Sultan Knish

The Liberal Uses of Race

2012-02-13T23:22:00.000-05:00

Racism is about many things but it isn't about race. To understand the uses of race in American liberalism requires understanding its place in the political culture. When American liberals speak of race they aren't speaking in the genetic sense, what they are doing is clumsily piggybacking class onto race and adding one dubious construct to another.

The placement of racial politics at the center of liberal advocacy coincided with a growing national prosperity that seemed to be on the way to making class warfare of the old kind irrelevant. Previous liberal civil rights activity had been a subset of class, but class now became a subset of race. And both were a means of liberal self-definition as the people concerned with the plight of the downtrodden.

Class warfare was not really about the poor, it was about using a permanent social problem as a means of recreating the social order and gaining permanent political power. Race is just class dressed up in the same old class warfare clothes so that there is nearly no distinction between the two. Reformers gain power by attacking the failures of the system and positioning a social problem as an open sore that must be healed. But it isn't healing that they have in mind.

When your power is a product of social problems then the failure to locate social problems that are an open sore on society, a cry of conscience and a grievous crime that must be faced, leaves you powerless and irrelevant. Once you start running out of legitimate social problems to tackle, then you have no choice but to start creating them or exaggerating them. Whether the problems you are dealing with are real or unreal, your challenge is to find ways to make them worse in order to retain your power and the social relevance of your movement.

Race has very little to do with racial politics which rely on the older methodologies of radicalizing slums and using subsidies to elevate community leaders who will support the reformers, all tactics that date back centuries and long predate the politicization of race.

When the Democratic Party had its change of heart on race all it did was take the same methods it used on German, Irish, Jewish and Italian immigrants and shift them to urban African-Americans who had come north and were living in the same neighborhoods formerly occupied by the immigrants. And so the party that during the Civil War orchestrated urban anti-draft riots by white immigrants targeting African-Americans was using the same methods to orchestrate African-American riots aimed at the second and third generation of working class immigrants that it had once fostered. What most people thought of as racial politics was just the Democratic Party doing what it had been doing all along.

Race hasn’t simply been politicized, the practical meaning of the word has been so thoroughly transformed that it does not refer to what most people think that it does. In the liberal lexicon race like class is an outcast term. It is a catchall term meaning those who are oppressed by the powerful majority. It is why the left will use accusations of racism in completely inappropriate ways that make no sense in relation to the dictionary definition.

Muslims are not a race, but they have been classified as an oppressed group. Socialism is not a race, but they are the official representatives of all oppressed peoples. To insult either one is to be “racist” because racism refers to majority oppression and nothing else. To be a racist is to oppose or denigrate the moral worldview of the reformers without reference to the skin color of any of the parties. Therefore African-American opponents of President Clinton were racists because the terminology of race had nothing to do with the preexisting racial construct. The idea of race as it had existed in the

United States

no longer applied. Words like racism were part of the Newspeak grammar which insisted on appropriating the moral force of the old meanings, but without actually employing those meanings.

This liberal lexicon is the Newspeak that is all around us. It relies on the moral power of words while first subtly and then grossly changing their definitions until they no longer have anything to do with the old meaning. The process begins with politicized terminology and ends when the core terminology of a free country like “rights”, “freedom” and “democracy” no longer have anything in common with their formal definitions. Their new definitions are those that serve the purposes of the ideology that commands them.

Regardless of what they are supposed to mean, progressivism, racial tolerance and social justice all mean the same thing. And so in the inverse, racism, conservatism and small government also add up to variations of the same idea in the liberal lexicon. Which might not be so much of a problem if it were not also the lexicon being used by the media, academics, politicians, judges and the entertainment industry to name a few groups who are invested in the altered meanings because they are also invested in the ideology that those meanings support.

Ideologies define a worldview where for compelling moral reasons the ideologues are the only ones who can be safely allowed to rule. Imposing this worldview on the people as often as possible and through every possible venue from news reporting to novels and from music to the educational system as allows for the perpetual power of the ideologues. So long as the cause is just then no possible overreach of power or abuse can ever justify removing the ideologues from their petty thrones.

The purpose of any ideology is power. To gain power the ideology must impose its notion of a crisis and its view of a solution as the right and natural one. Once the proponents of the ideology are empowered to impose a solution then they gain factional and personal power that allows them to remake the system in ways that will prevent them from being dislodged. Their first goal once in power is to worsen whatever crisis brought them to power without appearing to do so. Their solutions deepen the crisis while appearing to devote every resource to resolving it.

