing.

The peace process was still a mantra then, more so than it is today. Gingrich already had larger ambitions and along with a bipartisan delegation of Republicans and Democrats he met with Arafat in order to play the statesman, but he took the side of Netanyahu over Clinton. Considering that history is repeating itself under Obama, that should be considered significant.

Gingrich's position on Israel has been fairly consistent over the years. And he's expressed himself far more directly in ways that few Republican national leaders have. The following is from a year earlier in 1997.

Gingrich said it's dangerous "to confuse the terrorist and the democracy ... It is extraordinarily dangerous to always impose the burden on those who are your friends because you're too timid to tell the truth to those who are your enemies."

The speaker suggested the Clinton Administration is undermining Israel's security by equating Palestinian violence with new Israeli housing in east Jerusalem. The latest round of violence between Palestinian youths and Israeli troops flared after the Israeli government broke ground on a new housing project in the area.

Gingrich also said the U.S. should adopt "principles that say, 'If you're a terrorist, you should not expect to live very long,'" and make a commitment "to pre-emptive strikes when we deem them appropriate."

The same year of his visit, Gingrich was even more blunt when it came to the Clinton-Arafat troika.

''It's become the Clinton Administration and Arafat against Israel,'' Mr. Gingrich said at a news conference. ''The Clinton Administration says: 'Happy birthday. Let us blackmail you on behalf of Arafat.

In 2002, Gingrich was still saying blasting Arafat and suggesting that he should be expelled from Israel. He was also doing it seven years earlier in 1995.

Gingrich said: "I'm told that if we were to move the embassy there tomorrow, that this would cause enormous unrest among those neighbors that would like to destroy Israel. Well, I'm frankly not sympathetic to that. And part of my reaction is: They ought to grow up.

As early as 1990, Gingrich was taking on even Senator Dole over Israel. He's been consistent on the issue for nearly two decades. You can read him saying similar things twenty years ago. Has he been perfect on the issue?

In 1993 he seemed to have a friendly meeting with Arafat and laid out some suggestions for a viable state. That's the source of the first photo. Sometime around then he appears to have questioned moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, something that he has otherwise supported for seventeen years. Both these events were obscure enough that there are hardly any news items about them. They also occurred during a period when most people, even those who should have known better, did begin to believe that peace might be possible.

As with any politician there is no telling what he might do with executive power, but Gingrich has one of the best pro-Israel records of anyone in Congress running for the White House right now. He certainly has the longest such record. It's not implausible to think that he does mean it.

The release of the photo is a transparent smear by the wildly Anti-Israel Sam Stein, who has moved on to plying his wares at the Huffington Post. Redistributing the photo without a larger context is misleading. As is relying on a story from a source of Sam Stein's.

Gingrich met with Arafat twice. Both times within the context of congressional events. He has also repeatedly spoken the hard truths about Arafat and the PLO, even comparing them to Nazis. He's not the only pro-Israel candidate in the race. Santorum knows the issues and is pro-Israel. For anyone looking for a pro-Israel candidate, either man is a good choice.

More significantly the out of context release of this photo is typical of the smears we're seeing in the race. And we are going to be seeing lots more of the same. That's why I thought it worthwhile to run this piece which is not a traditional article, but a hasty clarification of a photo that is making its rounds in the blogsphere.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - The Survivor

2012-01-20T15:23:00.000-05:00

I'M GOING TO DISNEY WORLD

It used to be that you were supposed to win a Super Bowl before celebrating with a trip to Disney World as a public figure, but Obama can't stop doing his touchdown dances even as the country sinks faster. The similarities between Obama and Captain Francesco Schettino are a little too obvious.

The Captain ordering dinner as his ship is sinking and the elected leader of the United States partying on as the debt hits completely unsustainable levels are behaving the same way. Obama sinking the United States economy to do favors for his friends and Captain Schettino sinking a ship to wave to his buddy are the product of the same egotistical mentality.

If someone could just convince Obama that America was going down, then he would be on the first plane to wherever the good life is.

MUSLIM HATE GROUPS ON CAMPUS

My pamphlet on Muslim Brother hate groups on campus has been published and is available at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and Front Page Magazine. The campus Muslim Student Associations or MSA's are tied to a long history of Jihadist terror.

"Muslim Students Association leaders have gone on to become leading figures in terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda. Anwar al-Awlaki, for instance, was MSA president at Colorado State University before he became the leader of external operations for Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Ziyad Khaleel, was MSA president at Columbia College11 before he became Al-Qaeda’s procurement agent in the United States. Abu Mansoor al-Amriki, onetime MSA president at the University of South Alabama, is now the spokesman for the Al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia. Wa’el Hamza Julaidan was MSA president at the University of Arizona before he became a co-founder of Al-Qaeda.

Some former MSA presidents are in prison on terrorism charges or actively involved in illegal activities. Abdul Rahman Alamoudi, a former MSA national president, is serving a 23-year sentence for illegal transactions with a state sponsor of terrorism.

Ohio State University’s MSA used its publication MSANEWS to distribute terrorist bulletins from Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-Muhajiroun and even Osama Bin Laden. These bulletins included Bin Laden’s “Declaration of War” against the United States. (the introduction appended to Bin Laden’s words concluded: “Read and get ready for JIHAAD!!”) MSANEWS even maintained a special section dedicated to Bin Laden under its listing of “scholars,” which was featured on a CNN broadcast as an example of how Bin Laden used the Internet to spread his teachings. An MSANEWS bulletin from Al-Muhajiroun praised the Al-Qaeda attacks on American embassies in Africa, saying, “American interests are not safe anywhere in the world,” and “the Mujahideen will seek out and obliterate them into rubble as happened today.”

You can see the whole detailed write up in the pamphlet, Muslim Hate Groups on Campus. Anyone who cares about the Islamic intimidation of Jewish students and the radical activity of the Brotherhood on campus will find some interesting material here.

THE SURVIVOR

Whatever else Newt Gingrich is, he's a survivor. The establishment sank him once over Paul Ryan and he came back. It sank him a second time over Bain and once again he's back. A much hyped interview with his ex-wife hardly touched him no matter how often Drudge pushed the story.

With Perry out and Santorum lagging despite his apparent win in Iowa, Gingrich is pulling ahead as the Anti-Romney. Santorum still has a shot, but it's a longer haul and he may have been undermined by having a win stolen from him in Iowa. Had he emerged as the winner then there would have been a definite Anti-Romney going into South Carolina. Either man could cement the other's status by dropping out and endorsing the other, but that isn't too likely to happen soon.

Despite Gingrich's nine lives, the Marianne story shows that he needs to own his biography sooner rather than later. His debate position is entirely legitimate and popular, but at the same time he needs to find ways to connect his story to the grand ideas he's moving. Falling many times and still being able to get up again is a perfect metaphor for how many people see America today and for his own path. Being poor and achieving success would ground his talk of jobs over food stamps in a way that Romney can't.

Gingrich seems resistant to using his biography that way, but it's a time honored tradition in American politics and he will have to do it sooner rather than later. A humble biography helps offset the power of class warfare. Telling people that he doesn't come from diplomats and bank presidents, but hard working people is something he needs to do more often. And conceding that he has made mistakes and learned to overcome his weaknesses through faith and determination is something people need to hear, not necessarily right after a major scandal rollout, but during the campaign.

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION THROWING THINK PROGRESS UNDER THE BUS?

I wouldn't bet on it, but in a sign that Soros' Center for American Progress may have overreached in its attack on Jews, Jarrod Bernstein, the White House's liaison to the Jewish community tried to put some distance between CAP and the Obama Administration.

The problem is that the Center for American Progress is so closely linked to Obama that it's hard for Bernstein to plausibly pass off its views as distant. CAP has been the think tank for the administration.

"Cooper conveyed his concerns about CAP during a White House meeting last week with Obama’s newly appointed Jewish community liaison, Jarrod Bernstein, who told Cooper that the situation at CAP was “troubling” and not reflective of “this administration.”

Which means mainly that Jews have to be talked down this election.

The real issue is that the CAP boys began going after mainstream Jewish organizations for not being Anti-Israel and in one of their dumbest moves to date began bashing the Simon Wiesenthal Center. This is some of the blowback.

The National Jewish Democratic Council once again showed off its Uncle Tom stripes by defending CAP.

David Harris, president of the National Jewish Democratic Council, described CAP’s views on Israel and Iran as reflecting “mainstream positions and concerns of the American Jewish community — and indeed of most Americans.”

Clearly that's not true. CAP's views on Israel mirror those of Pat Buchanan. I went into more detail on this subject in my Front Page Magazine article, Soros Firsters Bash Israel.

The Center for American Progress is the brain of the Obama Administration, the think tank whose talking points feed back and forth out of the White House and into the media. Its attitude that anyone who defends Israel is the enemy speaks volumes about the ideological tenor in the highest offices of this government. Jilani and Gharib are at CAP because they fit its agenda and CAP fits the agenda of its corrupt billionaire backers. And it’s that agenda, more than the slurs of some of CAP’s bloggers who are doing the dirty work that they are paid to do, that should really worry anyone who cares about the future of this country and the free world.

George Soros has said, “It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” In 2003 we all began living out Soros’ power mad fantasies when he declared that the central focus of his life was to force Bush out of office. That same year the Center for American Progress came into being under the impetus and with the financial backing of America’s newest self-made god.

You can see the rest of the article at Front Page Magazine

VERY SERIOUSLY

Update: CAP has "responded" to the Washington Post under the subheader, "Organization Takes Charges of Anti-Semitism Very Seriously".

Taking charges very seriously is usually the corporate mea culpa right after you messed up big time and you realize that you're supposed to nod long enough to be able to move past this.

"The Center for American Progress is and always has been pro-Israel, committed to a peace process that produces a durable two-state solution negotiated by the parties..." is how the response begins.

This is how it ends. "It is disappointing that in spite of our clear record and our recent actions, we continue to face political attacks that attempt to discredit our entire body of work on critical national security issues."

Meanwhile the first article on the sidebar of the site is Matt Duss' "Talking to the Muslim Brotherhood (Finally)". The Brotherhood's spiritual leader has praised Hitler and called for exterminating the Jews.

This is what the Center for American Progress supports.

"The only thing that I hope for is that as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of Jihad and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah's enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life with martyrdom. Praise be to Allah."

And this...

Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption," he said. "The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them - even though they exaggerated this issue - he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers."

... is it any wonder that the Center for Un-American Progress declared war on the Anti-Nazi Simon Wiesenthal Center.

THE ROUNDUP

...but without the government there will be complete vending machine anarchy in Florida.

The Islamic Egyptian Revolution will be brought to you by European banks

Larry Sinclair to claim Obama broke up with him while he had Multiple Sclerosis and Cancer.

This Thursday I wrote a piece on revolution, this material from Western Rifle Shooters is a good companion to the strategy and technology of cultural warfare.

Magic jobs from the magic kingdom

Hamas wins. Democracy wins. It's the Obama way.

For those in LA, Andrew Bostom will be at the Luxe Hotel to give a talk on the Koranic roots of Anti-Semitism. Be sure to check it out.

No buildup in the Gulf.

The race card is too big to fail.

The Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign has a Cultural Boycott Officer. Those Nazis sure love their titles.

Hate crime alert: Murderous madman's house burns down.

Tell the truth about Hamas. Get stabbed.

You got your Communists in my election.

China + Saudi Arabia + Nukes = What could go wrong?

So You Want a Revolution...

2012-01-18T23:49:00.003-05:00

The lawyer has more in common with the prosecutor than he does with his clients and Republican and Democratic politicians have more in common with each other than they do with the people who come out to support them and vote for them. The hopes of ordinary people for the future, their ability to earn a living and their fears are only a job to the politician.

This doesn't mean that politicians are villains, only that like the police officer and the ER nurse, other people's urgent calls are just another day at work for them. Mediating them and dealing with them day in and day out gives them a different perspective that is detached from the present and rooted in the realities of their profession.

The police officer and the nurse know that everything is an emergency, that everyone has problems all the time and that it's never really the end of the world. Cynicism comes with the job. So does seeing the people they encounter as foolish folk who have trouble taking care of themselves and have to come to them for help. That detachment leaves them with more in common with those who walk on the night side of human events than it does with the people who come to them for help.

Professional politics breeds cynicism more thoroughly than spending your nights answering domestic abuse calls or patching together the victims of drunken brawls. Like them politics is a profession founded on idealism, but the idealism in much harder to sustain because it rarely survives the first practice of professional politics. It's possible to work in the ER or patrol the late nights streets of an urban city without losing the belief that medicine and law enforcement are noble professions, but continuing to believe that politics is a noble profession after a year in congress is all but impossible.

Politics is a profession with a practice that runs completely counter to its ideals. The best politicians believe nothing they say. Whatever commitments they make to the voters are left behind once they enter the white halls of government. Like police officers who are forced to become criminals in order to do their job right, they discover that the practice of their profession requires the comprehensive corruption of their ideals. Only by discarding their principles and commitments can they actually get the things they want to do done.

The successful politician does not believe in absolutes except when he is delivering a speech intended for the ears of the voters, what he knows to be true is that everyone has a price at which a bargain can be made. For all that the image of legislators and executives is of men and women standing against marble backgrounds and taking a stand, the real life version is of a bazaar where everyone is trying to make a deal while doing their best to be outraged by the other side's offer.

"Forty billion dollars for clean energy subsidies? Ridiculous. My family will starve and my children will have to beg in the streets! Forty-two billion? Now that's more reasonable. Make it forty-three and I'll give you that cowboy poetry festival and steel tariff you wanted."

Think of Washington D.C. and every state capital and every local bunch of elected officials as a Middle Eastern bazaar and you come close to the truth. And while this system works well enough when stocks are limited, when the merchants can dispose of unlimited assets that they don't own and drive their constituents deep into debt to pay for their latest deals, then the real nightmare arrives.

The right has spent a lot of time trying to win elections and sent a lot of horse traders to Washington, and for the most part missed the point of what the left had done. The left does not win elections all that often and even its prize politicians are generally not as left as they pretend to be. What the left did was take over institutions and set the base exchange price in the bazaar that politicians from both sides had to meet. That base price became the "moderate" consensus that everyone has to abide by.

Shifting the exchange price allows the left to control what deals get made. It takes certain products entirely off the table. Mainstream positions from ten years ago become too extreme even for the GOP and completely unacceptable positions that no mainstream Democrat would have run on ten years ago become the consensus. This doesn't happen because anyone takes a vote. Most votes just push through whatever the consensus is.

Politics is based around a consensus. The left does not operate on a consensus, it is a revolutionary movement and it works by subverting the consensus and presenting its revolutionary position as the new consensus. All that is left for the politicians then is to affirm the new consensus. This has happened over and over again in the lifetimes of even the youngest person reading this article and the process has been accelerating lately because it is a revolutionary process.

There are two types of conservative politicians. Gatekeepers and revolutionaries. The gatekeepers are consensus builders, they talk a great deal about traditional values, and are elected to keep change out. This defensive strategy is a dead end because the real changes are happening outside the direct purview of the gatekeepers, who usually lack the imagination and courage to do anything about them. When the left pushes hard enough, the gatekeepers fold and add the new order of things into their panoply of American values.

The gatekeepers will put up a vigorous show of fighting gay marriage and then ten years later they will proclaim gay marriage as the embodiment of our family values. They will make a great show of fighting Global Warming legislation, and then five years later they will say that our courage to confront climate change is the deepest sign of our values of responsibility for the world around us.

Gatekeepers often don't believe anything they say. They believe some of it, but not very vehemently, and they lack the imagination to think of anything else. Expecting them to intelligently counter the left's cultural warfare is absolutely hopeless. At their best they put on a superior smirk and dismiss it as ridiculous, only to concede when the debate has flanked them and the voters are no longer firmly in their traditional corner.

The Republican Party is full of gatekeepers. There are a great many of them who have been defending traditional values and will go on defending traditional values, even though they cannot begin to explain what traditional values are and why they defend them except in circular self-defining terms. Traditional values and American exceptionalism are their goal and as the goal posts keep moving, so do they.

Revolutionaries are rarer. They are dangerous and explosive. Sometimes they are erratic. They are full of ideas, determined and unwilling to compromise. They rarely make good politicians, but sometimes they make very explosive ones. Find the political leader whom the rest of the party hates and can't wait to get rid of for his obstructionism and sabotage of the gatekeeper agenda, and you may have found a revolutionary.

The revolutionaries cannot transform this mess or turn back the clock solely through their elected office, but they can dismantle the power bases of the other side and they can support and help create counterbalancing institutions. But their most valuable contribution is a refusal to accept the consensus, they refuse to do business at the exchange price set for them by the left.

There are few things more powerful and liberating than spitting in the face of authority, tearing down the sacred symbols and violation the taboos of those in power. In a democracy political power is based on a consensus. Defying that consensus, trivializing that consensus and walking all over it gets you called an extremist, but if you do it right then you have weakened the psychological power of the establishments over the minds of men.

Defiance is the fundamental virtue of the revolutionary. The left defied the accepted norms and values of America, and that defiance paved the way for a cultural revolution. The power of the left will never be broken until the right defies their values and norms the same way. Until it publicly destroys, mocks and violates everything that they consider sacred in the spirit of revolution.

Revolutions begin as culture wars against the established order and they connect cultural defiance to political change. The fundamental message of every revolution is a defiance of authority and if the revolution succeeds then those in power are forced to give way and accede to change. It can be done. That populist spirit is out there, it is abroad in the Tea Party, it is there in blogs and social media, and even occasionally on talk radio. But all that goes to waste empowering a political establishment of gatekeepers who sometimes talk like revolutionaries, but don't act like revolutionaries.

In a New York Times book review, Sheri Berman wondered, "Why, in an era of extreme unemployment, rising inequality and social dislocation, is it the right rather than the left that generated a movement like the Tea Party? Why are mass protests railing against tax increases rather than demanding more progressive and activist government?"

The answer is transparently obvious. Because it is the left that is in power. Why bother demanding an activist and progressive government when we already have one of those? At most the left can demand a "more" activist and progressive government, but how enthusiastic can protesters be about calling for more authority and more power for the existing system? That is why OWS was basically incoherent, it was little more than a loincloth for the naked emperor already sitting on his throne and looking for the plebes to cry out for more chains.

The revolution of the left is the stratified revolution of Barack Obamas and Elizabeth Warrens, greedy political activists feeding at the watering hole of government and crying out for more. More power. More laws. More chains. Parse the rhetoric and all you get is the powerful demanding that we give them more power. This revolution of the greedy and corrupt would already be dead if it had not used the momentum of its ideological fervor to embed itself into every institution and seize control of the educational system and the cultural dialogue to program succeeding generations to give it even more power.

The time is ripe for a true cultural and political revolution of the right, but that revolution has been hijacked over and over again by the gatekeepers who warn us that it's time to play nice, that we must think of the long game, that some issues have already been lost and we need to fight only for the core issues that matter to them lest we alienate people. The long march never ends in a last stand, only another tactical withdrawal on issue after issue.

The establishment, which does not care about anything but its very narrow agenda of limited deregulation while protecting some forms of spending that benefit them, will win or lose again, without making too much of a difference. Even if it loses then there will be enough votes in congress to get some of what it wants done and the money will be there to try again with an even more content free candidate who will preach a form of American exceptionalism and traditional values absolutely indistinguishable from the political positions of President Clinton, or by then maybe even Obama.

Every time we bow our heads to the consensus, self-censor ourselves to stay within our prison bars and execute another tactical withdrawal to fight for some last vestige of our program that really matters, the power of the left continues to grow.

The power of the left is not political. Its political power is the least of what it is. It leverages its cultural dominance to enforce a political consensus. It uses its grip on power through government and non-governmental institutions to impose regulations and laws that politicians from both parties end up signing on to. It is an establishment, an incarnation of the power and privilege of a fossilized ideology built to destroy the country, but leveraged to give its leading members and some of its base a taste of the really good life while the whole edifice of civilization slides down the cliff.

It is important to elect conservative politicians, even feeble ones, not because they are good for anything, but because at the least they can serve as sandbags against the tide. The sandbags will not stop the tide, but they might slow it down. It is vitally important to elect revolutionary conservatives who don't just deliver platitudes, but show that they have the fire in their bellies to confront the left. And it is even more important to undermine the values and institutions of the left. It can be difficult to undermine institutions, but anyone can undermine the values of the left by saying the politically incorrect thing.

Revolutions begin with an open contempt for and anger at the existing order. The left knows that. It is why it fears talk radio and populism more than it fears the latest set of dapper gatekeepers we send to the Senate. The contempt and anger are here, the more they go public, the more the power of the left is shaken. And the next step is to expand the cultural war to a specific disrespect and hostility for the values and sacred cows of the left. Then to challenge their institutions and regulations. And then real political change can begin with candidates who are revolutionaries because they believe it, or because they are operating under a new paradigm that is outside the left's manufactured consensus.