The growing prosperity of working classes in the West weakened the crisis of class warfare that had led the left to trumpet that the only alternative to their political reforms was a bloody civil war between the workers and the owners. That was when the left turned to race as their central crisis. Over time the left has broadened race back to cover the immigration exploitation that they had been engaged in during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. As most of the new immigrants were now non-white, the left rolled their old new crisis into their new old crisis and continued to call the whole thing racism, even when as with Muslims, they were conflating religion with race.

Crisis is king. Crisis justifies a war on poverty and a war on racism which are actually wars on anything that is an obstacle to the absolute power of the ideology that exploits the crisis. That is why we are now forced to show photo ID’s in order to buy cough medicine when we come down with the flu, but any talk of showing photo ID’s at the voting booth is shouted down as racism. Why is it racism? Because the working definition of racism is anything that interferes with the progressive power structure. Questioning the existence of the crisis is the worst form of racism of them all.

Well over a century after the Civil War and Reconstruction, and half a century after the civil rights movement, do we really need the Federal government looking over the shoulder of states to stop them from controlling their own electoral systems? Is it really in the name of equality that the Federal government steps in and ban non-partisan elections in the city of Kinston for fear that African-Americans won’t know whom to vote for?

Protecting African-American voting rights has become code for protecting the Election Day turnout for the Democratic Party. Preventing the wrong kind of redistricting is about maintaining the gerrymandered minority districts which are code for safe Democratic Party seats. Racial justice is the tail of the dog and the dog is a Democratic Party hound and it has nothing to do with the old fashioned kind of racism.

The Democratic Party has switched from suppressing minority voters to giving added weight to minority votes, both in violation of the law. The common denominator in both cases is that it does what serves its own interests and calls it defending the rights of the people. The distance between the Red Shirts and the New Black Panther Party, or the Redeemers and the Diversifiers is shorter than most Democrats would like to admit. The bottom line goal in all case was the power of the party.

Ideology is a vehicle for political power and all the Machiavellian outfits draped around the naked emperor of power do not change that. Western political parties in America, Europe and around the world have traded in the “Labor” ideology that banked on the dissatisfaction of the native working class for a “Diversity” ideology banking on the dissatisfaction of minorities. Such a transition would not have occurred, no matter how much the changing ideas of the left pushed it, if it did not serve the interests of the political machines driving them.

For decades now when we talk about race, what we are really talking about is the power and privilege of a political movement and its associated party. What we are really doing is reinforcing that power and that privilege.

Reform is natively antagonistic. It requires problems and crises and when those are exhausted, it needs to exploit or manufacture new ones. Class or race, religion and culture, it makes no real difference. What it needs is a source of dysfunction to maintain as its power base. When social problems are resolved then it must create them and transform them into the axis around which the wheel of the society revolves.

The engine of dysfunction grinds on making the society a much worse place until it is willing to destroy the society rather than give up the drive to create more dysfunction in order to justify its power and privilege.

A Tale of Two Wars

2012-02-12T22:56:00.001-05:00

There are two possible conflicts on the table in Washington. One is with Iran and the other with Syria. The Iran conflict is the one that Washington doesn't want. Its most likely trigger at this stage is an Israeli assault on Iran's nuclear program. Like most of the wars centering around Israel, this one is existential and of no interest to the philosopher kings in D.C. who wage wars with the grand purpose of making the world a better place.

Washington does not particularly care whether Iran gets nukes or doesn't get nukes. It cares about History. With a capital H. Libya got bombed because it was on the wrong side of history. Syria is about to get bombed because it's on the wrong side of history. There are people in the administration like Samantha Power who would like to bomb Israel for being on the wrong side of history, but they don't think that even J Street and Peter Beinart could spin that as a pro-Israel move.

Being on the right or wrong side of history is one of those topics that primarily interests Islamists and nation builders on the right and the left who subscribe to a progressive version of history. Things don't just happen, they happen because a country and a people are riding the history escalator up or down, to the top floor of the mall of the world where the cultivated stores like Starbucks, Nordstrom and the now defunct Sharper Image are located, or the bottom where K-Mart, Payless and Gap take up space.

The Arab Spring was on the right side of history because of its transformative qualities. Supporters of it were on the right side of history. Opponents of it needed to be bombed if they were Arab dictators or disinvited from the right cocktail parties if they were merely columnists and analysts. And at the end of it all through the sublime majesty of democracy and people power, the Middle East would look exactly like Europe, but with a more exotic cuisine.

Israel has always been the hedgehog in the soup of Arab democracy, agitating them, empowering their rulers and causing them to distrust Western benevolence. Now Israeli jets threaten to spill the soup of the Arab Spring by bombing Iran, which may reinforce support for Syria, which will hold up the Arab Spring and halt the progressive escalator of history.