Most of the elements are already in place. The consensus establishment is making its last stand, but it is fading. It is now a race between shaping public anger into a vehicle for political change and the speed at which the left is transforming and fragmenting the country to prevent a political revolution of the right from ever coming about. May we be swift for if the left wins the race then it is the end of America.

Fact Check: Why Rick Perry is Right About Turkey

2012-01-17T23:21:00.000-05:00

Fact checkers and truth squads are the media's latest tool for blurring the line between the editorial page and the new page. The ubiquitous fact checks are editorializing dressed up as verification. While on some occasions there are actual facts to verify, for the most part the fact checks defend a partisan liberal viewpoint on a particular issue.

So no sooner did Rick Perry suggest that Turkey had no place in NATO and that some perceive its government to be run by Islamic terrorists than the media rolled out its fact checks. In the spirit of fact checking the fact checkers, let's have a fact check of our own.

CNN Statement: "Turkey is not ruled by Islamic terrorists. It is led by a party with Islamist roots, the Justice and Freedom Party, or AKP."

Those are the facts according to CNN's Truth Squad, which took its name from a certain book by George Orwell. But let's look at the actual facts.

The Facts: The AKP emerged out of a series of banned Islamist political movements. CNN's Lie Squad mentions that the AKP's current leader of Turkey Erdogan was banned for reading an Islamic poem in public. It neglects to mention the content of the poem.

"The minarets are our bayonets; the domes are our helmets. Mosques are our barracks, the believers are soldiers. This holy army guards my religion. Almighty, Our journey is our destiny, the end is martyrdom."

It also neglects to mention the context in which it was read, at protests that were being conducted by Islamists after their Welfare Party was disqualified. Erdogan was not jailed for reading an Islamic poem, he was jailed for reading a poem calling for a violent Islamic overthrow of the government.

Erdogan was specifically convicted of "inciting hatred based on religious differences." There's quite a difference between noting that Erdogan was convicted of Islamic bigotry and just writing that he was convicted for reading an Islamic poem. Would CNN write equally vaguely that David Irving was put on trial for writing a book?

What exactly was the Welfare Party? It was an Islamist party under Prime Minister Erbakan, Erdogan's Islamist predecessor. Erbakan gave some of his thoughts to the press a few years ago in which he explained that the Jews run the world, organized the Crusades, control all the money and created the Protestant Church.

The AKP's leaders emerged out of Erbakan's Milli Görüs based movements. Another group that emerged out of Milli Görü is IHH which has been designated as a terrorist group by the United States government and has ties to Al Qaeda. Erdogan maintains close ties to IHH and his son is a member.

Erdogan has his own Al Qaeda connections. Yasin Al-Qadi, who funneled millions to Al Qaeda is a close friend and though his assets have been frozen worldwide, he enjoys a safe haven in Turkey. The co-founder of the AKP party, Erdogan's senior and advisor and right hand man, Cuneyt Zapsu gave Al Qaeda a mere 300,000 dollars.

Mohammed Fatih al-Hassanein, the head of an Al Qaeda front charity who helped shelter Bin Laden, met privately with Erdogan and the local Al Qaeda franchise has an office in Turkey where it puts out its propaganda magazine.

So while technically Erdogan and Gul are not going out and planting bombs, they have close ties to those who do and they support them. Islamist parties have gone two routes. They have infiltrated the political system when possible and when impossible they have turned to terrorism. Erdogan's poem made it quite clear that he was contemplating the latter. Had the AKP not succeeded then Erdogan might be giving orders to plant bombs in public places. Since it did he instead supports terrorist groups like Hamas.

Is it inaccurate to say that Turkey is ruled by people perceived by some as Islamic terrorists? Some inside Turkey even perceive the AKP that way. Can AKP leaders be described as Islamic terrorists? A co-founder and a board member of the AKP is an Al Qaeda donor. Erdogan protected a leading Al Qaeda moneyman who was designated as a terrorist by just about every government and law enforcement agency on the planet.

Responding to Perry the Turkish Foreign Ministry sneered that Turkey had been in NATO when Perry was two years old. Which is a nice line, but that Turkey no longer exists. Erdogan's AKP controlled system has purged the military with the claim the claim of a vast conspiracy that makes Stalin's Moscow Trials seem credible. Comparing the Turkey of then to the present day is like comparing the Germany which joined the League of Nations in 1926 to Adolf Hitler's Germany. Turkey still has the same name, but it is no longer the same country, instead it's an Islamic empire.

Finally does Turkey belong in NATO? Aside from its terrorist flirtations, there is Turkey's continued occupation of Cyprus. The Republic of Cyprus is an EU member, a third of whose territory is occupied by Turkish settlers. Turkish ethnic cleansing of the native peoples of Cyprus remains a blot on NATO along with the numerous other atrocities that have been carried out and continued to be carried out by the Turkish state.

In addition to Turkey's genocide of Armenians, there is its continued repression of its Kurdish population. The Turkish state holds tens of thousands of political prisoners, many of them for the mere crime of speaking their native language. Turkish forces have repeatedly invaded Iraqi Kurdistan, massacring the civilian population and are even suspected of using chemical weapons.

Hundreds of Kurdish children sit in Turkish jail for merely participating in political protests. The members of a Kurdish children's choir which visited San Francisco and sang a Kurdish folk song were put on trial. Their choir director has an arrest warrant still out for her and remained in the United States.

Does a brutal regime that oppresses its own population, occupies the territory of an EU member state and supports terrorists belong in NATO?

Is there any reasonable person who is not a member of the press or a diplomat who really thinks that it does? Take a look at a list of NATO members like Canada, the United States, Portugal, Norway and Turkey... and see which one doesn't belong on that list.

The only reason why Turkey became part of NATO was because of Cold War strategic geography. But the Soviet Union is gone and today's Turkey is aligned with Iran and other Islamic states that we are likely to end up fighting one day.

While the media continues claiming that the AKP is moderate, its own history and alliances show otherwise. Moderate governments do not stack jails full of political prisoners, they do not conduct an occupation of an EU member state, they do not make common cause with terrorists or endorse Islam over the rights of all citizens.

Telling the truth about Erdogan and the AKP is about more than condemning a gang of Islamst thugs who have used Saudi money to seize control of what was once the most modern Muslim country. It is also about affirming the rights of its victims, the native people of Cyprus, and the Armenians and the Kurds. It is about standing up for the values of freedom and democracy over the terror and tyranny of a man who wants to turn Turkey into another Iran.

CNN along with the New York Times and much of the rest of the media has chosen to repeat the same tiresome lies. Maybe for once their fact checks should actually involve using the facts.

The Society for the Protection of Iranian Nuclear Scientists

2012-01-16T23:05:00.004-05:00

After having exhausted the indignant possibilities of protesting the extinction of whales, pelicans and polar bears, the left has found a new endangered species to be outraged about. Iranian nuclear scientists. It's one thing to hug a polar bear or a tree, but it's another to embrace an Iranian nuclear scientist, who may well be a jolly and colorful fellow with a family and a paint by numbers coloring kit of an atom, but also happens to be a participant in a plot to kill millions of people.

The left which has all the moral sense of a squashed peanut would like us to feel outraged because someone somewhere has been knocking off the engineers of death in a project whose goal is genocide. Yet if you point out to them that just last week a member of the Iranian backed Hezbollah terrorist group was arrested in Thailand for plotting a terrorist attack, you can wait a week until they shrug.

At The Atlantic, Ali Vaez and Charles Ferguson assure us that assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists makes a nuclear Iran more likely. The left specializes in irrational conundrums like this. Every time we kill a terrorist, they lecture us that this will only lead to more Muslims turning into terrorists to take their place. But really now are we to believe that Muslims will respond to the deaths of nuclear scientists by becoming nuclear scientists? Even if they do it will take them a while to get their degrees and by then Iran may not be run by a bunch of homicidal loons.

Meanwhile the same left which insists that Ahmadinejad didn't really say he wanted to destroy Israel and which spent years arguing that there was no real evidence that Bin Laden was behind September 11, has already decided that Israel was responsible. Their proof so far is an Israeli Brigadier General's Facebook comment that whoever did it, he isn't shedding a tear. If that's the left's standard of proof then I am clearly guilty of the murder of Bin Laden, Iranian nuclear scientists and anyone else whose death I haven't shed any tears for.

At the Guardian, some fellow whose last name is Hassan and looks rather angry about something, vehemently denounces the killings as "state sponsored terror". Iran knows a thing or two about state sponsored terror, considering that it is a state whose chief export besides, oil and heroin, is terrorism. Assuming that some state was sponsoring terror against Iran, it would be that "blowback" business which deep thinkers on international affairs love to bring up in conversations about September 11.

It's hard to think of any regime has more blowback coming to it than Iran. The Ayatollahs sponsor terrorism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Israel and occasional detours into Asia and Latin America. Once such bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires killed 85 people and wounded 300 more. People who were not engaged in researching new ways to wipe another ethnic group off the face of the earth.

If there's any place on earth that exceeds the Guardian and the Atlantic as a rubbish dump for moldy leftectuals, it's Israel's own Haaretz where Avner Cohen asks breathlessly, What if the Iranians start killing Israeli scientists? If Avner Cohen's father was as bright as him, then around the time that Lil Avner was in diapers, he asked his wife, "What if you get an abortion?"

Sure the Iranians have been killing Israeli road repairmen and kindergarten teachers through their proxy terrorist groups, but just imagine if they start killing Israeli scientists. Next thing you know people in the Middle East will start serving pita. Avner imagines that Israeli scientists have had some immunity until now. Their only immunity has been that Iran didn't care which Jews it killed, so long as someone named Moshe or David ended up splattered all over a wall somewhere. But Avner Cohen need not be too concerned that a member of the Revolutionary Guard will show up in his hotel room. A fellow as useful as him is not going to be on any target lists in Tehran.

Like so many of his colleagues, Avner Cohen doesn't seem to understand what genocide means or that the Ayatollahs and their henchmen actually mean it. This bubble of privilege is what makes their idiocy so repulsive. Like Michael Moore wondering on September 11 why Al Qaeda didn't bomb a state that voted for Bush, Cohen probably believes that the Iranian backed terrorists might take out a settler or two, or maybe one of those brown Mizrahi fellows who aren't clever enough to get out of the draft, but they would never touch a man with an MA in Philosophy and a PhD in the History of Culture.

The common consensus among the fellows of SPINS or the Society for the Protection of Iranian Nuclear Scientists is that killing Iranian nuclear scientists will only encourage Iran to develop nuclear weapons... which in any case they are doing anyway. The SPINS position is that if we keep trying to stop Iran's nuclear program, that will sabotage any efforts to talk Iran out of having a nuclear program. If the talks work half as well as they did in North Korea, then perhaps they are better off being sabotaged.

If not killing Iranian nuclear scientists leads Iran to continue developing its nuclear program and if killing them also leads it to continue developing its nuclear program, then we might as well plink some PhD's and see what happens. Punching a hole in the organizational charts of mass murderers seems like a better plan than waiting for them to realize that they don't need plutonium, all they really need is love.

Prattling about violations of Iranian sovereignty, when discussing a regime that violates the sovereignty of other states the way that other countries pick a national bird, is a waste of time even by the low standards of diplomatic breast beating. The Ayatollahs and their pet lunatic Mahmoud can't even share power among themselves, and their grip on power is a violation of their own laws and in opposition to the will of their own people. They are entitled to as much respect of their sovereignty as they can fit in a bucket and put on their heads.

It's unknown who or what is going through Iranian scientists and Revolutionary Guard commanders like used tissues, but it doesn't really matter. Since its grim early days this regime has lived on terror and it remains in power only through terror, through the murder, torture and rape of its political dissidents. With a tanking economy and dissent at home, it only has one thing to offer to its fanatical base. Mass murder.

It's not just the Israelis who don't want to see Ayatollah Atomica. Few of Iran's neighbors are too enthusiastic about the idea. Neither is Europe which doesn't particularly like the idea that the next time Salman Rushdie publishes a book that infuriates some holy beardo browsing the Guardian's book reviews in between doses of Hashish, the furious Islamist book critics will be able to threaten a radioactive review.

If worst comes to worst, a nuclear weapon would be the final doomsday option for a regime that is increasingly unpopular in some of its largest cities. There is nothing like taking out a section of Tehran to see to it that the Ayatollahs don't end up like a certain Libyan colonel. It may be hard for many of Iran's defenders to imagine a regime that would do this to its own people, except for the Bush Administration which they always believed was capable of anything.

At Salon, a site that most people assumed stopped operating around the time Clinton was in office, the always excitable Glenn Greenwald shrieked, "Does anyone have any doubt whatsoever that if Iran were sending hit squads to kill Israeli scientists in Tel Aviv, or was murdering a series of American scientists at Los Alamos that those acts would be universally denounced as Terrorism, and the only debate would be whether the retaliation should be nuclear, carpet-bombing, or invasion?"

Greenwald would probably prefer all three and as soon as possible to happen to Tel Aviv, but Iranian backed hit squads have been killing non-scientist Americans and Israelis for decades now, without nuclear carpets being bombed or invaded. Like most bigots, Greenwald is also an idiot who assumes that there is a double standard that is weighed against his favorite killers when it actually goes the other way.

Iran has gotten a blank check on decades of terror. If someone has finally written in a name and a number and is depositing the check, then it's a matter of Iran earning 0.000001 percent interest on its campaign of domestic and international religious terror.

At the Daily Beast, Andrew Sullivan, who is still under the impression that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has a fatwa permitting gay marriage in his drawer which he will publish when Sullivan has written enough columns demonizing Israel, asks "Is not the group or nation responsible for the murder of civilians in another country terrorists?" This is either the opening of a postmodern Shakespearean soliloquy or the world's dumbest moral dilemma.

Assuming that we define people obtaining Zyklon B for the gas chambers and Plutonium for the reactors as civilians and define killing them as terrorism, then we certainly are in a bit of a bind. But then again anyone who equates the random murder of civilians and the assassination of genocide conspirators has an anal fixation on categories while lacking basic moral reasoning skills and common sense.

If killing nuclear scientists serving the atomic production of a genocidal state is terrorism, then some of the worst terrorists were the OSS, the intelligence agency which directed its agent to make contact with Werner Heisenberg, then heading up Nazi Germany's nuclear program and kill him if there were any indications that Germany was close to having the bomb. Heisenberg never did bite the bullet, but did claim after the war that Nazi Germany had only wanted nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, while the Allies used it as a weapon of mass destruction. It's a lovely soliloquy that only a Sullivan or a Greenwald could believe.

Not that all the empty talk amounts to anything but column inches. It's not as if we actually know who is doing this, why they are doing this and when they will turn it into a movie of the week. That won't stop the SPINS gang from spinning their centrifuges and explaining why Israel and America are the real terrorists because everyone knows they did it. And by everyone they mean themselves.

What the tender soliloquies of SPINS members for dead Iranian nuclear scientists really show are the relative values placed on the lives of members of the Iranian war machine and those of their victims. There is no deep moral theorizing when an Iranian IED blows off the leg of an Iowa boy or a Hezbollah shell lands on an Israel kindergarten. That bottled outrage is only released when a Hamas terrorist loses a right of way argument with an attack helicopter or an Al Qaeda cleric takes a magic carpet ride via a flying drone.

Iranian nuclear scientists aren't the only ones who have children. There are cities filled with children that will be the targets of a Shiite bomb. Cities with Jewish children, Christian children and even the Muslim children that SPINS members claim to care so much about. If a few Iranian nuclear scientists experiencing a much more compact and limited explosion than the kind that they would unleash can help preserve those cities and those children then so be it. A few technicians of death are a small price to pay for the lives of millions.

War in the Gulf - An Analysis

2012-01-15T23:38:00.000-05:00

If a war begins in the neighborhood of the Persian Gulf, it will likely have less to do with a slugging match between Israel and Iran, than a simmering Sunni-Shiite war that is about to flare up into regional violence through a combination of factors dating back decades and recent events in the region.

The rise of a fanatically violent Shiite Islamist state has done more to destabilize the region than anything else. As much as Sunni Arabs prattle on about Zionist conspiracies, a few million Jews sandwiched in a narrow strip of land against the Mediterranean are no threat to them. But a rival version of Islam that is spearheaded by a non-Arab ethnic group and placed at the service of a powerful military machine and an oil economy is what keeps them up at night.

The fall of Saddam put Iraq up for grabs and raised the prospect of a Shiite superstate with a vast military and massive oil reserves. It also tipped Syria and its leftover Baath Party run by a variant Shiite sect directly into Tehran's paws. Add nuclear weapons to the Iran-Iraq-Syria trinity and you are looking at the worst nightmare of every Sunni Arab prince living in polished oil mansions near what he still insists on calling the Arabian Gulf.

A Shiite superstate will checkmate the Sunni oil monarchies and leave them no choice but to beg America to garrison them with so many troops, air bases and nuclear missiles that they might as well be the 51'st through 59th states. Using foreign soldiers to protect themselves isn't all that objectionable to the fat lazy oil monarchies who already use armies of foreigners to do everything for them. But the American troops who saved the Saudis and Kuwaitis from Saddam also gave Bin Laden a pretext for trying to overthrow them.

The Gulf Sunni Arab princelings know that a massive infusion of American troops will bring out more Bin Ladens, and even the American military hierarchy which knows to salaam to the princes will lose patience fast when the Khobar Towers bombing repeats itself enough times. Americans fighting Gulfies will quickly turn their countries into another Afghanistan. On top of that the Americans won't stay there forever.

The Gulfies could develop competent armies, but no Muslim state trusts its own military. If all those billions and billions in state of the art American military equipment were put into the hands of competent generals, instead of the cousins and nephews of the royal family, then very shortly the generals would be running the country. And even if they could trust the generals, the locals have no reliable military tradition except as caravan raiders and have gotten a little too used to the good life to fight for any other reason than an outburst of Koranic fanaticism by the third son of the family.

The Persians have a long proud military tradition. The Egyptians and the Syrians picked up something from their European colonizers. But the Gulfies are not good for much except beating their Filipino maids and getting high on hashish before blowing themselves up to get to paradise. The Iranian military even in its current state would clean their clocks faster than you could say Alakazam and they know it.

What the Gulfies lack in military skills, they more than make up for in underhanded cunning. If they can't import an infidel army and they can't build a worthwhile military of their own that's good for something besides intimidating Shiite protesters in Bahrain, then they will find a counterbalance to the enemy. The Gulfies have been nurturing the Muslim Brotherhood and funding Al-Jazeera. Combine the two with an American administration eager to win over the Muslim world by reforming American foreign policy and the Gulfies got their own Arab Spring.

The real purpose of the Arab Spring was to create a Sunni Islamist superstate or regional alliance to counter the threat of a Shiite Islamist superstate. With the Muslim Brotherhood sweeping across North Africa all the way to Egypt, the harvest includes semi-secular states with competent armies and if Syria can be tipped into that camp, then Iran will lose its puppet and the Sunni superstate will have a military tipped with top of the line American and Russian equipment, funded by Gulfie oil money and backed by the lunatic fanaticism of Islamist fighters.

With America in decline, the Gulfies touched off the Arab Spring to create Janissary armies, but this time composed of devout Muslims, to keep the Shiites at bay. Iran pushed back contesting Saudi influenced territory in Bahrain and the Emir of Qatar is demanding that his slaves in Washington get cracking and "liberate" Syria for membership in the Sunni Caliphate.

That just leaves one wild card. Not Libya, which has been swung into the Sunni Islamist camp the hard way with NATO jets and Libyan Islamic Fighting Group terrorists. Not Turkey, which has repressed the last of its secular military and is pushing for Sunni regime change in Syria. The regional wild card is the only non-Muslim state in the area. Israel.

The theological relationship of Sunni and Shiite Islamists to Israel is murderous. The ascendance of Mohammed and the triumph of his Caliph successors was supposed to put an end to an independent Jewish existence. The triumph of Islam was directly measured through the subjugation of Christians and Jews. As the more apocalyptic of the duo, the Shiites would like to wipe Israel out to showcase their own private little armageddon. Turning the Jewish state into dust, or at least its inhabitants, would help lock in their case to being the rightful successors of their genocidal prophet who had purged the Jews from his part of the desert.

The Sunnis tend to be more patient. They want Israel gone, but they also recognize it as a valuable pawn in their own games. Rather than being a disruptive influence on the region, like Iran, it's a unifying force that gives Muslims a common enemy and a common aspiration. Israel is a theological enemy, but useful in practice. And whatever happens they cannot allow the Shiites to wipe it out. Like comic book supervillains, they have to be the one to kill the superhero or their existence is meaningless.