Washington needs the Syrian war to happen, and it needs to keep a conflict with Iran from happening. The great diplomatic problem of Israel has always been that its leader insist on viewing conflicts in practical terms. Israel does not fight wars to make the world safe for democracy, it fights wars because there's someone shooting missiles as it. This is an unacceptable reason for a war in a postmodern world where wars are fought to preserve the international order, protect civilization, make the world safe for democracy and prove that human rights violations will be punished by the duly constituted body of international jurisprudence.

Self-interest is Israel's original sin. It was the sin that countless titans of the left from H.G. Wells to Lenin berated the Zionists for. Instead of contributing to the welfare of mankind and participating in the international brotherhood of workers, they went off to rebuild a country that existed only in their holy books and stirred up all kinds of trouble doing it. And since they have kept on stirring up trouble, not in the name of some grand idea, but out of their tawdry interest in defending themselves.

With angry Muslims boiling in European cities, Koran touting terrorists blowing up the modern infrastructure of the world's capitals and turmoil roiling the hundreds of millions of Muslims who still haven't managed to get refugee status in the UK or the US, the progressive vision is in big trouble and the only solution is to somehow stabilize the situation. Democracy is the only panacea that the progressive prescription plan covers.

Israel's insistence on a purely existential view is dismissed as selfish and narrow-minded when the Middle East is headed toward a brave new world where nukes no longer matter because no one is angry anymore because there are no more dictators and democracy is everywhere. While the Israelis see the Middle East as basically static, the progressives see the Middle East as constantly on the verge of a great leap forward to a new more enlightened age.

As a result any affinity between the neoconservatives and Israeli leaders was always going to be limited. The neoconservatives were impressed by Israel's modernism, but they assumed that it could be copied over to their neighbors and came to resent Israel as an obstacle for not playing a more meaningful role in their grand theory of history. While outwardly the progressives see Israel as very modern, they reject it for not possessing the most vital element of modernism. Transnationalism.

While Israel has more than its share of leftists, its animating philosophy is an ethnic nationalism that is repugnant to the transnationalist. They can find no meaningful globally applicable philosophy that defines its success. Like Japan, Israel is a self-contained wonder. It is a nation, not a philosophy. Its identity is rooted in an infuriating recent and ancient history. It is modern in defiance of the progressive understanding of history-- which is why its technology, its human rights and its basic decency are dismissed.

The Arab Spring seems to be everything that Israel is not, a transnational transformation, the soul of Europe invested in a Middle Eastern body. A great leap forward that will lift the region out of its backward fanaticism and move the world closer to the modern place it ought to be. Then with some selective sanctions in Asia, laptops for every child in Africa, and some really good books on human potential, the entire world will be just like the European Union. If Israel doesn't louse it up this time.

The progressive philosopher-kings aren't stupid, their knowledge of history is. They believe that their wonderful system was not the product of a civilization, but of political protesters demanding change. If the political protesters demanding change are similarly empowered in the Muslim world, then they will end up with the same results.

To the left a theory of history in which a humanitarian society is created through the overthrow of the status quo makes perfect sense. To the American liberal right, a similar theory favoring democracy as the key element has almost as much appeal. Both agree on the notion that if their native process is exported, then the results will be the same.

There's a certain kind of technocratic sensibility to it, that if you build the same machines and use the same recipe, then anyone can make Coca Cola. Which is true, except that people in different parts of the world prefer versions of Coca Cola that taste differently. Exporting the process of democracy does not export the outcome of democracy. It only helps the local create the sort of government they really want. Egypt and Tunisia have already shown us what kind of government that is.

Washington is not interested in Israel's selfish need not to be nuked. It isn't in this for existential reasons and it doesn't see why Israel should be either. If the United States can sacrifice thousands of lives for the greater good to promote peace, tolerance and respect for international law, then why can't Israel risk a few million lives, especially when there are foreign policy experts who will explain slowly and distinctly to the dunces in Jerusalem why it is very unlikely that Iran will actually detonate a nuclear bomb.

Israeli leaders have a diminishing interest in grand theories of history arising from DC or Brussels. Small nations can't afford grand theories of history. They make do with keeping the rain from leaking through the roof. The Israelis aren't interested in another war, which is exactly why they want to launch a preemptive strike against Iran's nuclear program. In response Iran's terrorist proxies will do their part by shelling Israeli towns and villages, but that's part of life. Not the good part, but the part about living in a region overrun by terrorist militias that anyone can sponsor for a dollar.