Whoever is blowing up Iranian nuclear scientists and facilities, it isn't likely to be roving teams of Mossad agents, most likely it's Iran's own internal divisions being exploited by some combination of Western intelligence, Israeli intelligence and the intermediaries between the locals carrying out the attacks and foreign intelligence agencies who are almost certainly Iran's own neighbors.

Israel may not even be involved in the attacks. It suits the Sunnis to have their Zionist boogeyman and it suits Israel to be the boogeyman. The Sunnis get their conspiracy theories about Jewish power and Israel gets the deterrent effect of being seen as able to strike anywhere at any time.

For all the noise recently coming out of Tehran it is doubtful that the regime really believes Israel is responsible. The traditional Iranian response to Israeli domestic activities is to round up and string up members of the local Jewish community. That hasn't happened yet. For that matter if the regime really believed that gangs of Israeli agents were freely roaming its streets and wiping out key personnel then heads would be rolling within its own security forces on a daily basis. That hasn't happened either.

Who is actually carrying out the attacks? The list of suspects is endless because the Iranian regime has plenty of domestic opponents and is internally divided against itself. Paranoia is routine in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, some of whose commanders might profit from making the nuclear program more expensive to develop. Between ethnic minorities, political opponents and internal traitors, the list is nearly endless.

If the Gulfies are involved, directly or indirectly, then the explosions serve their purpose. They fear an Iranian nuke as much as Israel does and they also want to avert a direct war. A massive Israeli operation will turn Iran into the victim and fingers will be pointed at Sunni Arab states which will be forced to explain how Israeli jets were able to overfly their territory. An American strike will require them to lend their bases to an assault on a Muslim state, which will lead to even more of a backlash.

With the Arab Spring becoming an Islamic Winter the Gulfies are playing for time. On the one hand they want the United States to hold back any Israeli attacks until they approve, on the other they want to sabotage and undermine Iran long enough for a Sunni Islamist coalition to be strong enough to hold back any Iranian threats. If Iran is to have nukes, the Gulfies want them first and they want them in the hands of people that even Tehran's Ayatollahs will be afraid of. Not the Israelis, who are fairly liberal, but Wahhabis who view Shiites as infidels and would have no problem pushing the button.

A nuclear stalemate between two fanatical branches of the same religion is bad enough, even if you think that nuclear winter might be a myth, but Muslim states often divert themselves from direct armed confrontations by competing for status in wars against fully authentic infidels.

Bin Laden established his bona fides by flying jets into American skyscrapers. Iran does it by bombing Israelis. A nuclear standoff between Sunnis and Shiites would most likely end with nuclear weapons exploding in non-Muslim cities. Potential targets include Tel Aviv, New York and Moscow. Potential attackers would include any of the numerous Sunni and Shiite Muslim terrorist groups being funded by Iran and Saudi Arabia which have developed into worldwide networks.

The first act of mass destruction carried out against Westerners was done by a Sunni terrorist group. The next one might be done by a Shiite group, just as a matter of competitiveness and because the United States is closely aligned with the Saudis and the rest of the Gulfies. While a nuclear standoff might result in a repetition of the Iran-Iraq War, it is more likely to result in another September 11 but on a much more massive scale.

War in the Gulf might still come, but the Gulfies have a history of fighting a different kind of war. That war can be seen in the No Go Zones of European cities, the economic sabotage and terrorism. For the moment they would like to avoid that direct confrontation and they might succeed, but the long term costs of standing by while a Sunni Shiite nuclear arms race takes off may be more than we can even begin to imagine.

Out of Options in Egypt

2012-01-14T23:33:00.002-05:00

Back during the early days of the Tahrir Square protests I wrote, "59 percent of Egyptian Muslims want democracy and 95 percent want Islam to play a large part in politics. 84 percent believe apostates should face the death penalty. That is what Egyptian democracy will look like. A unanimous majority that wants an Islamic state and a bare majority that wants democracy. Which one do you think will win out? A democratic majority of the country supports murdering people in the name of Islam. Mubarak's government does not execute apostates or adulterers. But a democratic Egypt will. Why? Because it's the will of the people."

Here we are almost a year later and we have gotten the democratic Egypt that anyone who understood the realities of the region should have expected. An Egyptian parliament divided between the Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a country divided between the Islamists who want to chop off heads now and the Islamists who think that it's wiser to consolidate their power before chopping off heads.

The purpose of this article is not to berate the leftists and leftover neo-conservatives who supported the overthrow of Mubarak in the name of democracy. It's a waste of breath and time. Ideologues who are committed to an ideology that explains the world in a way that seems moral and right do not stop what they are doing just because the consequences are disastrous.

Now they want us to intervene in Syria. Who else wants us to intervene in Syria? The Emir of Qatar, better known as the man behind Al Jazeera, which pushed the whole Arab Spring lie into an international myth to overthrow non-Islamist regimes across the region. The Emir is tipping his hand a little transparently by calling for troops to invade Syria instead of sitting back and letting his Al-Jazeera propagandists do the hard work of selling the West on an independent democracy movement, but the pro-democracy crowd isn't paying attention.

They didn't pay attention no matter how many times they were told that the Muslim Brotherhood was the dominant force behind the "pro-democracy uprising" and that they would be the beneficiaries if Mubarak were overthrown. It was all just noise to them. Democracy would conquer all and the same Twitter activists they were so chummy with would write the new constitution.

So here we are down the long road and Egyptian democracy wears a sword and a burqa. "I've got to hand it to the MB. They have played this revolution like a fiddle. And still do. Brilliant work." That quote comes from Sandmonkey, one of the favorite activists of a lot of the bloggers and pundits endorsing the removal of Mubarak. There's no more room for illusions. Supporting the removal of Mubarak was a mistake and it's time to admit it and look at the available options.

Option 1. Pretend the Muslim Brotherhood or some wing of it is moderate. This is the approach on the left which is busy explaining that the Muslim Brotherhood is our best hope for restraining the Salafists and that the moderate Salafists are the best hope for restraining the extremist Salafists. These are the people who locked up with a tribe of cannibals would start diving the cannibals into moderates and extremists, and feeding the moderates their own fingers to keep the extremists at bay.

Option 2. Pretend that the Brotherhood will comply with the Democratic process long enough for Egyptian liberals to get their act together and start winning elections. Let's call this strategy reading Locke to the cannibal tribe. And it comes from the same people who thought El Baradei would be ushering in a new age of democracy in Egypt right about now.

Option 3. Back the Egyptian military and support their use of whatever means necessary to stay in power and exercise absolute power. Not a pretty sentence I know. It means backing the people behind the virginity tests and plenty of things uglier than that. It means doing what we were doing all along, backing Arab dictators who sneer at human rights and rob the country blind. It's also the only option on the table.

Now I don't just mean it's the only option on the table if you're worried about the rise of Islamists and the transformation of Egypt into another Iran. I mean it's the only option that actually exists.

You can support the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian military, or El Baradei and a magic troop of dancing democracy gnomes, and the end result will still be another dictatorship backed by a secret police that terrorizes dissidents and robs the country blind. That's the only form of government that exists across the Muslim world.

There are minor variations in this form of government. In Iran the oligarchy that runs the country and robs it blind is explicitly Islamic. In Egypt it's military. In Turkey it's a group of Islamist tycoons. In Afghanistan it's a bunch of warlords. The details don't matter that much, except that the Islamists use some of that money they steal to finance terrorism against us and they're usually more repressive than the secular or semi-secular alternative.

There is no option on the list that turns Egypt into a secular state with respect for human rights. It was never going to happen. It's not going to happen now. If the Muslim Brotherhood does put the military in its place and takes complete control, then it will just be one oligarchy replacing another. And the oligarchy will have a short distance to go because it already exists. Either way protesters will be beaten bloody and the secret police, most of the same secret police, will be out there dealing with dissidents.

Option 3 is the only real option and it isn't a promising one. The Brotherhood genie is out of the bottle and the Egyptian military is not the secular force that the Turkish military was. It has no real interest in restraining the Brotherhood which is its leverage against us and any of our democracy projects. Nevertheless it's the only option on the table because the Obama alternative is to continue pushing for Egyptian democracy which feeds power directly to the Brotherhood, as opposed to backing the military which feeds power to the Brotherhood indirectly.

When things have been screwed up enough there are no longer any good options. There is only a list of lesser evils. To true believers in the universally salvific powers of democracy, allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to claim power is a lesser evil to admitting that maybe the ballot box reflects the will of the people, not some spiritual power that grants human rights and freedom for all. They are all for giving the process more time to work. Which it will. It will go on working the same way.

Whatever veneer of law and secularism that Egypt had was not innate, it was carried over from its colonial period. The Egyptian military and some of Cairo's wealthy families and intellectuals were somewhat more modern because they were Western influenced, not because they represented some indigenous wellspring of modernity. Democracy brought out the will of the people for Islam. More democracy means more Islam.

Given democracy the Palestinian Arabs chose Hamas. Given democracy the Tunisians chose the Islamist Ennahda thugs. Given democracy the Egyptians chose the Salafists and the Brotherhood. The pattern is not hard to make out. The process can continue with the same exact results over and over again until we get it. Not until they do. We will run out of skyscrapers and children before they realize that Islam isn't the answer to all their problems and ours.

As long as most Muslims go on believing that their rights and societies are best safeguarded by Islam rather than by a system that protects individual rights without prejudice then this process will repeat itself endlessly. And that is their problem, our problem is keeping ourselves safe while they experiment with using texts written by mass murdering bigoted rapists as the basis for a civil society.

The Bush era idea that doing what is best for them will also be best for us is wrong on multiple levels. Our first duty is to do what is best for us, which is truer than ever because there is nothing really that we can do which is best for them. Only they can make those choices which will uplift them. And until they make those choices and are ready to join the community of civilized peoples, then our only task is to do what is best for our peoples and our nations.

There is nothing wrong with supporting tyranny in Egypt, if the alternative is an even worse tyranny briefly sanctified by the ballot box. There is nothing wrong with shutting down a process which will see Egypt's remaining Christians purged and its women locked away. There is nothing wrong with slamming the door on those who would kill us because their holy book tells them it is their path to paradise. There is nothing wrong with supporting a regime that will not make war against us, no matter how undemocratic it might be. Our first duty is not to alien democracies of terror, it is to our own lives and freedoms.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Out of Line

2012-01-13T15:45:00.001-05:00

A LITTLE URINE WASHES OUT

In case you haven't heard some US soldiers might have urinated on dead Taliban fighters. Hopefully they did it facing in the direction away from Mecca, as American soldiers have been ordered to do to avoid offending Muslims, and that the dead Taliban didn't have Korans in their pockets at the time or it'll be a holy war. Oh wait it already is a holy war.

McCain, fresh from being saddened by the Communist attacks on Bain Capital, announced that he was saddened by the video and wanted the marines punished. Because having trials and routing that sort of thing through a military justice system rather than through the fiat of sad senators isn't how we do things anymore.

Good news though, the Taliban have announced that the video will not prevent them from accepting our surrender anyway.

Noted kleptomaniac and humanitarian Hamid Karzai denounced the video as "completely inhumane." Speaking of "Completely inhumane", there's Karzai's buddy Abdul Rab Rasoul Sayyaf. Abdul is the head of the Islamic Union who was a pal of Osama bin Laden and a mentor to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Here's some of his very "humane" handiwork. During the Afshar massacre, Sayyaf's Wahhabis, with Saudi funding, massacred Shiite men, women and children. But that is humane. Unlike urinating on a dead Taliban.

The Taliban have also denounced it as inhumane.

The Taliban initially indicated that the video would not undermine the push toward talks, saying that they saw it as just more evidence of what they said was American brutality and arrogance.

“We strongly condemn the inhuman act of wild American soldiers, as ever, and consider this act in contradiction with all human and ethical norms,”

But let's hear it from the Taliban what they consider "humane" behavior.

"You must become so notorious for bad things that when you come into an area people will tremble in their sandals. Anyone can do beatings and starve people. I want your unit to find new ways of torture so terrible that the screams will frighten even crows from their nests and if the person survives he will never again have a night's sleep."

Instead of just searching for criminals, the night patrols were instructed to seek out people watching videos, playing cards or, bizarrely, keeping caged birds. Men without long enough beards were to be arrested, as was any woman who dared venture outside her house. Even owning a kite became a criminal offence.

"Basically any form of pleasure was outlawed," Mr Hassani said, "and if we found people doing any of these things we would beat them with staves soaked in water - like a knife cutting through meat - until the room ran with their blood or their spines snapped. Then we would leave them with no food or water in rooms filled with insects until they died.

"We always tried to do different things: we would put some of them standing on their heads to sleep, hang others upside down with their legs tied together. We would stretch the arms out of others and nail them to posts like crucifixions.

"Sometimes we would throw bread to them to make them crawl. Then I would write the report to our commanding officer so he could see how innovative we had been."

Is there anything in there to make McCain "sad"? Anything to make Obama question negotiating with the Taliban? Don't count on it.

Urine washes out but there are worse stains on the soul. Like sitting down at a table with filth like this and accepting medals from the moneymen funding the murder of Americans. Urine washes out. Evil doesn't.

GOOD NEWS FOR PETA

Americans can no longer afford to eat meat. Many can't even afford chicken. Hope and Change.

TO KILL A MILITARY

Defense spending still represents less than 5 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. That is about half of what it was at the height of the Cold War. Obama is trying to push it back down to the 3 percent that it was under the Clinton administration.

To put the numbers into perspective, the fastest growing part of the budget isn’t defense spending, it’s interest on the national debt. And the interest alone is expected to pass 3 percent of GDP by 2016. If Obama is reelected then by the end of his term the interest on the national debt will cost more than national defense will. We will not have a military capable of reacting to any threats against the United States, but at the least the bulk of those threats will be coming from debt collectors.

Even while the Obama administration is making drastic cuts to the military, it has plowed more money into the welfare state than ever. Means-tested welfare spending increased to 910 billion dollars in 2011 amounting to a 50 percent increase over Bush administration budgets. That’s 200 billion dollars more than the Department of Defense budget.

See the rest in my entire article To Kill a Military at Front Page Magazine

RON PAUL'S RED STATE

Want proof that Ron Paul is the true uniter? Who else can help bring together Marxists to help cut America's defenses.

Trevor Loudon has followed up my piece on Ron Paul's Soros Defense Plan with a look of some of the players to the DSA or the Democratic Socialists of America, which happens to be Barry Hussein's old party.

The Project on Defense Alternatives coordinated the work of the Task Force. Carl Conetta drafted the main body of the Task Force report in ongoing consultation with Task Force members who “developed or digested proposals from the diverse sources cited in the report.” A sub-committee of the Task Force reviewed the final draft before publication. Conetta was assisted in overseeing the report by his Project on Defense Alternatives co-director and fellow Task Force member Charles Knight – a long time member of Democratic Socialists of America.

There's more. Lots more. Follow the link to see the rest.

ALWAYS BELIEVE THE GOVERNMENT AND THE MEDIA

Jew Persecution Over Says Envoy

Washington, March 27, 1933 (INS)

Secretary of State Hull today was "greatly relieved" at the official report from the American embassy in Berlin that mistreatment of Jews in Germany had abated and the Hitler regime was doing its best to curb further persecution.

The report: received at the state department over the week-end said physical mistreatment of Jews "may be considered virtually terminated."

Secretary Hull immediately sent this reassuring information to leading American Jews and Jewish organizations who had complained of the alleged persecution of their religious brethren under Hitlerism.

In his telegraph the secretary said the "feeling had been widespread in Germany that following a political readjustment as has recently taken place some time must elapse before a state of equilibrium could be re-established.

"In the opinion of the embassy," he added, "such a stabilization appears to have been reached in the field of personal mistreatment and there are indications that in other phases the situation is improving."

Nazi Drive on Jews Under Control Now: US Investigation Shows No Cause for Protest (AP)

March 26, 1933

"A reply has now been received indicating that whereas there was for a short time considerable physical mistreatment of Jews, this phase may be considered virtually terminated. There was also some picketing of Jewish merchandising stores and instances of professional discrimination.

"These manifestations were viewed with serious concern by the German government. Hitler in his capacity as leader of the Nazi party issued an order calling upon his followers to maintain law and order, to avoid molesting foreigners, disrupting trade and to avoid the creation of potentially embarrassing international incidents."

(from the Hull telegram)

Sec. Hull Again Apologizes to Germany for "Insults"

Washington March 17, 1937 (AP)

A second protest by the German government against anti-Hitler remarks by Mayor LaGuardia of New York drew a fresh apology today from Secretary Hull.

The German ambassador, Hans Luther, delivered the protest in a 55 minute conversation with the secretary of state. He complained that LaGuardia insulted Hitler by declaring at an anti-Nazi rally in New York that Hitler was a "man without honor".

Exodus of German Jews can't begin before 1939: Estimate 5 to 10 Years before Problem can be Liquidated

July 24, 1938 (AP) - Washington. The flow of refugees which President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Hull are trying to set in motion from Germany cannot begin before the end of the year. A vast amount of preparation, political and financial, must be completed before German Jews can begin their exodus to the United States and other countries which have voiced their willingness to receive them. Officials say five to ten years will pass before the problem can be liquidated.

OUT OF LINE

In one of the odder election events so far, a Republican candidate who for all his flaws did have a track record of implementing a conservative program was demonized as a Communist on behalf of a man who had nothing resembling that track record, in defense of a company which benefited from tariffs and a pension bailout.

But the word has come down the wire. If you hate Mitt Romney then you're a Communist. Like those well known members of Occupy Wall Street, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich. So Gingrich came down to conservative talk radio, portions of which are heavily syndicated by a company owned by Bain Capital to make his apologies. Not that it will stop the establishment from baying for his blood a second time around.

Gingrich was obviously out of line here. The last thing we want is a candidate who takes the fight aggressively to his opponent. What we want is a candidate who smiles a lot at the camera and waits for the media to do his work for him. But that won't work so well for Romney in the actual election where Obama has the national media sewn up. Sneering pieces in the National Review are not going to win the general election. Neither will declaring Bain Capital off limits. That might work on Bain Capital radio, it won't work at all in the media.

Romney has the Republican establishment on his side in the primaries, but in a national election the establishment he faces is liberal. Which is why liberal Republicans can sweep through primaries but have a much tougher time in national elections. Standing for nothing is a good way to win party support, but a bad way to win national support.

In an Olympics worthy display of acrobatic prowess, no lesser conservative stalwart than John McCain declared that attacks on Bain Capital were right up there with Communism. "These attacks on, quote, Bain Capital is really kind of anathema to everything that we believe in. We believe in job creation, and the record of Bain Captial is to take companies that would otherwise fail and restore them to some kind of viability, and sometimes that doesn't work, but, you know, when it always works is a thing called communism, where you keep everybody in business."

Which just goes to show you that McCain is a Communist because back in 2008 he was leveling withering attacks against Romney's Bain tenure. But the authentic conservatives like Romney and McCain have spoken. We will speak of Bain Capital no more, until we're all defending Romney on it in a few months.

HEZBOLLAH NOW OPERATING IN THAILAND

Thai police were on Friday questioning a Lebanese man with alleged links to Hezbollah militants as the U.S. Embassy warned of a “real and credible” threat of a terrorist attack against American citizens in Bangkok.

FINDING MODERATE MUSLIMS

What were viewers willing to endure rather than experience the Shiite version of the Jersey Shore? They tuned in to National Geographic’s “Alaska State Troopers,” Tru TV’s “Lizard Lick Towing” and Animal Planet’s “Finding Bigfoot,” but you couldn’t get them to watch “All-American Muslim.” Which just goes to show that we’re a nation of Islamophobes. Or that even people with bad taste in television have standards.

The dirty little liberal secret is that progressives don’t watch “All-American Muslim” either. The show only exists as an Islamophobia talking point. Every time an advertiser drops it in favor of “Finding Bigfoot,” the progressives crow that once again they have proven that we are a nation that hates Muslims and loves Bigfoot.

All-American Muslim’s hopeless ratings suggest that Americans are more confident of finding Bigfoot than of finding those even more imaginary creatures: moderate Muslims who reject terrorism of all kinds. They certainly aren’t to be found on “All-American Muslim” where the guest Imams have been far less peaceful than Bigfoot who in all his decades of appearing in grainy videos has not been known to curse infidels or support terrorist groups.

See the rest of the article on All-America Muslim's swan song at Front Page Magazine.

ARMS RACE BETWEEN EGYPTIAN ISLAMISTS AND BEAUTY SALONS CONTINUES

Story 1: Self-proclaimed "morality police" in Egypt found themselves on the receiving end of a beating themselves when they threatened women at a beauty salon.

Witnesses said the ultra-conservative vigilante gang, members of the strict Salafi sect who consider themselves "morality police" inspired by Saudi Arabia's "Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice," entered the beauty salon in Benha recently and ordered the women to cease their beauty treatments or face punishment, bikyamasr.com reported Monday.

However, the men, who claimed they were enforcing Islamic law, were shocked when the women attacked them with their own canes and shoved them out onto the street,

Story 2: The self-proclaimed Islamist “Morality Police” announced on its new official Facebook page that it has acquired 1,000 tazers to be distributed to volunteers who will promote “virtue” and combat “vice” in the Egyptian street.

So after being beaten up by women in an Egyptian beauty salon, the courageous Salafist lions of Cairo are smuggling in tasers.

FREE TRADE FOR COMMUNISM

The only thing more striking than the $32,000 diamond-encrusted eyeglasses on display at the Baodao Optical department store here is the bronze statue of Chairman Mao that greets shoppers entering what is billed as the world’s largest eyeglass emporium.

A bronze statue of Chairman Mao greets shoppers at a Baodao Optical store in Beijing. The store's owners are from Taiwan.

That is because Baodao Optical’s owners are from Taiwan, the island whose governing party, the Kuomintang, fought a fierce — and losing — civil war against Mao’s Communist forces before fleeing the mainland in 1949 with more than a million refugees. The rival governments have yet to sign a peace accord.

But by choosing to display Mao’s likeness and his famous credo “Serve the People” so prominently, Baodao Optical reveals how far some Taiwanese businesses will go to romance a Chinese market

First free trade helped convince the United States and the rest of the world to sell out Taiwan and back China. Now hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese with financial interests in China will help swing the vote over to the pro-China candidate moving along the inevitable process of China swallowing Taiwan.

The Obama Administration is naturally against Tsai Ing-wen, the independence candidate.

The Obama administration has warned that a victory by Tsai Ing-wen, the Taiwanese opposition leader, in the island’s January presidential election could raise tensions with China.

“She left us with distinct doubts about whether she is both willing and able to continue the stability in cross-Strait relations the region has enjoyed in recent years,” the official told the Financial Times after Ms Tsai met with administration officials.

Which is a euphemism for the slow surrender of Taiwanese sovereignty. Much like the Israeli peace process is a euphemism for dismantling the country and turning it over to Muslim terrorists.

But the Foxconn Apple suicide factory will be shipping workers back to cast their votes "the right way". Which is about right for an election that hinges on free trade, or rather the version that allows China's combination of crony capitalism and slave labor to outcompete the rest of the world, including the United States and Taiwan.

Lenin's famous line about the capitalists selling us the rope with which we will hang them shows he was a piker. Saudi Arabia, Russia and China are the ones selling us the rope with which we hang ourselves.

TURKEY SEEKS TO TRY DUCHESS OF YORK

No really, the Islamists are really jumping the gun. Sharia hasn't actually become law in the UK yet.

ROMNEY'S CONSERVATIVE CREDENTIALS BURNISHED BY RELIABLE SOURCES

"Former Obama Official Defends Bain, WaPo Debunks Propaganda Film" TownHall.com

DOUBLE STANDARDS

"You know how to make the Jew jealous? Have some money, honey."

"There was one producer, I won't say (who), but she is the personification of what people think about when they think negatively about Jews,"

Guess which comment came from a minister, guess which one came from an indie favorite star. And guess which one touched off a backlash and which one led to yawns.

WHAT DOES IT LIMIT AGAIN?

Obama to ask for 1.2 trillion increase in debt limit.

EXTREMISM IS THE NEW MODERATION

80 percent of Palestinian Arabs support Hamas

OBAMA IS ALL ABOUT THE TROOPS

“Look, I was excited to meet him. I wanted to like him. Let’s just say the scales fell from my
eyes after I did. These are people over here who’ve been fighting the war, or working every day for the war effort, and he didn’t want to take _________ pictures with them?"

DEMOCRACY WINS IN EGYPT

The Muslim Brotherhood will control close to half the seats in the first Egyptian parliament. The more hardline Nour Party, which advocates the strict application of Islamic law, has emerged with 113 seats, or 23 percent, putting Islamists of different stripes in control of more than two thirds of the chamber, according to the figures.

Three Fundamental Mistakes in Dealing with Islam

2012-01-11T23:20:00.000-05:00

We made three fundamental mistakes in our dealings with Islam. First, we assumed that the only politically acceptable answer was also the right answer. This is the most common mistake that politicians make.

Second, we established a construct of a moderate and extreme Islam that reflected how we saw it from the outside. This construct had no theological relationship to any actual belief or movement within Islam. Had we made the division into modern and fundamentalist, we would at least have been using words that meant something. Instead we used moderate and extreme in a military sense to mean hostile and friendly or neutral. But as a Vietnam era president and military command should have known, in a guerrilla war not everyone who isn't shooting at you is friendly or even neutral.

Our construct was black and white with few shades of gray. But the Muslim world is all shades of gray. The absolute choice we wanted them to make, "you're either with us or with the terrorists", was foreign to their culture and their way of life. Multiple layers of contradictory relationships and alliances are the norm in the region. You expect to betray and be betrayed, much as you expect to cheat and be cheated while bartering for a carpet at the souk. In a region where coalitions of Fascists, Communists and Islamists are doable, contradictions don't exist, all alliances are expedient and built on an expected betrayal. The rise of Islam itself was built on broken peace treaties. So it is no wonder then that in response to Bush's call, they chose both us and the terrorists. Appeasing America and the Islamists at the same time was their version of the politically safe middle ground, the path of least resistance and the only acceptable option.

And the more we prattled about the peacefulness of Islam, the more we looked like we could be easily appeased with a few gestures. And so it was the Islamists who were more threatening, who got the benefit of of their appeasement. We had asked Muslim countries for an alliance with no mixed allegiances, in a region where only kin could ask or count on such an arrangement. And we are not their kin, neither by blood and certainly not by religion. While we insisted that all people were the same, this was a statement of our belief, not theirs. And they did not believe that we believed it either.

Rather than learning what the Muslim world was, we had already decided what we wanted it to be. But our perspective was a foreign one. They might pander to it, but they would never dictate their own beliefs by it. We might talk of a moderate or extreme Islam, but that is our idea, not theirs. There is more than one form of Islam, they are not defined by their extremism or moderation. Nor by their approach toward violence. No more than we are.

Muslim theology is violent, because violence has always been a tool of its expansion. When we ask Muslims to disassociate themselves from violence, we are really asking them to disassociate themselves from Islam. And this they will not do. They will contextually condemn some acts of terror, depending on the identity of the perpetrators and the targets, and the impact of the acts on the nation and ideology of the Muslim or Muslims in question. But they will dub other acts of terrorist as valid resistance. The differences are not moral, but contextual.

The Muslim world is a gray zone full of alliances written on sand where every principle can be bent at need, but is dominated by a religion that pretends to be morally absolute. This is an inherent contradiction. And like most moral conflicts it is resolved through self-deception. Our absolute standards have no meaning when applied to the Muslim world. They have moral force, but little practical relevance.

Islamic moderation is not theology, but pragmatism. Its fanatics are the most trustworthy, and its pragmatists the least trustworthy. We have put our faith in the moderation of the pragmatists, but confusing pragmatism with moderate beliefs, morals or friendship is no better than lapping at the sand of a mirage and calling it water.

Our third and final mistake was to believe that we held all or most of the cards, and were free to give away as many of them as we wanted to. But the more we thought we were calling the shots, the more we were shot at. Because we were not in control. The political, religious and armed conflicts we were engaged in were being fought on their terms, not ours. They began the war. They decided when to initiate the violence or call a halt to it. Their violence set the tone, we tried to defuse it. Our attempts to promote moderation in the Muslim world were reactive. It is the bomber who has the initiative once he chooses to act. And so we tried to teach the bombers not to bomb, while the bombers taught us to appease them.

When a psychiatrist rewards rats for finishing a maze, is it the psychiatrist who is training the rats to finish mazes, or the rats who are training him to give them cheese. The answer to that question hinges on who controls the experiment. While we thought that we were experimenting on the Muslim world to make them more moderate, they were actually experimenting on us to teach us to appease them.

While we were trying to force the Muslim world into our maze with two openings, one labeled 'extreme' and one labeled 'moderate', they were really moving us into their meta-maze with two openings, 'death' or 'appeasement'. Our plan was to keep forcing them to choose the moderate openings in order to moderate them and break them of any attachment to terrorism. But our chief method for moving them there was appeasement. Once we got bogged down in Iraq, appeasement became our only method. While we thought that we were leading them to the moderate opening in our maze by appeasing them, they were leading us to the appeasement opening in their maze.

The rats turned out to be training the psychiatrist and they have done an excellent job of it. The Muslim world is more Anti-American than it was 10 years ago, while we are more pro-Muslim. Each time they finish the moderate maze and assure us how peaceful Islam is, we gift them with the cheese of appeasement. Rather than teaching them to be moderate using the reward of our appeasement, they have taught us to appease them using the reward of their faked moderation. Like tourists at the souk, we have been cheated badly by laying out good money for a fake rug. But worse than that we have been turned into rats in their maze, rushing to appease them in the hopes that they will reward us by being moderate.

Pavlov demonstrated that once you teach dogs to associate a ringing bell with a meal, they will salivate when you ring the bell even when there is no food. So too rats will keep running the maze even when there is no cheese. So too governments continue appeasing Islam, even when the promised cheese of moderation fails to yield any significant changes on the ground. A plot broken up here or there. Or even a mosque that opens its doors to the FBI or Scotland Yard is enough for them. But is it the FBI that is teaching Muslims to be more cooperative, or Muslims who are teaching the FBI to be more accommodating. Who is the psychiatrist and who is the rat?

By initiating violence, the Muslim world turned us into their rats. We reacted to their stimuli as we desperately looked for a way out of their maze of violence. Except when we took the initiative by attacking them-- the locus of control was always in their hands. And even when we did take their initiative, it was still in response to their violence. We were still making war on their terms. Trying to work with them, reform them, reach them and appease them. We were running the maze and still are. Starving to death still searching for the cheese which isn't there.

All this drives the flywheel of appeasement round and round. The more we turn it, the worse the violence becomes. The capacity for terrorism made Muslims prominent. They have become ticking time bombs we are driven to defuse. We shower the Muslim world with respect, money, political power and every possible thing that might keep them from killing us. It is absolutely vital in the minds of our leaders that we make them like us so that they won't kill us. Which means that it actually is in their interest to kill us. Rather than rewarding them for their moderation, we are actually rewarding them for their extremism.

The more we appease them, the more violent they become. And the more we habituate ourselves to appeasement, the harder it is for us to stop. Our worst mistake in dealing with the Muslim world was to habituate ourselves to the appeasement solution. To make it a reflex action. American politicians chose it as their path of least resistance between complete surrender and all out war as their safe way through the maze. They rationalized it as a wedge strategy to split the minority of extremists who wanted a superislamic state from the majority who wanted peace and prosperity. By embracing Islam, we would reform it. The majority of Muslims would choose peace and prosperity, and ally with us to isolate the extremists. Then we would use the wedge strategy to split the extremists into the moderate extremists and the extreme extremists. Using the carrot of foreign aid and close ties to the United States and the stick of military intervention, we would force the terrorist groups and their state backers to choose either the carrot or the stick.

But it was the Muslim world which was forcing us to choose between their carrot and their stick. The carrot was a positive relationship with the Muslim world, the stick was a negative relationship. And since 2001 we have been chasing the carrot, while getting whacked over the head with the stick. Some of the politicians have realized that there is no carrot, only the stick. For these 'New Realists' avoiding the stick or at least minimizing the force of its blows has become the new carrot.

If we're good little infidels, we'll only have 5 terrorist attacks a year instead of 10. We'll have 100 rapes instead of 200 if all wear our burqas. And even that is another illusion. The Muslim world cannot control its own violence, only channel it. There is no off switch. Only pipes that they can use to funnel it our direction. They cannot offer us peace. It is not within their power. Only by directing their own violence inward could they do this. And that is obviously not in their interest. Only by forcefully demonstrating that the violence is absolutely not in their interest, will we ever put a stop to it. And to do that we would have to pose more of a threat to them, than their own people do. Appeasement is the worst possible way to go about doing that.

With our first mistake, we limited our options to one single course of action. With our second mistake, we guided that course of action based on a construct that had no relationship to the reality of the Muslim world. With our third and final mistake, that course of action was hijacked and used to manipulate our behavior, causing us to repeat the same disastrous course of action over and over again. The more we did it, the more it seemed like the only possible course of action. And our only way to check whether we were succeeding or failing was a misguided construct that could not measure what we needed it to.

In real world terms, this is equivalent to driving the wrong way, using a map from the wrong country and repeating the same course over and over again, because rather than realizing that something must be wrong, we just look at the map and assume that if we repeat the course enough times, we will reach our destination. Even when we no longer seem to know what the destination is because we have become so used to going in circles that the circle has come to seem like our destination.

Like most mistakes that are based on a process that was wrong from the beginning, we can only begin to fix it by going back to the first broken train of logic, the first error in understanding. Only then will we be able to break the loop and begin anew.

What Does a Real Conservative Candidate Look Like?

2012-01-10T23:38:00.001-05:00

If a true conservative is for small government, strong national defense and traditional values then there is no such candidate in the race. There might have been earlier, but there certainly isn't now.

It's a sad testament to the current state of the party that the choice is between two men who believe in global warming, one who believes in big government, another who believes the terrorists are right and a third who believes in open borders. But last election the choice came down to two men, both of whom believed in global warming and one of whom thought that waterboarding terrorists was torture. That man became the nominee. So maybe we're making some progress.

Critics will point out that Reagan didn't fit that mold too well either. They're right. No leader has. Standards are aspired to, but they are rarely here in the pure form. But the other aspect of the argument is that the standards change in response to the period. Libertarian positions seem more authentically conservative in no small part because of government failures.

That is why attacking Teddy Roosevelt using what we know now as if he were a current political figure is not a valid approach. Roosevelt was a product of his time. Our politicians are a product of ours. Reagan might have been a very different leader if he had been born 30 years later and had been elected 28 years later after the Cold War and its assumptions had been washed out of the common consciousness.

So what is a conservative really? A National Review piece described Romney as the real conservative simply because he was in the business world and defended corporate profits. The former would cover Warren Buffett and Ted Turner. And the latter probably would too depending on what day of the week you ran into them.

I had not planned to address the Bain Capital mess after last night's article, but the idea that an attack on Bain is an attack on capitalism is a misanderstanding of what free enterprise is. Free enterprise does not mean that companies are immune from criticism over the impact of their business, it means that government should not regulate them to bring them into line with a socially approved model of how to do business.

Bain Capital is not really a great candidate for flying the flag of capitalism and small government. One of the Bain companies petitioned for tariff quotas and its underfunded pension plan had to be bailed out by the government. I don't have a problem with using tariffs to protect American businesses under certain conditions, but the free trade purists who attacked Santorum for his opposition to NAFTA might.

But that's the other side of the coin. People who actually do business in the real world are a poor fit for free trade purists. Successful businesses don't run in strict compliance with an ideology. Any ideology. That's the paradox of championing someone like a capitalist as a paradigm of pure capitalism. Capitalism has never been all that pure and most large companies have reached out to the government for one thing or another.

Romney, Gingrich, Perry and Santorum all have a history of going big government to achieve their goals. And how else could it be? Two of them were governors of major states. One of them was the House Majority Leader. The fourth was a United States Senator. Whether or not they talked the talk, they were always going to be somewhat more flexible when they wanted to get things done. Even Ron Paul stayed in office by going to the same pork barrel as everyone else, while making a show of voting against the pork.

So much for doctrinal purity. And all that's left are goals and beliefs. Beliefs influence how you pursue goals. It's why candidates talk about their background and their lives so much. The ideology is a factor, but not the only factor, most successful politicians are post-ideological. They pursue goals by any means necessary.

That is certainly the impression that Romney gives. Santorum is at least honest about it and willing to say openly that he will use government to achieve his goals. Santorum's goals and values can be disagreed with, but at least we know what they are. What are Romney's real goals and values? It's hard to say. He must have them and he articulates them over and over again, but the more he talks the vaguer they become. He believes in all the things we do, except when he doesn't.

We can line up candidates by stated political positions and get one result. And line up candidates by the actual methods they have used to achieve their goals and get another result. On the first metric Romney and Santorum might be far apart. On the second metric Romney and Santorum would be close together. Perry and Gingrich would probably be right there too.

That's where a record comes in. Not just the record of votes, which is often a meaningless toll of positions taken for political reasons on bills that were always going to pass or were never going to pass, but a record of actions taken that actually mattered.

When we talk about values, there are two types of values. There are political values and there are the things that the candidate actually cares about. A candidate may have an official position on small government and may even mean it, but when given a chance to take action something he really needs, whether it's food for poor children or a bailout for an industry that provides jobs in his district, then 9 out of 10 times he will resolve the contradiction by supporting the specific value over the general political value.

Small government and politicians are a contradiction in terms. Political office depends on consensual decisions, even at the executive level. At the legislative level things get done collectively, rather than by a Mr. Smith going to Washington and hijacking all the legislative business until he gets his way. All those group decisions add up to positive legislation that employ power rather than negative legislation that give up power. Even for someone like Ron Paul who has made a career out of promoting small government, expediency is still in the mix.

All politicians who work in big government are big government politicians. There is no way around that. They may vary in the degree of how much government interference they support and how much they would like to restrict the power of government and finally in how much they have done to restrict it, but their tools are still the same. Even their methods are mostly the same.

So we have a race in which most of the candidates pay lip service to values while still employing expediency to achieve the things that they really care about and deviating from ideology when society changes. Which is to say they are politicians.

It all comes down to goals. If you believe that protecting and salvaging the family is at the center of the country's problems, then Santorum is your man. If you believe that we need someone in office who will use common sense policies to promote business, but without being confrontational about it, then vote Romney. If you want someone who will tackle a broad range of problems, but not always in ways that you agree with, then vote Gingrich. If you want an acceptable combination of Romney, Bush and Santorum, then you might be better off with Perry. If you want a candidate who will hold the line and reform the country, then you might gamble on Gingrich or gamble even more on Paul, but it's doubtful that there is any such candidate in this race.

Each of the candidates has their case to make. Santorum is right about the economic and social impact of the family, and as much as libertarians hate to hear it, there may not be a viable country without salvaging the family. Some libertarians have their own approach to the problem and they have a point that government solutions, even with the best intentions, hurt the family. But so do libertarian solutions.

Romney is right that his approach will probably help American businesses, create jobs and boost the economy. If he wins then a year later we will all probably be better off for it. Is he the man to tackle the larger economic problems caused by big government? No he isn't. And he will probably end up adding to those problems in the long run, even while creating relief in the short run.

Gingrich wants to tackle everything. Can he? Maybe. He's the only candidate who thinks big and who has a snapshot of the larger conflict, but his solutions may not be the right ones and they certainly won't follow a rigid ideology. Gingrich wants to be a great leader, but that means leading on ego and gambling that you are right. If anyone among the candidates has the background and the credentials in office to make that gamble, it's him, but he's a long way from a perfect or ideal candidate, and he has been wrong plenty of the time.

That leaves Perry, who in his own way is as vague as Romney, but whose cowboy image helps him dodge the questions that Romney can't escape. That may be because Perry is also a professional politician and with him in office, the effect a year from now also be a marked improvement for the economy. But like Romney his short term decisions will have long term consequences. Perry is a more conservative, but less electable version of Romney. He can probably win a general election, but for now he's doing poorly even here. If Obama wins, look for him to make a comeback in 2016 with a more polished approach.

Finally there's Ron Paul who in his own way has specialized in the same line as Romney. Being everything to everyone. You can be on the left and support Ron Paul. You can be on the right and support Ron Paul. Whatever policies you support, Ron Paul is for them or for allowing them at the state level. As with Romney it works better if you don't look too closely at the details. Ron Paul is for and against a range of social ills. He's for and against national defense. He's willing to be vague about 9/11 Deniers and a whole range of conspiracy theories, without quite subscribing openly to them.

But why should that be a surprise? Ron Paul has spent over two decades in congress. Whatever else he is, he is also a professional politician. So is everyone else on the list and that's the point.

Politics is a profession. It's one of the few professions whose professionals also consistently deny that they are politicians. A doctor doesn't come into his office and insist that he isn't a doctor and is only engaging in public service as a sacrifice to help people, but the first chance he gets, he's going home to get a real job. But being a politician has a negative image attached to it because it comes with the perception that you can't be trusted. Which politicians prove by lying about being politicians.