They are often stupid, but they are rarely stupid in the way that American and European leaders are stupid. Israel can't afford its own version of Blair, Sarkozy or Obama. The closest thing to them, Shimon Peres, was quickly voted out despite wearing the cloak of martyrdom and has been relegated to a ceremonial office which allows him to explain his vision of the New Middle East dominated by nanotechnology and free trade zones to foreign visitors who are impressed by this visionary.

When Israel looks at Syria, it doesn't see a potential gateway to regional progress, it sees a local civil war backed by its neighbors, which will result in instability and one side or the other gaining Syria as a pawn. It sees Assad's weapons stockpiles ending up in the hands of terrorists, terrorists flocking to fight in the civil war, and it even sees Alawite refugees desperate enough to flee across the border. What it does not see is the glowing symbols of the Arab Spring.

And when it looks at Iran, it doesn't see a rogue state, it just sees a bunch of fanatics about to get their hands on nuclear weapons. And time running out in which their efforts can be aborted or at least slowed down. It will do something about it not because it wants to change the region or advance human civilization, but because it knows the exact casualty count from a nuclear detonation over Tel Aviv.

Washington desperately doesn't want anything interrupting its rush to war in Syria. Jerusalem has run out of patience and will go it alone in Iran. The consequences aren't unpredictable and won't be much fun. But that is also the difference between responsible and irresponsible leadership. Responsible leaders can take a hit now to avoid much worse consequences down the road. Irresponsible leaders take refuge in philosophy and chase after theories of history, rather than keeping the rain from leaking through the roof.

Playing the Percentages

2012-02-11T22:47:00.000-05:00

After occupying the headlines for far too long, Occupy Wall Street was dispersed by a combination of inclement weather, mayoral irritation and having served their purpose. Occupy Oakland will go on doing what it can to depress the economy of an already economically depressed city by attacking its ports. The other Occupations are being moved along back to the Starbucks that spawned them.

As committed Warmists, the Occupiers might have expected that temperatures in the northeast and the midwest in November and December would feel just like a day at the beach in Santa Monica. But while the manipulated hockey stick graphs might have been on their side, the weather wasn't. Neither were the already overstretched urban budgets turned inside out by having to pay for police overtime, electrical generators and cleanup duty. But most of all they had served their purpose as a launching pad for the Obama 2012 campaign.

The job of the Occupiers was to move the 99 and 1 percent memes into public consciousness, which in between the homeless camps, the rapes and the cardboard signs, they managed to do. Or the media did it for them. Around the time when well-meaning idiots began wearing 99 percent buttons, I thought of getting a 100 percent button. But the 100 percent button wouldn't have been very accurate. It implies that we're all in the same boat which is not the case.

The percentage debate is so much nonsense because the issue isn't class, it's position. OWS wanted the rest of the country to pay for a small government subsidized middle-class that would either work directly for the government or in occupations supported by government funding. The rich weren't being pitted against the poor. University grads were pitting themselves against the remnants of the aspirational working class.

Optimists see the glass as half-full and believe that with some effort it can be filled up all the way. Pessimists see the glass as half-empty and want to drink it all, before someone else does. Economic pessimists are also redistributionists, striving to secure their position within a shrinking economy. Economic optimists believe that wealth can come from outside the existing system and don't see the need for redistribution.

The economic pessimists of the left are acting like stranded castaways who keep bringing up cannibalism as the only way. OWS and Obama 2012 sound like the Donner Party, campaigning on who should get eaten first. Rarely has an incumbent campaigned on economic pessimism. It's all the more startling when a candidate who ran on hope is now running on hopelessness, but the only way to beat the call for change is to convince people that change is hopeless. That change will leave them even worse off. Economic pessimism is the ideal tool for the job.

The Republicans claim that things will get better while the Democrats whisper that they will only get better for people who aren't you. Forget about opportunity and vote for someone who will cut you a big slice of the leftovers so you can ride out the decline and fall of the West.

Obama 2012 and OWS is about patronage and their 99 percent slogan broadens the promise of patronage to everyone. Like Ivory's 99/44 clean or most other 99 percent advertising slogans, it's a clever fraud. 99 percent of the public can't be subsidized by the 1 percent, especially when the 1 percent are the ones doing the governing.

The percentage of the public that will be subsidized is the one that the sloganeers need to win elections and maintain their power. It won't be 51 percent, but between government employees, union members and those on the dole, it will probably be in the thirties. The rest will work low paying jobs in the private sector and a handful will work in the financial industry, though their jobs will mainly involve dubious transactions with no future. That will leave us with a very European economy of Muslim immigrants running businesses under the table and paying just enough taxes so the government can subsidize university degrees and conferences on poverty.

That latter group, the degree getters and conference attendees, are the ones targeted by OWS. The young and the cutting edge who bought into a dysfunctional educational system and now want the patronage of the government as their exit strategy. These are the same people who helped Obama get elected and bringing them out in 2012 is a priority.

Patronage is the issue. Or the old Russian term "Protektsia" transplanted to Israel, with parallels in most countries with a heavy bureaucracy. It's what happens when the "Pull" or "Connections" that are invaluable for mid-level personnel within the bureaucracy looking to get anything done become universalized so that public access to the system depends on their level of political access.

The left likes to say that everything is political, and when they make the government big enough, then everything really is political because you have to deal with the government to be able to get anything done. Since government bureaucracies are hideously inaccessible beasts, the only way to get anything done is to have friends within the system. The more you want, the bigger your friends need to be.

American politics has become so dysfunctional and the country so indebted because the system kept expanding its reach while the politicians kept doling out more pork. The bigger the system grew, the more the human touch of the pols was needed to compensate for it. This game of Good Government- Bad Government has taken most cities and the country to the breaking point. Between the restrictions and the favors, we have ended up with a country that has less freedom and more debt without anything to show for it.

Redistributionism is the final act of thieves looting the treasury who don't think there will be anything left for them. When Chavez brought Venezuela's gold home, he wasn't doing it for the people, he was doing it so that if he and his family and their cronies need to flee the country, they can carry with them a form of wealth that won't fluctuate like their currency or depreciate like the dollar. And when Obama offers patronage to tens of millions of his supporters, he's only doing it to be able to go on looting the treasury on a much larger scale.

Those who think that they are part of the 99 percent are really just bad at math. The percentages don't break down along income level, they break down by position. The government employee with a secure pension and early retirement is better off than the 1 percenter who lost all his money in bad investments. When patronage is pegged to the treasury and the lending power of the wealthiest nation in the world, then position matters more than stated income. A professor with tenure in a state uni is more secure than his contemporary working in the free market.

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates may both be in the 1 percent, but Gates makes money when his shares go up, Buffett makes money from a sweetheart deal in a government backed financial company. It's not income that matter. Only "Protektsia".

When the Democrats took Tammany Hall national again, they promised patronage for everyone in exchange for votes. The country is still trapped in their Democratic oligarchy where the economy can be destroyed as long as the right number of people go on voting for their government benefits and the Buffett's and the Soros' keep funding the United States of Tammany from the top.

The patronage economy brought us to economic disaster when the pols decided to create a subsidized mimicry of the free market by funding homes and college educations. Now we're a breath away from turning the entire economy into a way to sell environmental indulgence bonds as the price for being able to manufacture or do anything. And when that happens then the looting will finally be complete because there will be no industry left.

The problem is power. Centralize control and you create something like absolute power. Which is why income numbers don't matter. Money is a form of power, but it only buys you so much access from the outside. It's whether you are on the outside or on the inside that matters. It's your affiliation that counts the most.

Playing the percentages is more than an election strategy, it's a strategy to reconfigure the country. There will still be rich and poor, and a diminished middle-class, but wealth will increasingly align by affiliation, rather than by initiative or success. There is no competing with the oligarchy. You are either with it or against it. That is the absolute of absolute power turned into absolute corruption.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - A Clash of Civilizations

2012-02-10T12:58:00.002-05:00

CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

It's not often that the Democratic Party's working class religious base collides with its progressive radical left base, mainly because the leaders of the first group rarely concede that there is a conflict between the radical left's agenda and their own. The contraception mandate was one of those unique events when the collision happened and the left backed down.

That the collision happened at all is a testament to the arrogance and cluelessness of the Obama elite which operates in its own bubble. Even the input of insiders like Biden who understood exactly what was going to happen did not prevent the ship from sailing. It took some aggressive pushback for the administration to reverse itself, while pretending that there was no reversal, but the real story is how tone deaf the insiders in this administration really are.

The last thing you want to do before a national election is pick a fight with a major section of your own base which is a bit skeptical about you anyway. Giving them a reason to turn on ObamaCare and the administration was the dumbest thing possible. And it happened because the people running things did not understand it would happen. They assumed that they could put on their paternalistic attitude, smile dismissively, spin up some talking points and everyone would go along.

This stupidity is our best hope. If the Republican Party establishment insists on arrogantly making a mess of things, the Obama Administration's arrogance and heavy-handedness exceeds their own and may succeed in the battle of alienation.

ISLAM'S GROUNDHOG DAY

Groundhog Day is the long eternal tragedy of Islam, which always sees its shadow and always ends up with six weeks, six months or six hundred years of more winter. That hopeful time when the bitter cold of winter begins its slow transition into the warmth and renewal of spring never comes for Islam.