What does a real conservative candidate look like? Find the man or woman who has never been elected to anything, who gets shut out of everything, who gets dismissed as too extreme. They might be the one.

The Bain of Romney

2012-01-09T22:51:00.000-05:00

First things first. Criticizing the way a politician ran a company at a time when he is running for office on that record isn't radical leftism, it's Politics 101. Unless any of Romney's rivals have called for him to have to pay higher taxes or be closely regulated by the government, then they have nothing in common with Occupy Wall Street and suggesting otherwise is a talking point that doesn't hold up.

Romney was the one who brought in his record as a job creator. It's entirely legitimate for his opponents to question whether he really created jobs or destroyed them. Asking whether a candidate's record holds up isn't class warfare, it's common sense. And it's ridiculous that some of the same figures who turned Gingrich's personal spending into a campaign issue are suddenly insisting that Romney's time at Bain Capital is off limits.

A commitment to free enterprise does not mean supporting anything that any company does. It only means supporting their right to do it. Just as a commitment to free speech does not mean agreeing with everything that everyone says. It means supporting their right to say it. Believing that the total effect of free enterprise is better than any other system does not mean that individual companies are protected from criticism. There is a basic difference between criticizing how a company goes does business and calling for it to be regulated by the government.

That means Romney is free to create a company that runs euthanasia clinics in Bangkok, but when he runs for office, then the net social benefits of Bangkok Euthanasia R'Us will come up, especially if he brings it up himself. So if a company outsources jobs to China or sells drum kits to hyperactive four year olds, draping the flag of free enterprise over it does not mean that its CEO is immune from criticism. Free enterprise means the right to do something. It is not an innate endorsement of any and every business practice. It is certainly not immunity from having the net social benefits of those practices questioned especially when you're using those same net social benefits as a talking point.

Not that Romney sold drum kits to four year olds or euthanized anyone in Bangkok. What he did or didn't do at Bain Capital is the subject of some debate and has been ever since he ran against Ted Kennedy for the Senate back in the nineties. And the only truly noteworthy thing about his record with Bain Capital is how clumsily he has used it and defended it over the years.

Back in the nineties Romney was boasting that he had created 10,000 jobs and was running as the Jobs Candidate in Massachusetts. The number is now up to 100,000 and he's still running on the same platform. While that numbers creep might seem like Romney's jobs have some resemblance to Pinocchio's nose, the inflation comes about mostly because of the growing success of Staples, long after Romney had left the scene.

Can Romney take credit for the growth of Staples all through the years? He can if he makes the case that his backing and policies helped the company become what it is today. And that's the case he really should be making instead of wrapping himself in the flag of capitalism.

But Romney blew it back then retreating from the 10,000 number and he's wavering on the 100,000 number. During the Senate race the Bain association resulted in withering ads featuring striking and laid off workers that helped cost Romney the election. That same playbook is on the table at the White House and when it's played out then Gingrich and Perry riffing on Romney's record will seem like a warm soft hug.

Eighteen years down the line you would expect that Romney had honed his talking points and could at least solidly back up his numbers and his experience, instead of sounding like Obama talking about all the jobs he saved. Instead he managed to contribute another sound bite that will be showing up in every ad this election.

It's not the first time that Romney has screwed up this way. When pushed he has a tendency to say the wrong thing through a sudden outburst of honesty, whether it's "We can't have illegals around here, I'm running for office" to "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me."

It's the Kerry disease, and between his French, his flip flopping and his hair, Romney seems to have his own "I was for it before I was against it" problem. He compensates for his musical chairs politics by suddenly telling everyone how he really feels in the worst way possible. For now Romney hasn't generated his own, "I was for it before I was against it" quote, but the way he's going it's only a matter of time.

The issue isn't class warfare, it's tone deafness. There are plenty of billionaires who have or manage to fake the common touch. Romney has trouble even faking it and when he tries to it's awkward and horrible. The American people don't hate the rich, but they do hate obvious pandering. When you're worth somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter billion dollars and your father was a CEO, then telling a crowd of people that you know what it's like to be afraid of losing your job is pandering. And it's weak bad pandering.

Romney doesn't need to convince everyone that he feels their pain. That's not something he can do and it's not what voters are all that interested in. They have had their fill of empathy and they just want someone competent at the helm who will fix things. All he really needs to do is sell himself as competent and back it up with a few slogans. But the way he has mishandled the Bain Capital question shows the same tin-eared approach all over again.

The easiest response to being accused of firing people is to ask how many people Perry and Gingrich have let go over the years in the public and private sector. The most comprehensive response would be a defense of his time at Bain Capital that dwells on the actual numbers and the opportunities. The best defense against being accused of profiting off failure is to show how you have actually helped people succeed.

Romney is back to being accused of putting "People Over Profits" as when he was running against Old Bad Ted. In the nineties he blew a lead over Kennedy and tanked the election because he was slow to protect his image. Romney's people still excel at negative attacks, but they're absolutely terrible when it comes to protecting their candidate.

Trotting out robotic talking points about capitalism is not doing Romney any favors. Within the party structure it is possible to take certain topics off limits through intimidation and ridicule, but in the general election, outside the party's echo chamber, those defenses won't work. If Romney can't take on Perry and Gingrich on the topic and win without conservative pundits taking Bain Capital off the agenda, then how is he going to stand up to Obama?

Wrapping Romney up in a capitalism blanket and hissing that all the mean men attacking him are dirty Marxists is not only eye-rolling silliness, it's also a concession that he can't fight his own battles or defend his own record. Taking an issue off the table in a campaign where just about everything has been on the table is an admission of weakness that will not protect him in the general election.

This isn't about class warfare, Marxism or Socialism. Romney, Gingrich and Perry are not poor men. This is about whether Romney can turn his record into an asset or will be stuck limping around with it attached to him like a chain. If he can't defend the productive and constructive value of his work at Bain Capital now and win over voters, then what hope does he have of doing it in the general election?

Plenty of time has passed since his last devastating collision with Bain Capital political attacks and they won't lose him the general election. They probably won't even hurt him that much. Not unless he lets them. But it's interesting to take a look back at the first collision between Gingrich and Romney. Back then Gingrich was trying to cut funding for the AmeriCorps beast, while Romney teamed up with Clinton to condemn any cuts by Congressional Republicans to the program.

Since then Gingrich, for all his deviations, has tried to be a culture warrior, while Romney has done his best to be all things to all people. The man who ran for the Senate in Massachusetts as being better for gay rights then Ted Kennedy and disavowed Reagan/Bush, reinvented himself as a conservative national candidate. A man who was for abortion before he was against it, who has been consistently inconsistent on global warming, on gun control and just about everything else needs some kind of identity. Something to tell us who he is.

Romney's biggest appeal and challenge is that he is a blank slate. Talking seriously and directly about Bain could change that. He did it before in this Harvard Crimson article from 1994. "Romney then returned in 1989 to the financially-strapped Bain & Co. to engineer its massive restructuring. While rebuilding Bain, Romney said he would resign if he laid anyone off. Now, five years later in his campaign against Kennedy, Romney uses his pledge as an example of job-making skills."

But the article also warned that Romney had a tendency to coast on an early lead, instead of pushing hard to win. That is what brought down his Senate bid and his last presidential bid. Whether it will take him down before or after the election is up to him. If Romney can't successfully defend and rebut a simple attack that he has been dealing with since 1994 with any more grace and intelligence then he has shown so far then he is not electable and he does not deserve to be the nominee.

Romney has been taking the Bain Capital test for eighteen years. If he can't score with that much preparation time and put some passion into an explanation of what he did at Bain and what he believes he can do for America, then there is no reason to believe that he can win.

Compromise Impossible

2012-01-08T21:46:00.000-05:00

The Western doctrine of non-violence depends on the willingness to compromise. To resolve any conflict by sitting down at a table, finding points of agreement and then working through the rest. The ruthless killing fields of the twentieth century have not shaken that eternal faith in a diplomatic solution, rather they have only strengthened it. But what happens when a compromise is genuinely impossible?

The commitment to non-violence depends on the assumption that while small numbers of fanatics might seek war, the vast majority of people do not. And even if they do want war, they want a humane war, not a genocidal war of extermination. Therefore even when such wars are fought, they do not reflect the will of the people, only that of a small group of fanatics.

That such a manifestly absurd belief that flies in the face of human history could be so widely held among the decision makers of the world's dominant civilizations is itself apt testimony to the decline and fall of those civilizations. Nevertheless this belief remains unshakeable.

Atrocities are attributed to a dictator and a few of his cronies. Remove the dictator, roll in the voting booths and then we need make war no more. But the rise of Islamic terrorism presents an explosive challenge to that worldview. There is no Hitler or Stalin of Islam. No small group holding power on which everything can be blamed. In the age of terrorism, it is the ordinary Muslim who acts as the killer. Who sheds his guise of humanity and kills.

Islamic terrorism is the most democratic and representative form of war there is. There is no draft. No government mandate. And no compulsion but that of the Koran. Of course in territories under their control, becoming a Jihadist sometimes is compulsory. But that certainly isn't the case in the West. While Western diplomats chatter about democracy, the Muslim votes with his bomb vest. And his vote is the decisive one.

Islamic terrorism is a direct refutation to that understanding of evil as a function of governments, rather than people. Its election victories mock the idea that democratic political representation ends violence. While Western intellectuals parrot the party line about a tiny minority of extremists being at fault, the political success of Islamist parties demonstrates that they are neither a minority nor extremist. That the version of Islam they relegate to cave dwelling barbarians is actually the mainstream one.

If Western elites were to accept this, they would also have to accept that compromise is impossible. And that we face a war of extermination waged against us with every available weapon from demographics to atomics. But rather than accept the error of their ideas, they mainstream the Islamists. When the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas ride a wave of popular support, they rush to explain why they are really moderate after all. If Al-Qaeda were to win elections in Yemen, there would immediately be distinctions made between the moderate Al-Qaeda terrorists who won the election, and the extremists who don't represent the humanistic principles that Al-Qaeda stands for.

The official position is that we are fighting a war of ideas against 'radicalization'. To win, we have to beat that tiny minority of extremists in a debate over the nature of their religion. And while they have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Koran and the Hadiths, we have a silly little ditty we picked up about Islam being a "Religion of Peace". But no matter how often we lose the debate, we never admit defeat. Instead we go on empowering Islamic populism, and when the populists turn out to be the very radicals we were fighting all along, then we reach for the dictionary and redefine them as moderates.

The intellectual error that lies at the heart of this cluster of stupidity is that the fault cannot lie in the people. That no people can be committed to war and destruction. That no mass of human beings would rather kill, than reach a reasonable compromise.

And so when the compromise is refused, its inadequacy is held to blame. Next time a more generous compromise must be offered. And if that too is rejected, then it's time to sit down and understand why the previous offers were judged so inadequate and bid even higher, like a game of poker in which the objective is to lose as much money as possible. The notion that the compromises are being rejected for the very reason that they are compromises is not one that can be accepted.

One sided compromises quickly become appeasement. But that is the only kind of compromises that are accepted, and even they are only temporary. Why compromise when you can win? To the mindset of a people who believe they would be running the world, if not for setbacks, political weakness and treachery-- the very word is poisonous. A treaty is a slap in the face to destiny. And a war is nothing to fear. The value that civilized morality assigns to life is absent in a culture where the individual is only an extension of the family, whose honor matters more than his or her life.

The Western fixation on non-violent solutions has no common echo in the Muslim world. There a non-violent solution is strategic, not moral. Such strategic cowardice has its place, but it is the violent solution that is held to be the moral one. The Jihad is approved by the Koran. But treating on equal terms with infidels is immoral. If Western leaders think that war is immoral, the Islamists view the lack of a war as immoral. This is a gap that cannot be bridged with any manner of compromise. No more than you can stop a sword with a handkerchief.

Western diplomats can't accept the impossibility of compromise because it overturns the political developments that led them to this stage. And they are not about to go back in time, no matter how much of a dead end the present path that they are taking may be. Rather they are still trying to pin the blame on individual dictators, orchestrating elections and counting on the goodwill of the majority to avoid the violence. They have not made any progress, but that is not for lack of compromising.

Israel has nearly been compromised out of existence through the process of one sided compromises that lead to nothing but more violence. Europe is following swiftly on its heels. And America, Australia and Canada are not far behind. The compromisers say that we must given in to show what noble and well-meaning people we are. And if our compromise is rejected, that is proof that we did not compromise hard enough. The diplomatic and political blood-letting is a slow form of suicide. The rhetoric about peace becomes a warm bath in which the suicide slits his wrists and floats away to dreams of a New Middle East in a cloud of his own blood.

And none of these sacrifices, the abandonment of dignity, law, religion and life avail as nothing against the inevitable violence of people who believe that it is their moral duty to kill us. That murdering us is their sacred duty to their god. That the atrocities they commit are a fulfillment of their national destiny.

Compromise exchanges victory for a tolerable agreement. But the fiction of the inevitable compromise is the work of Western intellectuals and diplomats serving declining trade empires. The compromise is their preferred method of achieving stability without excessive risk. It preserves the lives of individuals at the expense of the power and interests of the nation. This seems an obviously moral tradeoff in the 21st century Post-Religious West-- but a shameful act of cowardice in the eternally 7th century Muslim East.

In the face of such determined evil, compromise is impossible. And even when possible, immoral, for such compromises are nothing more than Chamberlain pacts, pieces of paper that do not bring peace, but a chance for the enemy of life and freedom to improve his position, to devour and mangle more victims, before finally turning his eyes toward the biggest prize.

The Post-American Entertainment Industry

2012-01-07T22:13:00.000-05:00

The decline of the entertainment industry is all around us. Movie ticket sales have dropped sharply even with inflated numbers from IMAX and 3D movies. Network viewership has declined even more dramatically leaving big three letter networks with numbers that look more like cable. Even the music industry is a ghost of its former self.

The entertainment industry has done its best to disguise this state of affairs with glamor and big numbers. More money is invested in bigger budget projects than ever before, and some of those projects yield incredible sales numbers, but the occasional megahit can't disguise the overall decay of the basic business model as more and more money has to be spent to draw in a declining base. It now costs more to promote a successful movie, show or performer than it takes to produce the creative content. The hundreds of millions of dollars that used to go into product development go into sales now. And the sales look good until you start taking a close look at the big picture and the bottom line. No matter how big the hits are, overall ticket sales are down, television viewership is down and there is no relief in sight.

The industry has blamed the Internet, and while technology has historically played a role in eclipsing and destabilizing technology linked entertainment business models, which movies, television and the music business certainly are, it's an insufficient explanation. The Internet is a source of creative chaos, but the source of the entertainment industry's woes come from inside its own gates.

The entertainment industry was once one of the more American industries as it was steeped deeply in taking and putting out the national culture. Today it has little to do with America or Americans who are nothing but a backdrop for its spectacles, providing the scenery and extras for stories and songs that no longer speak to them.

The decline of the entertainment industry is linked to that failure to speak to Americans. When the entertainment industry speaks it is to the concerns and obsessions of a political and cultural elite, but for the most part it acts as a weapon of mass distraction. It no longer speaks, it bellows like an insane carnival, pumping out garish spectacles and outlandish personalities in the hopes of attracting patrons.

American entertainment now performs better around the world than it does at home. Or at worst it performs equally well because there is no longer anything American about it. It was possible to look at a film from the 1950s and see something of the American character and value system in even the most worthless drivel. It has become all but impossible to look at the front shelf products of modern film, television and music and see anything American in their values.

The question is not one of morality or vulgarity or artistic value. It is simply that there is nothing American about them. They speak to an undifferentiated global audience in a glottal cacophony of noisy spectacle with no meaning. American entertainment used to be difficult to compete with because it was innovative and well made. It is difficult to compete with today because so much money is spent on making it and promoting it. And because its formlessness is universal, it speaks to the common need of all people to be distracted, shocked and amazed by the explosive and the emotionally shallow. It is something that everyone can enjoy, but that no one but teenagers can relate to.

The decline of a conscious Americanism has implications for more than a nation's entertainments. A nation is an idea that reminds a people of who they are. When there is no idea, then there are endless civil wars fought over every possible difference. When the Sunnis and Shiites are told to put down arms and unite to preserve Iraq, what is Iraq to them that they should unite behind it? If a foreign enemy invades it then they might join up and fight, but they have nothing that unites them beyond an accident of geography and tribal humor.

Building up a meaningful identity takes time and effort. The American identity projected outward around the world was one of good humor, fair play and confidence in the future. It was the essence of decency combined with optimism that made the world seem like a better place. That identity can still be found in the country, but it is harder to find in the organs of its national identity among political and cultural elites preoccupied with preparing for the end of nations. There is no room for an American exceptionalism of any kind among the ruins of nations in a borderless world.Which amounts to declaring that there is no room for Americans.

The entertainment industry has left Americans behind and Americans have left the entertainment industry behind. America is still a grandiose stage for the world, but fewer of the natives are paying attention to the entertainment of a decadent post-American class.

The breakdown of the family overseen by the entertainment industry has led to a reciprocal decline in the bread and butter business of that industry.The family viewing hours that once led to tremendous ratings for television shows are gone and the numbers have gone with them. Family movie attendance is also on the decline. The entertainment industry has its laser sights set on an always vanishing young adult demographic that spends a great deal of money on entertainment per individual, but which is also fickle and requires spending a great deal more money on advertising. This leads to massive hits and massive failures where the few successes outweigh the larger failures of the business model.

The family is a vanishing figure in the entertainment industry and so are the revenues it used to bring in. It isn't gone yet, but the entertainment industry has forgotten how to interact with it. It is no longer sure what Americans are, let alone American families, and it compensates for its cultural detachment with insecurity, throwing more money at bigger projects, and if it can't come up with the money, then it goes directly for shock value.

There is no better barometer for the artistic failures of the industry than its loss of nuance. It is no longer able to speak to people, only shout at them without making any sense. It retains nuance only when addressing its own concerns and this it considers to be art. Disconnected from the larger public, it rolls out carnivals and turns everything into a confection of sugar, blinding lights and more venial amusements. The audience lingers for a time and then leaves with nothing exchanged but time and money.

The industry is still capable of distracting Americans and that is the only reason the money still keeps rolling in. But the ways in which it distracts them are not unique. Even its distractions are increasingly imported and its vulgarity reeks of the desperation of a once witty professor reduced to scatology in order to keep the students interested. And the hollowness of the spectacle can't prevent the drain from continuing.

The problem with distracting people is that anyone can do it. The only barriers are money and marketing. The internet has made broadcasting universal. And for now the only things the entertainment industry has on its side are the relics of its old operation, the contracts and agreements, the rights and privileges, the stations, networks and theaters. The physical and legal relics of a way of doing business that is on the verge of disappearing. SOPA and its cousins are the dying gasps of dinosaurs looking to outlaw gravity, instead of learning to look where they are going.

That just leaves money and more often than not it isn't even American money. American entertainment is an investment, funded by foreign investors and increasingly made for foreign audiences. The massive conglomerates which encompass music, films, television, comic books and much more have become the middle men between foreign businessmen and foreign audiences. Eventually the businessmen will realize that they can make money by building up an industry at home and cut Hollywood and its sisters out of the picture completely.

For now the pyramids of money keep the Pharaohs of the American entertainment industry on top of what appears to be a booming business. But the business is mostly one of name recognition. No one really knows what they are doing anymore, and like so much of American business, the template for success is to leave on a high note before the consequences of your incompetence catch up with you. Fortunes are being spent to sell audiences on a product that they don't want all that much anymore, and every negative set of numbers sends a fresh panic through the industry which retaliates by spending more on increasingly derivative and unoriginal projects in the hope that when the whole thing collapses no one will blame them for it.

Entertainment is one of the few products still being made in America, but it is a product that is less American than ever. It is not an American vision made for American audiences, but a way for the world to pass the time while waiting for the next economic collapse, the next war and the next blast from the collapse of civilization.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - You Never Know

2012-01-06T12:01:00.000-05:00

ON THE BLACKBOARD

I have gotten the occasional request to read an article or two in a podcast, but while I never got around to acting out one of my articles, Glenn Beck did. For anyone who wants to see one of my articles acted out with props and cameras, watch the video. It's nice to see my work up on that blackboard and to know that it influenced the political process.

The original article, Ron Paul's Soros Defense Plan, appeared here and at Front Page Magazine, and was mentioned at websites like Noisy Room. It's nice to see that it made its further into the pipeline and may have even changed some minds.

The research isn't new, and I had commented on it in a Friday Afternoon Roundup a year ago, and would mention it from time to time, but two weeks ago I picked it up again, dusted it off, did more in depth research and decided it deserved to be an article of its own.

For a political writer the best reward is knowing that you have made a difference. It's why I got into this, it's why I go on doing it day after day. My computer died on Sunday. I'm getting by this week with a netbook and an old dusted off dinosaur still running Windows ME until UPS brings the new one one over. It's why I may not have been able to get back to some of your emails, and I'm cut off from Facebook and Twitter completely, so I can't respond to anyone there for which I apologize. But there's so much to write about and no matter what technical problems get in the way, when your fingers are flying over the keyboard to get the message out then all other things are forgotten.

Still when an article provides useful material to build on, showing appreciation by commenting on it, sharing it, linking in to it or citing it is a good thing to do because it encourages the author to write more of the same. If you like an article enough to make extensive use of it in your own article or video, then crediting the author of it is a good way of making sure that more material like it will be produced that you or others can use. It enriches the ecosystem of ideas on our side and that benefits everyone.

We're all fighting the good fight against a common enemy. And that's what really matters. Solidarity in that fight derives from a common cause, but it also derives from how we treat each other.

A SYRIAN PUNCHLINE

The Arab League, which partially backed NATO action against Gaddafi, sent a team of observers to monitor Syria's human rights, with the different factions pushing them one way or another. The Arab League's word could justify all sorts of interventions which would then appear to have the backing of the Muslim world, or at least those parts of it that have most of the oil money.

Heading up the superteam of human rights experts was Lieutenant General Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi who is an expert at human rights because he was the commander of Sudan's Arab Muslim genocide against its native population back in the 90's. And Al-Dabi and the team found nothing too serious going on in Syria, which is true compared to what Dabi and the boys were doing to Christians and Animists in Sudan.

Speaking out against the team's conclusions is Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad Bin Jasim Bin Jaber Al Thani, who has even more names than Al-Dabi does, who said that the Arab League team was inexperienced and needs help from the United Nations.

Qatar's Al-Jazeera has been backing and propagandizing the Arab Spring and Al-Thani was telling Al-Dabi, "You got it wrong the first time. Go back and join up with the UN and determine there's genocide so we can overthrow Assad."

Al-Thani is a member of the local royals overseeing a dictatorship or monarchy if you want to be romantic. Al-Dabi is the pet thug of a genocidal totalitarian state. And Al-Dabi and Al-Thani are debating how bad a third dictator and his totalitarian state are and whether they should be overthrown in the name of human rights.

To sum up. Bashar Assad of Syria is a dictator. Sudan's Omar Hassan Al-Bashir is a dictator. Qatar's Al-Thani clan is another dictatorship. They're all dictators, they all have zero regard or belief in human rights and the idea that any of them have any standing to talk about human rights is a joke. But Western governments and media are taking this nonsense seriously.

Al-Dabi is the messenger boy of an internationally wanted war criminal, but we take the Arab League which sent him seriously. Sheikh Hamad Bin a bunch of bins Al-Thani overthrew his own father to rule Qatar. What the two of them know about human rights could be put in a thimble and have plenty of room left over.

The Arab League does not care about human rights. Al-Jazeera does not care about human rights. They have no independent existence. They are pawns of local Arab Muslim dictators who use them for their own agendas.

And NATO? If NATO cared about human rights they would have been bombing Sudan a long time ago.

ANOTHER DAY TO REMEMBER THE REAL VICTIMS

Perhaps the most odious aspect of this is the incorporation of the Islamophobia theme into a day of remembrance for the dead, until the very act of remembrance becomes tarred with accusations of bigotry. Every commemoration of the day by Muslim leaders seems determined to not only foist the Islamophobia myth on us, but to also associate it with some national overreaction to that day. Like the family of a cop killer arriving at a memorial determined to make their own sense of victimization the center of attention, the need by some Muslims to turn their own sense of victimization into the focus of September 11 is inappropriate and flies on the face of what should be basic decency.

From my Front Page article: All-American Muslim’s Very Special Tribute to 9/11

OBAMA THE KNIFE

You've got to give Obama some credit. Sure he may have run up spending in every other way, but when it comes to the military he's got his red pencil and axe on the desk. While every other part of government has grown unrestricted, the military has gotten cut over and over again.

The latest plan is to fire soldiers and replace them with unmanned drones. It's a strategy so genius it only could have come from Joe Biden and undoubtedly did. Drones are neat and all. If you want a low risk way to take out an Anwar Al-Awlaki without sending in the marines then a drone is great. If you're stuck fighting an actual war though drones are not going to be anything but a supplement.

Dumping a hundred thousand troops is going to leave the United States less prepared for a conflict and will weaken its global posture. It's also "peculiar" that at a time when government jobs are growing by leaps and bounds, there's suddenly no money for an army.

But there is a solution. Just retask a battalion as an EPA SWAT team fighting the war on Global Warming and suddenly there will be a lot of money in the budget for them.

Now if you were wondering why Panetta was sent over to be Secretary of Defense, you know why. You need an ignorant party stooge in the driver's seat to sell an ignorant and irresponsible plan.

Rep. Allen West says the military cuts outlined by President Barack Obama at the Pentagon Thursday show “incompetence” in understanding the nation’s national security needs and the defense strategy is not “coherent.”

“We’re not talking about a coherent national security strategy — what the president laid out is very dangerous and it really does show incompetence in understanding national security strategy,” West said. “He did not talk about how we go forward on the 21st century battlefield — the ability to engage, deter, and strike the enemy when necessary. We cannot sit around and say we won’t fight a second combat operation because the enemy has a vote in this.

after World War II we gutted the military to such a degraded state that the first Army battalion that showed up on the battlefield in Korea was absolutely decimated — I don’t want to see that type of things happen to my friends and also one of my relatives that’s still serving in the military.”

But it's not like we have to worry about North Korea anymore. In other good news the strategy makes it all but impossible for us to counter it in a new conflict.

To understand what's really at stake here read Major General Scales' piece in the Washington Post.

Unfortunately, Obama’s plan does exactly that. It forgets the lessons of history. Some facts: Harry Truman seeking to never repeat the costs of World War II reduced the Army from 8 million soldiers to fewer than half a million. Without the intervention of Congress, he would have eliminated the Marine Corps entirely. The result was the evisceration of both land services in Korea, a war Truman never intended to fight.

With Dwight Eisenhower came the “New Look” strategy that sought to reduce the Army and Marine Corps again to allow the creation of a nuclear delivery force built around the Strategic Air Command. Along came Vietnam, a war that Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson never wanted to fight. But by 1970 our professional Army broke apart and was replaced by a body of amateurs. The result was defeat and 58,000 dead.

After Vietnam, the Nixon administration broke the Army again. I know. I was there to see the drug addiction, murders in the barracks and chronic indiscipline, caused mainly by a dispirited noncommissioned corps that voted with its feet and left. Then came Jimmy Carter’s unique form of neglect that led to the “hollow Army” of the late ’70s, an Army that failed so miserably in its attempt to rescue the American hostages in Iran.

I've excerpted only a portion but the entire thing is well worth reading to understand the situation. This isn't about saving money, this is about retaining a military that's still large enough to cost a lot of money, but can't win wars on the battlefield.

As far as the leaner meaner force is concerned. Obama's plan delays the Joint Strike Fighter again. 120 planes are being postponed. So lean yes, mean no. 15 billion dollars is being saved by retarding the program which will make the planes more expensive, which will make them harder to sell to our allies, which will set back American military capabilities further.

15 billion dollars sounds like a lot, but it's about what this administration spends on ice cream. Hey you know who could use that 15 billion dollars that we aren't spending upgrading our air force?

ACORN and other radical left-wing groups would be eligible for up to $15 billion in federal funding if President Obama’s new economic stimulus package becomes law.

All this is about what you would expect from Reverend Wright and Billy Ayers' boy.

Trevor Loudon at New Zeal has his own thoughts on the subject.

A PROGRESSIVE JIHAD

A more accurate name for CAP would be the Center for Islamist Progress. There is no Islamist thug or regime too awful for the Center, whose number one priority is backing Islamist takeovers in the Middle East. Its number two priority is fighting military action on Iran, and even decrying sanctions against Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollahs, and its number three priority is portraying Israel as the greatest threat to peace in the region.

But if the Center wanted to avoid allegations of anti-Semitism it would have been wise to also avoid picking a fight with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a non-partisan organization started by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal that tracks expressions of hate against the Jewish people. Instead, in response to a simple policy statement from the Wiesenthal Center against returning to the indefensible 1948 borders, ThinkProgress’ Ben Armbruster called it a “far-right” organization and accused it of branding Obama a Nazi.

From my Front Page article: The Center for American Progress’ Jihad Against the Free World

THAT'S ALL FOLKS

In issuing his ruling, Davis said, “Counting the signature of Bugs Bunny is something only a lawyer could make seem OK.”

FIRE AWAY

In the dumbest reason to ban a gun ever...

Owners of the Armi Jager AP80 .22-calibre rifle received a letter from the RCMP in December saying the registration certificates for the firearm would be revoked and they had a month to dispose of their weapons - with no compensation.

As of Dec. 20, the once legally owned gun would be classified as prohibited.

According to the letter, the decision was made because the AP80 is cosmetically similar to the AK-47 rifle.

In New York, home of gun control related insanity, where two visitors who brought legal firearms with them and asked to check them are facing hefty jail sentences, water guns can't remotely resemble actual guns.

The above case is taking place in Canada and a 22 rifle is about as dangerous as a water gun, no matter what it looks like. A robber who walks into a bank with a 22 rifle will be laughed at. But this is what happens when bureaucrats make the rules. And when gun registries are used to seize weapons.

AFTER THE PURGE

Phyllis Chesler has an interview with Professor Subramanian Swamy after his purge by Harvard for opposing Islamic terrorism.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ISLAMIC NARCOTERRORISM

During the 1970s and 1980s, Yasser Arafat’s and Mahmoud Abbas’ PLO controlled clandestine laboratories in Lebanon, laying some of the foundations to the current narcoterrorism infrastructure, which boosted the PLO’s stashed bank accounts. According to Western law-enforcement agencies, 40 percent of the PLO’s weaponry acquisition was then financed by the trafficking of heroin, hashish or morphine. Much of the heroine consumed in the U.S. and Western Europe was provided by Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, the PLO and other terrorist organizations, in return for Soviet Bloc military supplies. In a March 1988 interview with the El Paso Times, Tom Smith, a retired FBI deputy director for intelligence, stated that the PLO’s large contingency in Nicaragua was there in order to facilitate a narcoterror offensive against the U.S.

BAD STRATEGY

Stratfor (Strategic Forecasting, Inc.) has achieved a middling reputation among people who don't know any better as the go-to organization for intelligence and analysis on just about anything. There's rarely a topic in the news that the organization doesn't sound off on, either through its own website or in the form of published "reports." (Stratfor also used to be quoted quite a bit by legacy news organizations, though that seems to have died down in recent years.)

So says J.R. Dunn at American Thinker. Copies are still available of George Friedman's 1991 book, "The Coming War with Japan."

From Library Journal

Friedman and Lebard remind us at the beginning of their book that this century has already produced unlikely turns of events. Who in 1960 could have predicted that America 20 years later would be in retreat, defeated by the Vietnamese and reeling before the Iranians? If war with Japan seems impossible, the authors nevertheless deliver on their book's title with an alarming and usually plausible scenario that takes Japan and the United States on a downward spiral from trade friction to protectionism to armed showdown over markets and raw materials. Friedman and Lebard do not shrink from categorical assertions in the future tense--words like "inevitably" and "inexorably" dot the landscape

Maybe there should have been a few less inevitablys in the mix considering that around this time the United States found itself drawn into growing conflicts in the Middle East.

If the worst-case scenario is the basis for planning, then Israel must reduce its risk and restructure its geography along the more favorable lines that existed between 1949 and 1967, when Israel was unambiguously victorious in its wars, rather than the borders and policies after 1967, when Israel has been less successful. The idea that the largest possible territory provides the greatest possible security is not supportable in military history. As Frederick the Great once said, he who defends everything defends nothing.”

The latter might make more sense if we were talking about the Sinai. How any strategic expert could argue that the 1948 borders are more defensible than the 1967 borders is beyond me considering that we are talking about a relatively small amount of territory that is potently strategic.

Does George Friedman really think that splitting Israel's capital in half and handing over the other half to the enemy will make the country easier to defend? An inevitable war with Japan seems downright sensible compared to that.

The idea that Israel was winning wars because of the 1948 borders, but losing them because of the 1967 borders is plain bizarre. Israel only fought one conventional war on its territory since then and it won that war despite some strategic blunders at the outset. The determining factor in the Yom Kippur War was not the size of its borders, but the lack of preparation and the failure to launch a preemptive strike.

If Israel had started out with 1948 borders in the Yom Kippur War it would probably never have survived. It barely survived its War of Independence. It won the Six Day War by pushing outward.

Preparing for a worst case scenario by retreating back to indefensible borders is like preparing to be attacked by tying your hands behind your back and downing a handful of sleeping pills.

The One True Anti-Romney

2012-01-04T22:13:00.000-05:00

While other candidates were busy rising and falling, sinking and swimming, reaching out to experts and promoting themselves to insiders, Rick Santorum did things the old fashioned way. He campaigned. And the candidate whom the insiders ignored and disdained, came within a hair of winning Iowa.

So now it's another round of Pile on Santorum. After the previous round of Pile on Gingrich. Which is how we ended up with a match between Romney and Ron Paul. What exactly is the point of destroying Santorum I have to wonder? These attacks aren't really based on ideological opposition. Not for the most part. The war on Santorum in being waged to clear the way for some other candidate. And so every non-Romney candidate is being destroyed to make way for the one true Anti-Romney.

Who is the one true Anti-Romney? To some it's Perry, to others it's Gingrich and to others it's anybody but the candidates actually running.

There are many furious headlines being written castigating Santorum for somehow having sneaked under the radar without paying his dues by being lambasted by the conservative establishment for a week. The consensus is that he only almost won because all the other candidates crashed and burned. That might be true, but who tanked the other candidates? Aside from Cain, the liberal media hardly had to lift a finger. It was the gatekeepers of the establishment who did all the heavy lifting.

The National Review, which helped sink Gingrich, fires its biggest shotgun at Santorum by putting up a photo of him together with George W. Bush. It used to be Democrats that tried to sink Republicans with photos like that. But if we are going to disqualify any Republican who had his photo taken with Bush, the primary season just got a lot simpler.

The case against Santorum is that he is a "Big Government Conservative", all capital letters. That is the official talking point. But assuming that Santorum is a big government conservative, who are the small government conservatives? Romney, Perry, Gingrich?

When your competition are two state governors, one of whom was responsible for RomneyCare and the other for proposing a health insurance program for Mexicans, Santorum's transgressions like "national service, publicly financed trust funds for children, community-investment incentives, and economic-literacy programs in schools" don't seem that great a sin. What's left then for small government conservatism? Newt Gingrich? I like Gingrich, but he's not exactly immune to that charge by about a mile.

Worse still we are told that Santorum "voted against NAFTA and has long opposed free trade. He backed higher tariffs on everything from steel to honey." Horrifyingly unelectable. How can anyone possibly support a candidate who opposes mass shipping of American jobs overseas. Americans might support such a candidate, but the Chamber of Commerce never will.

At the London Telegraph, James Delingpole asserts that Santorum is "so left on the issues that matter he makes even Mitt Romney look like a red meat conservative". So I suppose we have found our Anti-Romney and he is Mitt Romney. The only way to possibly stop Santorum's radical left-wing opposition to NAFTA and support for economic literacy programs in schools is by rushing to vote for Mitt Romney to save America.

Longtime readers know that I am not a strong supporter of any candidate. There are candidates that I like while acknowledging their flaws. Overall I have tried to be fair to any legitimate candidate in the field and tried to find something good to say about them. As the seemingly inevitable ascent of Romney continues, I will find something to like about him, if only that his name isn't Obama.

What irritates me is that the primaries have descended into the depths of personal destruction where spurious attacks are used by supporters of one side or another until the field is a mass of ridiculed and banished candidates, and our winner is the man with the least personality and the least interest in what we think of him.

Proxies and backers for one Anti-Romney or another, and for Romney, trade insults and undermine each other's candidates, and while they are often right on the facts, those critiques are context-free because they rarely compare one candidate to another. Unfortunately we are well past the point where we can hope for a perfect candidate or even a great candidate, all we are doing now is the dirty business of comparison shopping candidates, trying to decide which one fits in our budget and won't break down after a hundred miles. There is something deceptive about rival car salesmen tearing down every used Chevy because it doesn't handle like a Porsche, when all they've got to offer are used Fords and used Hondas.

This race has come down to three Anti-Romneys. If conservatives can unite around an Anti-Romney then Romney is in big trouble. If they can't then Romney is the nominee. It's that simple and everyone knows it. But who will the Anti-Romney be?

The proxies accuse everyone who isn't their candidate of secretly being in league with Romney, which gives the man a little too much credit. If Romney was that kind of evil supergenius then he would have won more elections. They emphasize the big government vices of the other side while underplaying their own man's big government peccadilloes. So let's lay all the cards on the table.

All three Anti-Romneys are flawed. Deeply flawed. Human beings are naturally flawed, professional politicians more so. They all have their strengths and their weaknesses and they aren't the same. They have all variously denounced big government while all serving in very big government positions. They all have electability issues. They have all screwed up and been the object of mocking laughter.

I am not here to endorse or promote any of them. I like two of them, but I don't know if either of them can win an election against the Community Organizer in Chief and his press corps, and that is what matters most to me. The third I dislike, but would still prefer over Romney.

This isn't about who you should support. You will all make that decision yourselves. This is about how the primary coverage has boiled down to a circular firing squad that is as dishonest as it could possibly be. There's nothing wrong with pointing out a candidate's flaws. It's a public service. What is wrong is pretending that a disqualifying flaw in one candidate is a minor blemish on another. That's not honest criticism, it's trying to sell a bad product by tearing down the competition.

There are no Porsches here. There isn't anyone who didn't exercise government power or fund government programs. And there also isn't anyone who isn't a critic of some forms of government power. Anyone who served in congress or oversaw a state and claims otherwise is a liar. And everyone is also jumping on the small government reform bandwagon with varying degrees of sincerity. And that means more debates over the difference between legitimate and illegitimate exercise of government power is. But the bottom line is that they're all 1989 Chevy's and all we can do is try to make a case for the car that will actually take us four years on one tank of gas without costing too much.

That means we all have to do the numbers for ourselves and decide what fits in our budget and look at our gut reaction to the product. You have to decide what you can and can't live with.What candidate's values fit yours and which of their positions cross the line.

We have had enough messiahs in tailored suits. We're not looking for a Greek deity, just a flawed man who can win an election and check some of the worst abuses of the past four years. That's not aiming very high, but barring the arrival of some wonderful third party candidate, it's what we've got. There are plenty of other options for checking government power at the congressional level and in other ways, but this is what we have in the way of options at the presidential level.

Will we come together around an Anti-Romney? Probably not. The same establishment that destroyed every potential Anti-Romney will do its best to finish off Santorum clearing the way for a Romney nomination. Gingrich has made one comeback after being destroyed by the establishment and another one can't be ruled out. Perry has been trying to make a comeback, but has lacked the forum to do it in. Any one of them can still become the Anti-Romney and history will change.

I can't predict the future, but there are lessons that can be taken away from the present. The establishment has internalized too much of the media's criticisms and the preoccupations of its influential backers. It is not truly interested in changing things, only in perpetuating the status quo. Too much of the conservative media and new media has echoed them creating a circular firing squad whose only real purpose was to make it impossible for anyone who isn't Romney to make it to the nomination. How much of this was intentional and how much of it was an inevitable outcome of website traffic driven economics and the growing adoption of Huffington Post and Drudge like coverage of politics by conservative media is difficult to say. But the outcome is clear and clearly unpleasant. The gossip website ethos of sensationalism and a predatory appetite for human failings trumping all else.

It is hard for idealism to thrive or even receive a fair hearing in an atmosphere of constant media cynicism where the only reason to build up a candidate is to tear him down again, where a sneering version of 1984's Two Minute Hate is always playing in every theater. The triviality of the debates was nothing compared to the triviality of the right of center media coverage of the candidates.

If we truly want another Reagan to emerge, then the forum has to be there to make it happen. And that means a serious discussion rather than a two second ridicule reel of some obvious flaw. It means digging deep into a candidate's positions, rather than airing their commercials or their talking points. It also means honestly examining flaws, rather than tearing down any rival candidates for no other reason then that their name isn't Rick or Newt. And it means opening yourself up to inspiration from even flawed candidates who have the potential to be more.

In 2012 we may have to settle for an Anti-Romney or even only an Anti-Obama, but it doesn't always have to be that way. And the change in tone that can make it happen begins with us.