In a reversal of the cycle of season, the Arab Spring led to the Islamic Winter, but that is the endless pattern of Islamic attempts at reform and rejuvenation, which rather than finding renewal in their attempts at transformation only go on perpetuating the same cycle of violence, tyranny and oppression.

There is a peculiar tragedy to a religion which cannot escape its own destructive nature, each time it reaches for some form of redemption, its hands come up dripping with blood and it all ends in more bodies and petty tyrannies.

The full article is up at Front Page Magazine

GET YOUR WAR ON

If you tune in to CNN you can see footage of adorable Syrian children, as reported by Anderson Cooper. Because we've got to get our war on in Syria and liberate the Syrian people on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood. No adorable Christian children need be shown because we might have to think about what's going to happen to them once the funloving Religion of Peace is in the driver's seat.

Copts in the village of Kobry-el-Sharbat (El-Ameriya), Alexandria, were attacked on January 27 by a mob of 3000 Muslims led by Salafi leaders, who looted and torched homes and shops belonging to Copts.

Three "reconciliation meetings" were held at the El-Ameriya village police headquarters. They were attended by Salafi and Muslim Brotherhood representatives from neighboring villages, as well as church representative. Muslims demanded the eviction of all Coptic inhabitants from the village because "Muslim honour had been damaged."

That's what's going to happen to them. The Obama Administration is bent on this, but they don't particularly want to do the heavy lifting. Which makes it more likely that the Turks, the Saudis and some others will contribute the troops, while the United States acts as the air force for the Muslim Brotherhood one more time.

AKP's sleazy Islamist Foreign Minister is meeting with Clinton to discuss the next "steps" and it's clear that Turkey would like to be at the center of a coalition to take down Assad. The euphemism will be "Friends of Syria", because nothing says friendship like an invasion.

I WAS A MAINSTREAM MEDIA REPORTER BUT I BROKE FREE

Can anyone imagine seeing a headline like, "I was a Sunni Muslim but I broke free" in any mainstream American newspaper today? Nope.

But you can see a headline like "I was a Hasidic Jew - but I broke free‎" in the Post. Now if we are to have "I was a Jew, but I broke free" articles, then we should at the very least have equal time for, "I was a Muslim but I broke free" articles.

It's not too hard to break out of being a religious Jew. You just stop. Nobody beheads you or kidnaps you and ships you to Pakistan. Breaking out of being a Muslim is a good deal harder as plenty of Ex-Muslims can tell you.

Peculiarly though the media will not pay any attention to Ibn Warraq or to the victims of Muslim honor killings, but street trash like Deborah Feldman looking to find a book deal can always get media coverage.

Deborah Feldman claims that Jews are no better than Muslim "extremists" and while I'm no fan of the community she was a part of, she could leave. She doesn't have to look over her shoulders waiting for a cousin or brother to come up and kill her. The women who actually do have to live like that can't get book deals or the media coverage she laps up.

Jews and Christians who leave their religion bask in the adoring attention of a media which loves to portray those religions in the blackest colors. But when it comes to Islam, the only coverage allowed is the positive kind.

What's really repulsive is that the blurb for Deborah Feldman's book actually dares to compare this Satmar version of Snooki, with about the same IQ, to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel.

Ali has actually taken risks for what she believed in. Feldman grew up in a broken family and deciding she wanted the party life broke up her marriage. She's more qualified to be on the Jersey Shore than to write a memoir about her "struggle". If you're an Orthodox Jew and you decide not be one anymore, your only challenge is shopping for new clothes. If you're a Muslim and you decide to opt out, then you are endangering your life.

Today Ali needs bodyguards. Feldman needs PR agents. The difference between the two tells you all you need to know about the reality of Islam and the contempt in which Western elites hold traditional religion while embracing Islam.

THE CHUTZPAH OF OMAR THE BOYCOTT MAKER

The classical definition of the Yiddish word Chutzpah is a man on trial for killing his parents who asks for leniency because he is an orphan. Next to that definition is a picture of Omar Barghouti, a Qatari-born Muslim who moved to Israel and enrolled in Tel Aviv University to obtain a Masters Degree in Philosophy while conducting an academic boycott campaign against Israel.

See the full article at Front Page Magazine

LOOSE LIPS

There was still some ambiguity after Panetta's statement on the Iran window what the Obama Admin was up to, that ambiguity is all but gone after anonymous "officials" appeared to have hand fed NBC news a story that claims Israel is working with the MEK Iranian group to assassinate Iranian nuclear gurus.