Islamophilia and the Israeli Question

2012-01-03T23:41:00.000-05:00

The dominant theme of the Islamophile foreign policy narrative is that America's troubles with Islamic terrorism and the violent instability of the Middle-East somehow derive from our excessive closeness to the Jewish State. In this narrative, which is prevalent among diplomats, journalists and assorted talking heads who are neither but pretend to be both, the terrorists are really just critics of our foreign policy. Except instead of penning smarmy New York Times columns like Thomas Friedman or Nick Kristoff, they plant bombs and ram planes into buildings not for the greater glory of Allah, but to prove the theses of Adlai Stevenson III and Zbignew Brzezinski.

The trouble with this is that it fails to reflect any reality other than the one in the stifling craniums of the opinionators. The foreign policy dolts have been complaining about the Zionist menace long before there was a special relationship between the United States and Israel. Back then the British Foreign Office thought that the Empire could govern the region through a passel of puppet kings and princes. They carved up Israel, turning most of the land over to an expat bunch of Saudi royals, trained the Hashemite Kingdom's Legion into the second best military in the region and commanded them in the assault on Jerusalem against a handful of Israeli farm boys and Ghetto fighters fresh off the boat.

What did the Empire get in return for all its Islamophilia? Less than ten years later it was forced to turn to those same farm boys and their sons after the Woolrich educated King Farouk I went into exile in Rome and General Nasser began to be unfavorably compared to Hitler by leading British politicians for his designs on the Suez Canal.

Fairly soon the monarchies were all gone, except for those under direct American protection, and those kings and princes have been some of the leading financiers of Islamic terrorism making them a very bsd bargain.

In the Islamophile version of history, the Israeli Lobby "bought up" congress and terrorizes any politician who doesn't salute the Blue and White. In the actual history the relationship emerged because the reflex Anti-Western sentiments of the Muslim world left Western powers with few options.

The so-called "Special Relationship" did not develop until growing Soviet influence among the receptive Arab Muslim nations of the Middle-East created the need for a counterbalance. Israel has been that balance, the uncomfortable option held in reserve for when the Muslim allies of the United States, Britain and France inevitably turn on them. And to assert otherwise is to put the cart before the horse and the present before the past.

Had that relationship been the work of a nefarious Jewish lobby then it is rather odd that it has deepened even as the numbers and influence of American Jews have declined along with their commitment to the Jewish State. Somewhere between a third and a quarter of American Jews, among them some of the wealthiest, famous and best educated of the bunch, consider Israel an embarrassment and wish it would go away. They pour small fortunes into liberal lobbies that urge politicians to oppose Israel.

But what does this relationship consist of exactly? American troops don't fight for Israel the way that they have for Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or Lebanese governments. The military aid exists for much the same reason that unnecessary bases and Pentagon cost overruns do as part of the complicated relationship between defense contractors and local congressmen looking to subsidize industries in their districts.

The far more important part of the relationship, that of moral support hardly exists. Most Americans do support Israel in its conflict with Islamic expansionism, which is more than can be said for American leaders. Israel has hardly ever been in a war without receiving stern warnings from Washington to immediately seek a truce, regardless of who began the war or what's at stake.

Critics of Israel harp on America's failure to act as an "honest broker" in that country's negotiations with Islamic terrorists, by which they mean that we haven't pushed Israel all the way under the bus. But how much more room is there under the bus? Arafat's Palestinian Authority has never been held to a single one of its commitments, while Israel has been held to countless commitments it never even made. To gauge how far the negotiations have drifted and in whose direction, a process that began with Israel not negotiating directly with terrorists and signing on only to an autonomous territory within its borders, has now reached the point where the Vice President of the United States throws a fit because a housing permit was granted for houses in Jerusalem while he was in Israeli airspace.

It goes without saying that no Muslim ally of the United States is treated in such a shoddy way. Turkey, which genuinely and indisputably occupies Cyprus, could build mosques out of piles of Cypriot corpses and Biden would only smile and remark on the fascinating Eastern architecture. When Turkey's Thug in Chief threatened to ethnically cleanse the Armenians a second time if they didn't stop complaining about the first time at a joint press conference with the Prime Minister of Britain, the good fellow pretended to find something very interesting on the ceiling at that moment.

The Saudis can slowly behead a woman accused of witchcraft and win a long round of applause from diplomats, but when Israel grants a house permit in its own capital, one of the oldest cities in the world which fashionable Islamophiles now call a settlement, then all hell breaks loose.

Is this really anyone's idea of a special relationship?

The truth of the matter is that this is a relationship built primarily on Muslim intransigence. Rather than Israel trapping the United States into a relationship that alienates the Muslim world, it is the Muslim world's alienation from the West that made the relationship both possible and necessary.

Israel has not poisoned the West's relationship with the Muslim world. It is the native and reflexive hostility of the Muslim world which did that. The Islamophile apologists for a failed foreign policy would rather jauntily don their keffiyahs and meet for coffee in Cairo with the next up and coming revolutionary, while blaming America's relationship with Israel for the regional violence and hostility, rather than admit that a century of playing Lawrence of Arabia has only left behind two types of Muslim countries. Open enemies and covert enemies.

The problem is a structural one. Muslim Westaphobia is a hatred that predates the United States or the current foreign policy arrangements of its leaders. It is a civilizational conflict that cannot be settled with a convenient scapegoat or addressed solely in terms of the foreign policy of the last century, which is hardly more than a minute in a struggle defined by over a thousand years of acrimony.

Israel makes for a convenient scapegoat. A colonial scapegoat to tick the checkboxes of the left, never mind that its people are the indigenous inhabitants and the Muslim terrorists are the settlers and conquerors who have more in common with Francisco Pizarro than they do with Chief Joseph. But the attacks on Israel as the source of the sore spot are expedient rather than meaningful. It isn't about Israel or Mubarak or reports that somewhere an American soldier in a latrine flushed a Koran or any of the other spurious scapegoats of Muslim violence.

The structural animosity between Islam and the West must be addressed and it cannot be addressed so long as the Nazi ambassador is allowed to answer every question about his country's actions by pontificating about the Sudetenland north of Jerusalem. The relationship between Israel and the West is not the cause of the conflict between Islam and the West, it is the unacknowledged Western response to it.

Ron Paul's Soros Defense Plan

2012-01-02T21:24:00.000-05:00

It was recently observed that Ron Paul was to the left of Obama on national security and the best evidence for that statement can be found when one year ago Ron Paul joined forces with Barney Frank on a proposal to gut national defense via a panel of experts, quite a few of whom were tied to George Soros.

In July 2010, Barney Frank and Ron Paul co-authored a Huffington Post article rolling out their Sustainable Defense Task Force. The Task Force "consisting of experts on military expenditures that span the ideological spectrum" would recommend a trillion dollars in defense cuts. The experts however didn't quite "span the ideological spectrum", more like float under it.

The panel of experts who would decide how to best gut national defense featured such independent thinkers as William D Hartung of the New America Foundation. Hartung's main expertise was appearing in "Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire".

Then there was Lawrence J. Korb of the Center for American Progress and Miriam Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies. If you want to know what the Center, the Foundation and the Institute all have in common, it's Hungarian and smells like stale cabbage and the death of nations.

The rather creepy Institute for Policy Studies issued a paper proposing that Obama act as king and rule through executive orders. The New American Foundation is not only backed by Soros but has his son on its leadership council. The Center for American Progress is run by the co-chair of Obama's transition team and is all for intents and purposes the think tank of the White House. All three are Soros funded.

But it doesn't end there. Also on the panel was Christopher Hellman of the National Priorities Project. If you are wondering what the NPP is. It's a think tank whose objective is to "influence national spending priorities". And if you're in the mood for a double, Miriam Pemberton is also on the board of the NPP. The man behind the curtain at NPP? None other than our favorite Hungarian James Bond villain.

Going further down the list there's Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information. The CDI's goal is to strengthen "national and international security through international cooperation, reduced reliance on unilateral military power to resolve conflict". CDI operates under the aegis of the World Security Institute, which is apparently the least creepy name they could think of. Wheeler is a Counterpunch contributor, a site which even Stalinists think goes a bit too far. CDI gets money from Soros' Open Society Institute where the stench of death and stale cabbage never goes away.

Then there's Charles Knight and Carl Conetta of the Project for Defense Alternatives which appears to be a subset of the Commonwealth Institute. Of its Board of Directors, S.M. Miller is also the founder of United for a Fair Economy which enjoys generous support from a certain philanthropic chap who occasionally destroys economies for sport. Another member Guy Molyneux has also worked with the OSI. A third board member Richard Healey, was formerly director of the Institute for Policy Studies and is on the advisory board of the Center for Social Inclusion, founded by two OSI veterans.

If you think this can't get any worse, sorry to disappoint you but meet Paul Kawika Martin of Peace Action. You might know PA better by its old name of The Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy or just SANE. A Communist front group investigated by none other than Senator Thomas Dodd. PA has the same attitude toward American defense that burglars have toward alarm systems in other people's homes. They don't like them very much. And they have a "five year strategic plan" for the job.

Paul Kawika Martin travels around fighting progress on board The Rainbow Warrior and is also involved with Physicians for Social Responsibility. Martin has also collaborated with NIAC, a front for the Iranian regime. I think you can guess by now who funds Physicians for Social Responsibility. If you can't, here's a hint. The initials are GS.

Then there's Laicie Olson of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. The Center is actually a subset of the Council for a Livable World. Olson originally worked for Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Also on board was Heather Hurlburt of the National Security Network. The NSN's goals are to "build a strong progressive national security and counter conservative spin." Its founder was part of Obama's transition team and resigned to work for Janet Napolitano. Soros' OSI helped fund NSN and its Special Counsel was on the NSN Policy Committee.

If you're tired of reading through all this, then good news because here's the summary. Of the Paul-Frank Task Force, 9 out of 14 members were linked to Soros's organs. Two were affiliated with the Cato Institute. One is indeterminate.

Ron Paul proposed to put a bunch of Soros funded think tank experts in charge of dismantling the US military. Think about that for a moment. And then think about it again. Ron Paul supporters can see conspiracies in a glass of water, can they see anything wrong with this picture? Can they see anything wrong with having a man from a group that was investigated for its Communist ties in the driver's seat on national defense?

The task force's proposals included cutting nuclear deterrence, reducing the fleet by 57 ships, including two carriers, canceling the Joint Strike Fighter. "Severely curtail missile defense". and that is a direct quote from the report. Retiring four Marine battalions. Reducing the military by 200,000 personnel. Cutting defense research spending by 50 billion over ten years. And increasing health care fees for members of the military.

Not only did Paul join forces with Barney Frank to slash military preparedness, but he ended up putting the experts of a foreign billionaire with global ambitions in charge of the project. And that was what he did as a congressman. Can anyone imagine what he would do as President?

But why would Ron Paul allow George Soros that much power and influence over America's defense policy. There are a number of possibilities. There is the possibility that Ron Paul just didn't know and didn't bother to do his research. Which is not much of a recommendation for the job he's running for. There's another possibility that Ron Paul knew and didn't care, that he had no objection to being part of a left-right alliance against the "American Empire" with Soros. But there's also a third possibility.

During the previous election, Americans Against Escalation in Iraq ran an ad praising Ron Paul for his position against the war. AAEI was an umbrella group for MoveOn.org, the Center for American Progress, SEIU, Americans United For Change, the National Security Network and others in the progressive bestiary. A number of those beasties were Soros groups.

I'm not one to dabble in conspiracy theories, but when Soros pays for an ad praising you during the Republican primaries and then you put his experts in charge of America's defense policy, then maybe some questions should be asked.

The Genocide Doctrine

2012-01-01T23:05:00.000-05:00

Whether or not Ron Paul actually said that he would not intervene to stop the Holocaust, there is nothing particularly extraordinary about this position. The United States has never intervened to stop a genocide. Not in WW2 and not since when several genocides have taken place, most notably in Africa, without any military intervention.

The United States did participate in two NATO wars justified with phony claims of genocide, but the only ethnic cleansings that have taken place have been of Serbs from Kosovo and of Africans from Libya. Which is to say the closest thing to a genocide in either case was perpetrated by our allies against the people we were bombing on their behalf in two civil wars. And neither of those rise anywhere near the level of genocide.

We have maintained close ties with two genocidal Muslim states, Turkey and Indonesia. The latter conducted genocide against Christians in East Timor on our watch and with our weapons. Obama's Indonesian stepfather was a likely participant in that genocide, his former Director of National Intelligence helped keep it going. And Obama has been on record opposing any intervention in Sudan.

It is doubtful that any American president would have intervened militarily to stop the Holocaust, with the possible exception of George W. Bush, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. Ron Paul can't be given credit for much, but his response is honest if nothing else. Or at least partly honest. It's more likely that he is actually sympathetic to another party in the conflict. His newsletter where he blames Churchill for prolonging WW2 by not letting the USSR and Nazi Germany "fight it out" suggests as much. It's an echo of similar themes put out by Pat Buchanan and other fellow travelers.

But this really isn't about him. The question of whether we should be intervening to stop genocide is virtually irrelevant because it's not something we do. Holocaust education has very little to do with the mass murder of the Jews of Europe and a great deal to do with teaching tolerance. The genocide doctrine employed by modern administrations has nothing to do with the Holocaust either, it has a great deal to do with dressing up the wars that our leaders decided they wanted to fight anyway.

WWI had enough grandiose claims made about it to make you think that it was the ultimate war against evil. WWII where there actually were monsters on the side, not just Prussian stuffed shirts with curled mustaches, must have caught the propagandists by surprise. But had Hitler's minions practiced eugenics and killed ethnic minorities, there would have been no war. The initial response to Hitler was that he was stabilizing an unstable country. It was only when Hitler insisted on destabilizing the region with grandiose ambitions that war became inevitable.

Stability is the reason why we began bombing Libya. Not because Gaddafi was guilty of genocide, but because Western diplomats and the assorted grab bag of elites had decided that democracy was the way forward in the Middle East. And the dictators who were blocking the way forward had to go. Gaddafi's crime wasn't that his troops were raping and murdering their way through the opposition. Raping and murdering your way through the opposition is a time honored practice of Muslim rulers.

The trouble with Gaddafi was that he stood in the way of plans to "stabilize the region". That also happens to be Israel's crime. And stability means fitting into the regional order and not making too many waves. When Hitler was rolling out workers rights and grandiose national spectacles then he was fitting into the European future. Oswald Mosley, the fellow who would become the bugbear of English socialists, started out as a radical socialist, until his approach fell out of step.

It might be nice if we actually avoided wars except when dealing with threats or mass murdering lunatics, but plenty of the former and the latter have thrived on our watch. If we actually fought wars to deal with threats then the Saudis wouldn't be stuffing their faces with lamb stew while counting their rolls of money and rolls of fat. And if we actually dealt with mass murdering regimes, then the Butcher of Khartoum wouldn't be laughing while his troops wipe out another African village.

After World War II when we began actively intervening to push back threatening ideologies our wars on occasion had a certain amount of substance. Korea, Vietnam, Grenada and Afghanistan were arguably in our national interest. That was more than could be said for when we were clearing the way for UN aid workers or creating a Muslim state in Yugoslavia or protecting the fat Kuwaiti merchants from being looted by Saddam's kinfolk.

Saddam arguably engaged in genocide, and didn't have to worry about being bombed. It was only when he stepped on the toes of some of our oily friends that the bombs began to fall. And when our Kuwaiti friends got back their dominion courtesy of the United States Marines, their first order of business was ethnically cleansing the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs who had sided with Saddam. The response from the Bush Administration Mark I, which was quite fixated in its own way on the "peace process" was to shrug its shoulders and treat it as business as usual.

There's something noble about the idea of the United States Marines coming forward when some dictator decides to wipe out a few million people. It's what most Americans think their country does. But that idea is also completely detached from reality. We don't do it and we aren't about to start doing it. Which is why keeping things like Right 2 Protect around is a dangerous thing. It provides ammunition for the amoral likes of Obama and Clinton to fight their Post-American wars for their Post-American reasons.

The situation in the American Jewish community is even worse. The lessons of the Holocaust could not be any more lost on American Jewish leaders than if they had actually traveled in time from 1929 and were still enthusiastic about the prospects of the League of Nations for bringing world peace. Somehow the lesson taken away from the mass murder of six million Jews is not that survival is precarious, but that it's important to teach everyone to get along.

Israeli Jews, who are trying to survive a region ruled by a totalitarian ideology that is every bit as murderous as Islam, are constantly told that their survival efforts make them as bad as the Nazis. If they were really committed to peace then they would be out there offering up the Sudetenland of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem to the Nazis, and doing it more enthusiastically and with more feeling than they have up till now.

The real crime of those obnoxious Israelis isn't that they are oppressing anyone, but they are out of step with Realpolitik and with the syrupy liberal arguments used to clothe the brutal insanity of that Realpolitik in the veneer of ethics and morality. And whatever defenses of Israel are voiced they always fall short because they have nothing to do with either issue. The issue that Israel is out of step with the regional ambitions of the Arab Muslim majority and the pious suicide drive of the West.

Israel is doing its part. Tel Aviv is overrun with African migrants. Half the country is overrun with terrorists. A sizable percentage of its Arab Muslim citizens hardly pay any taxes and obey only the laws that they want to obey with no one to tell them otherwise. A nation that's hardly the size of Rhode Island has given up three times its own size in territory in the name of peace, without actually receiving any peace in return. But that's not enough.

The genocide doctrine was not about doing what's right, but about doing what's wrong. The aftermath of World War II didn't lead to a renewal of the rights of small nations but their acquisition and submergence into regional and global orders. Israel is a pariah within the regional and the global order for that simple reason. It is out of step with the United Nations, the European Union and the great progressive dreams of rolling all of mankind into some massive authority. The Great Daddy.

Our genocide interventions have been about the agenda of the international order. At the United Nations the nations that resisted Communism and Islam have been victimized. From Taiwan to Israel, the balance of power falls on the side of the powerful. The false lessons of Nazism have come down to quashing nations and empowering regional alliances to resist the "Rogue States" who fall outside the order. Nationalism is the foe, internationalism is the ally.

This hasn't prevented genocide, it has enabled it. Sudan is free to commit genocide so long as it has the support of the Arab League. The Arab Muslim majority which perpetrates genocide is protected by the Arab Muslim majority which has the influence and the wealth to make genocide possible. The obscene inversion of the international response to Nazi atrocities was to create a system that makes them possible and even profitable.

The Holocaust happened because the Nazis weren't killing anyone that people really cared about. That is the same reason why genocide in Sudan has taken place. No one really cared. And why should they? The people being raped and murdered aren't the way forward for a United Europe or an Arab Awakening or any grandiose philosophy of a better and more federalized world. They're simply people. The kind of people that the genocide doctrine was supposed to protect, but whose extermination it has actually enabled.

The Year We Lost Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia and Most of the Middle East

2011-12-31T22:40:00.000-05:00

About the only people having a Happy New Year in the Muslim world aren't the Christians who are huddling and waiting out the storm, but the Islamists who use a different calendar but are having the best time of their lives since the last Caliphate.

The news that the Obama Administration has brought in genocidal Muslim Brotherhood honcho Yusuf Al-Qaradawi to discuss terms of surrender for the transfer of Afghanistan to the Taliban caps a year in which the Brotherhood and the Salafists are looking up carve up Egypt, the Islamists won Tunisia's elections, Turkey's Islamist AKP Party purged the last bastions of the secular opposition and Libya's future as an Islamist state was secured by American, British and French jets and special forces.

Time Magazine declared that 2011 was the Year of the Protester, they might have more honestly called it the Year of the Islamist. In 2010 the Taliban were still hiding in caves. In 2012 they are set to be in power from Tunisia to Afghanistan and from Egypt to Yemen. They won't go by that name of course. Most of them will have elaborate names with the words "Justice" or "Community" in them, but they will for the most part be minor variations on the Muslim Brotherhood theme.

2011 will indeed be remembered, but not because of any Arab Spring or OWS nonsense. It will be a pivotal year in the rise of the next Caliphate. A rise disguised by angry protesters waving cell phones and flags. And clueless media coverage that treated Tahrir Square as the new fall of the Berlin Wall.

This was the year that Obama helped topple several regimes that served as the obstacles to Islamist takeovers. The biggest fish that Ibn Hussein speared out of the sea for Al-Qaradawi was Egypt, a prize that the Islamists had wanted for the longest time, but had never managed to catch. That is until the Caliph-in-Chief got it for them. Egyptian Democracy splits the take between the Brotherhood and the Salafists, whom the media is already quick to describe as moderates. First up against the wall are the Christians. Second up against the wall are the Jews. Third up is all that military equipment we provided to the Egyptian military which will shortly be finding its way to various "moderate militants" who want to discuss our foreign policy with us.