This is straight up sabotage and a warning that the Obama Administration will keep on leaking information to damage any Israeli action against Iran unless Israel falls into line. Considering the operational necessities of launching an attack and the level of US surveillance, O and his cronies can do a lot to inhibit and even cost lives in an attack on Iran.

This should also settle any further rumors that bombing Iran is an election strategy for Obama. That couldn't be further away from the truth.

The Obama Administration's sabotage is all the more obnoxious after it threw a hissy fit because Russia and China wouldn't let it go after Syria. So war with Syria on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood, yes. Allowing Israel to take out Iran's nuclear program, no. Sabotaging Israeli efforts to go it alone, also yes.

Israel had to inform the United States of what it was doing as part of the process of cooperation, though considering the MEK's presence in Iraq, it is extremely doubtful that the United States had no involvement in this, under the previous administration or even the current one.

While there is no independent verification of this story, it is far more plausible than the nonsense peddled by the mainstream media about Mossad agents running around Tehran. I have suggested all along that Israeli and American backed Iranian dissidents were responsible. But it doesn't take much to reach that conclusion.

After the Iranian backed Iraqi PM's MEK massacre and the US withdrawal, the MEK would need backers more urgently. Its position in Iraq is precarious and while its people have refugee status, nobody is going to protect them from Maliki's thugs. The Ashraf\Liberty situation is ugly and the MEK certainly has no sympathy from the Obama Administration. Not unless MEK was willing to hit Syria.

The ideology wouldn't really matter. The region is full of militias willing to ally with anyone on a temporary basis if it gets them money and advances their agenda. That's what keeps Afghanistan and Iraq where it is. And MEK is "unusual" enough that just about anything could be expected. But none of that means it's actually true.

Iran's claim that this is an MEK-Israel plot is convenient, but this is a region where every Muslim state or party accuses its enemies of working with Israel. During the Arab Spring, both governments and rebels accused each other of being pawns of Israel. Iran would like to delegitimize the MEK and justify further crackdowns by Maliki. This is the best way to do it.

The Pre-Tehran arm of the American left has been pushing the same line for a while, tying the MEK to some Republican officials who have at times supported it as a foil against Iran. The NBC article even looks like it was written by ThinkProgress with the same talking points.

It doesn't really matter though who's pulling the trigger. The assassinations are a sideshow that aren't going to stop the nuclear program. Israel is now on its own moving toward a direct strike method, while Obama tries to hold it back.

Defense Minister Barak, formerly a darling of the Clintonites in the Obama Administration, is on the outs after having strongly endorsed a strike. How bad is it? So bad that Administration handlers are now pushing the message that Netanyahu is the reasonable party who needs to keep Barak in hand.

The following excerpt from the New York Times, a reliable administration organ sets the tone

President Obama tried to defuse arguments for military action in a telephone call last month with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, the substance of which was confirmed by an Obama administration official who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to describe the conversation. While the two men have had an often contentious relationship over Middle East diplomacy, American officials emerged from that exchange persuaded that Mr. Netanyahu was willing to give economic sanctions and other steps time to work.

Which is the tune that was played all along. Give us more time till Iran has a nuke.

a senior Obama administration official, expressing frustration that the Israelis are looking at the problem too narrowly, given the many kinds of pressure being placed on Tehran and the increasing evidence that far tougher sanctions are having an effect.

Ah yes too narrowly, instead of taking the "broader view", which all comes out to not enough nuance. Which is a good summary of liberal foreign policy.

Administration officials cite this more complex picture in pressing the Israelis to give the latest sanctions a chance to inflict enough pain on the Iranian leadership to force it back to the negotiating table, or to make the decision that the nuclear program is not worth the cost.

Just like North Korea. And here we go...

Administration officials also noted a distinction in the tone of Mr. Barak and Mr. Netanyahu, who does not publicly favor the phrase “zone of immunity.” This week, an American official noted, Mr. Netanyahu declared that on the topic of Iran, officials should just “shut up.”

“I think that’s good advice,” the American official said.

Yes I'm sure administration officials are big fans of Israel shutting up about Iran, but then shouldn't they be shutting up about Israeli plans for Iran?

NUDGES

The creepy social engineering innovations that you'll see tomorrow are being tested in Europe today. So here's a sample of what you can look forward to.

Mr Halpern is director of Downing Street's behavioural "nudge unit". It advises government on ways to encourage people to change behaviour, without using compulsion. The approach is based on a school of thought that "nudging" people in a certain direction is more productive and cost-effective than trying to change behaviour by banning things or passing regulation.

So where is the UK "nudging" people now?