But there's no reason to sell the fall of Tunisia short or the transition in Yemen. And when mob protests didn't work, NATO sent in the jets to pound Libya until Al-Qaeda got its way there. Turkey's fate had been written some time ago, but 2011 was the year that the AKP completed its death grip on the country with a final crackdown on the military, which has now ceased to be a force for stability.

Left out of the picture is Somalia. Liberals fulminated when Bush helped drive out Al-Shaab and its jolly Muslim lads with a habit of beheading people who didn't grow beards or watched too much soccer. Any number of editorials complained that we had destabilized the country and that the Islamic Courts Union were really a bunch of moderates in disguise.

Sadly Obama has not been able to salvage the position of Al-Shabab which is low on money and has turned to forcing 12 year old girls into prostitution and torturing and murdering those who refuse. They're also forcing the elderly to join its militias. But there is good news. Like every terrorist group, Al-Shabab has gotten itself a Twitter account and when O finds 5 minutes in between vacations and golf tournaments, the White House will order neighboring African countries to withdraw their armies and send in Al-Qaradawi to negotiate.

But even if the Islamists don't get Somalia, they've got a nice chunk of North Africa to chew over, not to mention a few more slices of the Middle-Eastern pie, and Afghanistan will be back in their hands as soon as they manage to outmaneuver Karzai, which given his paranoia and cunning may admittedly take a while. But the Taliban are not big on maneuvers, they have the manpower, which means it's only a matter of time until they do what the Mujaheddin did to the puppet Soviet regime. A history that everyone in the region is quite familiar with.

The ugliest part of this story isn't what Obama did. It's when he did it. If he really had no interest in winning Afghanistan, and if as he had said, the Taliban are not our enemy, then why did we stay for so long and lose so many lives fighting a war that the White House had no intention of winning? The ugly conclusion that must be drawn from the timing of the Iraq and Afghanistan withdrawals is that the wars were being played out to draw down around the time of the next election.

What that means is Obama sacrificed the thousands of Americans killed and wounded in the conflict as an election strategy. The idea that American soldiers were fighting and dying for no reason until the time when maximum political advantage could be gained from pulling them out is horrifying, it's a crime beyond redemption, an act worse than treason-- and yet there is no other rational conclusion to be drawn from the timetable.

If the Taliban were not our enemy, then the war should have ended shortly after the election. Instead Obama threw more soldiers into the mix while tying their hands with Rules of Engagement that prevented them from defending themselves or aggressively going after the Taliban. Casualties among US soldiers and Afghan civilians increased. Now the Taliban are no longer our enemy and we are negotiating a withdrawal.

There are only two possible explanations. Either we lost the war or Obama never intended to win it and was allowing the Taliban to murder American soldiers until the next election. If so we're not just looking at a bad man at the teleprompter, we are looking into the face of an evil so amoral that it defies description.

But whatever motives we may attribute to the Obama Administration the outcome of its policies in backing the Arab Spring with influence, training and even weapons is indisputable. What Carter did to Persia, Obama has done to Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan and that's not the whole of the list.

Iraq will likely fall to Iran in a bloody civil war, whether it will be parts of the country or the whole country depend on how much support we provide to the Kurds. Under the Obama Administration the level of support is likely to be none.

Once the Islamists firmly take power across North Africa they will begin squeezing the last states that have still not fallen. Last month the leader of the murderous Enhada Islamists who have taken power in Tunisia stopped by Algeria. Morocco has not yet come down, but at this rate it's only a matter of time.

Syria remains an open question. The Muslim Brotherhood is in a successor position there and would welcome our intervention against the Assad regime. The Assads are no prize and they're Iranian puppets, but shoving them out would give the Brotherhood yet another country and its sizable collection of weaponry.

All that is bound to make 2012 an ugly year in its own right, especially if the Obama Administration continues allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to control its foreign policy. For all that Time and other mainstream media outlets continue splashing the same protest pornography photos on every page, the region has become an indisputably worse place this year with the majority of moderate governments overthrown and replaced, or in the process of being replaced by Islamist thugs.

Carter can breathe a sigh of relief. In one year the Obama Administration has done far more damage than the bucktoothed buffoon did in his entire term. After 2011 we can look back with nostalgia on the days when all that an incompetent leftist in the White House did was lose one country, one canal and a bunch of hostages. Things have gotten so bad that we can safely say that Obama on a good day is worse than Jimmy Carter on a bad day.

Forget the usual end of the year roundups which focus on pop stars, dead celebrities and who wore what and when. None of that really matters. It didn't matter four years ago. It certainly doesn't matter now.

2011 was not the year that Steve Jobs died, it was the year that any hope that we were not headed for a violent collision of civilizations died as Western governments helped topple the few moderates and let the worst have their harvest of power.

Will that be considered a bad thing in the long run? It's hard to say. What Obama did was speed up the date of an inescapable conflict. A day when it will no longer be state-supported terrorists setting off bombs, but when much of the Muslim world will look like Iran and will openly declare that they are at war with us. That was almost certainly bound to happen anyway, but bringing the day forward by ten or twenty years means that we will be less weaker than we might have been when it happens.

Evil has a way of destroying itself, and in his own backward way, Barry Hussein may have helped save civilization. It will be a long time before we know for sure, but giving the Brotherhood what it wanted before they were ready for it, and before we are so completely crippled by the left's political correctness that we are left helpless, may be our best hope.

2011 was the year we lost Afghanistan, Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia and many others, but it should not be the year that we lose hope. For all that the bad guys have been gaining and domestic prospects don't look good, the bad guys have a way of destroying themselves. Give evil its head and it will kill millions, but it will also self-destruct in a spectacular way. Even when it seems as if we have run out of productive things to do, it is instructive to remember that there is a Higher Power in the destinies of men and that the aspirations of evil men to play at being gods eventually leads them to complete and utter ruin through their own arrogance.

But 2011 is also a reminder that the world cannot afford another year of Obama. That it cannot afford the appeasement, the destructive policies or the post-American politics that have made his regime the worst administration in this country's history. 2011 may be the year that we lost the Middle East, but let's work to make 2012 the year that this country loses one Barack Hussein Obama.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Primary Punishment

2011-12-30T14:50:00.002-05:00

IOWA ROLL

Santorum is finally getting a look from Republican voters, if only a partial one, and it took long considering that he's far more consistently conservative in his positions. Is he electable, that's another issue.

Romney still has a fairly open path to the nomination only because the Anti-Romney vote has not solidified around a single candidate. And it hasn't solidified around a single candidate because none of the candidates really generates that much of an enthusiasm factor or makes voters comfortable.

The Pro-Romneyites know what they want. A stable candidate who will toe the Chamber of Commerce line and do a decent job of keeping the same mess going without being an "extremist" or alienating any sizable group. That means, contrary to what Coulter says, immigration reform and some form of national health care. It means compassionate conservatism. And it means a somewhat stable hand at the wheel.

Most Republicans don't like Romney or his positions very much, but there's no real ability to unite around an Anti-Romney because all the candidates are deeply flawed in some way. Gingrich may have been the best of the bunch, which isn't saying much, but he's losing steam much.

The rapid shifts from candidate to candidate is brand panic because no single candidate is able to hold on to voters. Ron Paul, who has always had a small but fanatical following, is a partial exception but his base is not really Republican and the voters he picked up as a temporary anti-Romney will move on leaving him with the same core he always had.

Gingrich seemed to have come closest to capturing what Anti-Romney voters wanted, a warrior who wasn't wasting his time biting at the ankles of the frontrunners. But weeks of sustained attacks took their toll, as did the lack of a debate forum where he could showcase what he does best.

Gingrich is not a campaigner. Give him a camera and a forum and he can sell himself, but he doesn't have that much use for the flesh pressing rounds of the trail. Bachmann had one of the best ground organizations in Iowa, only to have it taken apart by dirty tricks. Santorum put in the time in Iowa and is rising.

There is no serious or honest argument to make for Romney except that he may be electable and even that is debatable. He is at best more electable than his rivals because he's inoffensive. He's a window store mannequin with few views that he's not willing to change before and after an election. Which is why the establishment is running itself ragged trying to find an argument for backing him.

Coulter asserts that Romney is the only candidate who's right on the two most important issues.

In the upcoming presidential election, two issues are more important than any others: repealing Obamacare and halting illegal immigration. If we fail at either one, the country will be changed permanently.

But capitulate on illegal immigration, and the entire country will have the electorate of California. There will be no turning back.

Similarly, if Obamacare isn’t repealed in the next few years, it never will be.

The problem with Coulter's argument is that it assumes a number of things. First that Romney will be willing to take on ObamaCare. Romney has never come off as much of a fighter on controversial issues once in office.

Second Coulter equates E-Verify with opposing illegal immigration. It's somewhat more complicated than that. And even by the stats she quotes at the end of her article, Romney has a C Minus immigration rating. Perry has a D and the rest have D minuses except for Paul who has an F.

If Romney has a C Minus, then he's not exactly the best candidate on immigration, maybe he's the least worst one. If we take those numbers at face value, then every candidate is bad on immigration and there's no hope of electing a Republican president who isn't terrible on immigration.

And Numbers USA's piece on Santorum actually says that he was bad on immigration issues in the 1990's, but that he significantly improved later on. His actual grade is arguably better than Romney's. If he opposed amnesty while in the Senate then Coulter's assertion that he would support it in the White House is dubious.

Meanwhile the ugliness in Ron Paul's newsletters is getting some belated attention. Kirchick already dug most or all of this during the previous election, and the media and the establishment chose not to pay attention. This time they're paying some attention. Like all the marginal candidates, Paul is another wedge for Romney to win the nomination in the demolition derby of the anti-Romneys, but what happens then?

Ron Radosh at PJM has one possible scenario.

The danger, then, is that Paul will do what his followers want and what he originally promised he would not do: run on a third-party ticket for the presidency.

If Ron Paul follows that course, it means that he will take away just enough votes from the eventual nominee to assure Barack Obama’s re-election as president of the United States. Since Paul obviously believes that the positions of the Republican Party are no different than those of the Democrats, it makes sense for him to become the spoiler, thus asserting his own power in politics. For the rest of us, it will mean we have lost our only chance to stop the destruction of the America we have come to know and love by presenting Barack Obama with four more years to achieve his domestic agenda of transforming the United States into a European-style social democracy.

Some Paul supporters have already made the "Romney is indistinguishable from Obama" argument, which as bad as Romney is, is blatantly untrue.

Can a Third Party run by Paul get Obama elected? It's entirely possible if the Republican candidate performs weakly in swing states where Paul performs well.

Nader's Third Party run lost Florida for Al Gore. Romney is performing well in Florida and Ron Paul hardly registers there, but in a close race between Obama and Romney, even a minimal showing by Paul would be enough to swing the election to Obama. But the issue isn't likely to come down to Florida. There are other states where Paul can count on a turnout where Romney might be weak.

But on the other hand Paul isn't Nader. Nader's main appeal was to Democrats and those left of center. Ron Paul's appeal is more "complex" scoring better with Democrats and Independents then with Republicans.

Does that mean a third party run by Paul would actually hurt Obama more? Hard to say. But it might mean that if the race is close, it will require a good deal more numbers and state by state scrutiny to determine who Paul would hurt more.

In a general election those Democrats backing Paul now would split into those who naturally vote for Third Party candidates, and Ron Paul would just get the vote that they would have otherwise given to the Green Party. So they're a wash anyway. Would Paul be able to pull any Democrats who would otherwise vote for Obama? Very doubtful. Any Democrat so outraged over drone strikes or Manning that he would be willing to for Paul isn't likely to vote for Obama.

About the only voters that Paul might pull away from Obama would be independents. But Paul would also suck up Republican voters convinced that Romney is no different than Obama. There wouldn't be very many of them, but with Beck pushing Paul all through the election, it might be enough to eke out an Obama win in a close state race.

MAYBE HE SHOULD BE RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT OF IRAN

Apparently alluding to Israel and its nuclear-weapons arsenal, Paul said that “if I were an Iranian, I’d like to have a nuclear weapon, too, because you gain respect from them.”

Yet oddly Ron Paul isn't a fan of America's nuclear weapons arsenal. For the same tediously paranoid reason that he's opposed to a border fence or school vouchers or pretty much anything. Paul is very pessimistic about the American government, but optimistic about the Iranian government. With that why doesn't Ron Paul just run for election in Iran?

It's a semi-serious question. Ron Paul really dislikes the United States government. He thinks it's being governed by a secret society of CIA-Federal Reserve assassins. That we can't even secure the border because then we won't be able to run away to Mexico when the American Empire takes off.

Then why not just leave? If Ron Paul really believes the government is controlled by a secret society, then why does he think that he can be elected? Surely the Skull and Masonbergers would send another patsy after him and mutilate some cattle along the way. So either Paul doesn't really believe all this and is just pandering to his base, or he does believe it and doesn't want to take the time to run for President of Mexico.

Ron Paul has more confidence in the decency of Ahmadinejad then he does in the decency of American leaders. That seems to be part of a pattern for him. He thinks that we should have taken Bin Laden at his word for his reasons for attacking America, when he didn't take Bush at his word.

Fair enough. But then why stay here? If our system is so rotten, why not explore the free market economies and civil liberties of Iran, Mexico or Pakistan? If Ron Paul really believes that everything we do is doomed to fall into evil, then why not move somewhere that he can be optimistic about the authorities and the future?

TERROR FOR CHRISTMAS

The Nigerian church bombings were the resumption of a time honored Muslim tradition. That of Christmas terror.

Choosing a spot next to a light rail terminal, Mohamud waited for a train to arrive in order to inflict the maximum number of casualties on the families arriving at the ceremony. But instead of murdering thousands of people at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony, he was arrested and dragged away while screaming, “Allahu Akbar.”

...

The Christmas Market has been held in Strasbourg, France for over four hundred years. A year before Al-Qaeda flew planes into the World Trade Center, European Muslims began scouting the site for a terrorist attack. Salim Boukari filmed the market, remarking at the people passing by outside the Strasbourg Cathedral. “Here are the enemies of Allah as they stroll about. You will go to hell, Allah willing.”

See the rest of the ugly litany of terror in my Front Page Magazine article, Muslim Terror for Christmas.

Also at the site Mark Tapson lists some of the seasonal harassment directed at Christians in Muslim countries.

In Iraq, for example, all Christian services and masses were scheduled for daylight hours. Why? “Midnight Christmas Mass has been canceled in Baghdad, Mosul and Kirkuk as a consequence of the never-ending assassinations of Christians,” bluntly stated Chaldean Archbishop Louis Sako of Kirkuk in northern Iraq. In Egypt, where we are witnessing the outright, state-assisted genocide of the dwindling Coptic Christian population, churches were also threatened with violence. Christian prisoners in Pakistan, incarcerated for such crimes as blasphemy against Islam, were refused Christmas Day visits from their families.

See his piece, Islam's War on Christmas for the rest.

My other article for the week deals with Soros' black hand in the form of the Center for American Progress and the aid it's providing to the Muslim Brotherhood. See The Center for American Progress' Jihad Against the Free World

The Center for American Progress is not just any organization. Headed up by John Podesta, a co-chairman of Obama’s transition team and backed by a 38 million dollar annual budget, it is George Soros’ most ambitious attempt to turn his Shadow Party into a shadow government. CAP is the organization with the single greatest influence on the Obama White House and its foreign and domestic policy.

CAP is more than just another think tank; it’s a lever for shifting the Democratic Party further to the left, bought and paid for by George Soros and a roster of secret donors whose names are not made public by the secretive and powerful organization. Those who buy influence with it also get anonymity as part of the package.

But the Center is more than a rogue billionaire’s brand of progressivism turned into talking-point groupthink by Washington insiders. It is a link between the American left and the Muslim right, articulating the Islamist agenda as a vehicle for the foreign policy of the post-American left. It’s where Ali Gharib can run pieces whitewashing the Muslim Brotherhood while Zaid Jiliani attempts to justify the ambassador to Belgium’s comments denying the existence of Muslim anti-Semitism.

RON PAUL STILL NOT MAKING ANY SENSE

Ron Paul accused President Barack Obama on Thursday of offering suspected terrorists fewer legal protections than Nazi war criminals were given.

The Republican presidential candidate laced into Obama for authorizing the CIA-led drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an Al Qaeda leader, in Yemen this September. He reiterated his previously stated position that al-Awlaki’s American citizenship entitled him to due process.

More proof that Paul is an idiot. Drone strikes began under the Bush Administration. And Nazi war criminals only became war criminals after the war ended. We didn't try Nazi prisoners for war crimes during the war. If there was a Nazi officer with American citizenship during the Battle of the Bulge, we advanced on his position. We didn't stop the war and offer him Due Process.

As bad as they were, you know even Adolf Eichmann finally when he was captured he was taken to Israel. Israel gave him a trial. What did we do with the Nazis — war criminals — after World War II? They got trials. Yeah, and they got what was deserving: they got hung,” Paul told more than 700 voters during a campaign speech at a convention center in western Iowa.

Here Ron Paul isn't just wrong, he's inconsistent.Many of his Paleoconservative friends opposed the Nuremberg trials as having no legal standing. The Eichmann trials similarly had no legal standing.

If Ron Paul were at least intellectually consistent then he would oppose drone strikes and war crimes trials. Instead he uses selective rhetoric to argue a contradictory position. The Nuremberg trials and the Eichmann trial had no legal grounds except that when dealing with monsters you have to kill them. And if you're a nation state then your leaders occasionally have trouble pulling the trigger and instead go through the mechanism of a trial even when there is no reason or legal basis for one.

But the point that Cynthia McKinney's endorser is missing here is that the Nuremberg Trials took place after a war (that Ron Paul opposes) and so did the Eichmann trial. The war isn't over.

This is like arguing that the United States had no right to bomb Tokyo during WW2, but that it needed to apply due process to anyone in the city with American citizenship.

THE WORDPRESS JIHAD

The BareNakedIslam blog has been taken down by WordPress.The Twitter account is still up here.

Hillbuzz thinks that BNI's campaign against All-American Muslim's advertisers attracted CAIR. I suspect that is probably true as well. The blog also has some thoughts on how difficult dealing with Wordpress is.

Moonbattery suggests that free hosting makes a takedown more likely. That may or may not be the case. Paid hosts will also take down sites under enough pressure. Variables include who's running the show and how much pressure is involved. Paid hosting may be safer, but it's not necessarily certain.

IowntheWorld has a memento of a pre-censored BNI post, if you want to get a taste of the suspended blog.

THE SILVERSTEIN JIHAD

In one of the more astounding examples of pettiness and displays of outright despicable behavior, Richard Silverstein of the left-wing Anti-Israel Tikkun Olam blog decided that he had discovered the name of an anonymous Pro-Israel blogger and gleefully outed him in an entire post dedicated to the topic.

This is a sad window into a very sad human being who is nevertheless repeatedly featured as an authority by the New York Times and other media outlets, not because of his knowledge or expertise, but because of his relentless hostility toward Israel.

Now, due to a sloppy error on his part (thanks to an eagle-eyed Israeli who finds him as repellant as I, who caught it), Aussie Dave has exposed his real identity. And since I believe that hypocrites deserve their comeuppance and that their dark secrets deserve to see the light, I’m exposing him for what and who he is: David Loeb, 23 Rashi Street Beit-Shemesh, Israel. In his Facebook profile he notes some sort of affiliation with Virgin Megastores, which may mean he works there. If anyone knows, I’d like to find out.

It's pathetic reading that fills you with despair for the state of the human soul, or at least the soul of the Anti-Israel left.

I have seen ugly behavior in the blogsphere, but generally people step in and say something. But Silverstein's repulsive gloating only met with approval.

Uglier still Jillian C. York of the Electronic Freedom Foundation appeared to be egging Silverstein on. It is troubling that an organization which supposedly protects privacy would have an employee aiding in what she thought was the outing of an activist.

EFF's continued association with Jillian York severely damages its credibility and calls into question its principles. When a woman who serves as the Director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation acts this way, it shows that EFF is only dedicated to freedom of expression for those who agree with the politics of people like York.

Anyone who donates to EFF or supports it thinking that it is the electronic version of the ACLU and supports freedom of expression in a non-partisan way should now seriously reevaluate that. The EFF has shown that it supports freedom of expression and privacy only for those bloggers that it agrees with. It is not the ACLU, it is Media Matters and anything that it does should be regarded that way.

GOODBYE CHANUKAH

I have a more Torah oriented piece on Chanukah up here.

MORE GOOD NEWS FROM EGYPT

"Arab hate: A Muslim Brotherhood rally in Cairo’s most prominent mosque Friday turned into a venomous anti-Israel protest, with attendants vowing to “one day kill all Jews.”

Just step outside, can't you feel the warmth of that Arab Spring in the air?