Mr Halpern said Britain faced a shortage of housing, partly because elderly people remained in family homes after their children left. “A big issue we have is under-occupation of houses,” he said. “We have more TVs than people in the house.”

Officials also denied Mr Halpern was urging elderly people to down size after he told the conference that “we do have enough houses… it is just essentially they are lived in by older people”.

A report last year suggested there were 25 million empty bedrooms in the country. Ministers were urged to draw up proposals to encourage elderly couples to downsize and create more affordable family homes. The Government has recently backed council schemes that help pensioners move into smaller properties and rent out their family homes.

Sic transit.

BUT JEWISH REPORTERS CAN BE ANTI-ISRAEL TOO

CNN's Israel bureau is downsizing, reportedly to cope with a reduced budget due to falling advertising revenues.

That doesn't explain why they fired four Israeli Jewish journalists (out of a crew of 8), and retained only Arab journalists. The local chief editor of CNN is now an Arab.

This is blatantly unfair considering how hard Jewish CNN reporters have worked on smearing Israel. This discrimination fails to take into account how hard reporters like Joshua Hammer, Joe Klein and Peter Beinart have worked at proving that they hate Israel more than any Muslim does.

No one denies that Muslims really hate Israel, but I would urge CNN to remember that while hating Israel may be a qualification for working at CNN or in any mainstream media organization

THE ROUNDUP

The obsessive compulsive narcissism of Barry

What will European Sharia law look like? You're already seeing it now.

As larger and larger urban areas become Islamized (and it is happening very quickly), shari'a will not need to come in from above, through the traditional processes of legislation. Rather, it will come in from below, from people willing to enforce it and profit from it, and from the fact that the ethnic-European police will not even enter a lot of those neighborhoods.

So we are talking about de-facto City States, not de jure Nation States, going Islamic. That seems like an incontrovertible trend to me, and I would love to see any evidence pointing away from this reality. The nation state as a model will become increasingly unimportant, I project, as Western Civilization continues to decline, and the Islamic cultures overcome the sterile remains of the Englihtenment.

The entire piece is a good assessment of the trajectory of the process. Londonistan made real.

How big is that jobs deficit anyway?

According to the US Debt Clock Time Machine, in the period from 2000-2004, we gained about 10 million in population and 4 million in the workforce -- that is, for every new person in the population, we gained four tenths of a person in the workforce.

Now here's what worries me. From 2008-2012 we gained 9.5 million in population. Supposing an "average" gain in the workforce of about five tenths or 50%, we should have seen the workforce grow by 4 or 5 million. Right? But instead, the workforce SHRANK by nearly 5 million.

If it should have grown by 5 million and instead shrank by 5 million, aren't we looking at a deficit of 10 MILLION JOBS?

The Arab Spring comes to Sydney.

Showdown in Georgia

It's not easy being a Black Conservative.

It's getting harder to deny anymore...even as my adult, grownup brain wants to disdain the idea—actual evil seems to be afoot in the world, and its guise is becoming ever more clear.

Decoding the code

Islamonausea: It's the new human condition.

Veteran discrimination

The lost art of raking up profits

I decided long ago to end the shameful practice of begging on my property. First, I never allowed my own kids to raise funds this way. Second, every time a tot or teenager arrived on my doorstep, he was given a choice.

My pitch was simple; I'd say, "Look, I don't need or want what you are selling. But I understand that your teacher wants you to raise money for your class project/field trip/whatever, and I'd like to help. There's a rake in my garage, and I'll pay you ten dollars in cash if you work in my yard for one hour. You can give the money to your school, or you can keep it for yourself.

Only one ever took me up on my offer.

The Economic Sabotage of the West

2012-02-08T23:15:00.000-05:00

By combining an opposition to free enterprise with an opposition to industrialization, the left has adopted not one, but two platforms that doom the economic survival of their host societies. Even the Soviet Union and Communist China, systems which were the worst embodiment of leftist economic ideology did not throw out the industrial baby with the capitalist bathwater. Had they done so both countries would still be hopelessly feudal today, instead of crony capitalist mafia states with a lot of available consumer goods that create jobs and make life easier.

The Western left did not just adopt a system which insisted that all economic activity had to be tightly regulated and centrally planned in order to remedy inequality, it also adopted the anti-industrial back to nature rhetoric of those who believed that factories and cities were a mistake and that a harmonious society could only be an agricultural society.

While the hippie elements of the left have dabbled with buying farmhouses and growing occasional crops that are not cannabis, they are not serious about return to a nation of family farms or even collective farming. They have adopted the pollution paranoia and the twaddle about the dehumanization of machinery without actually having a fallback plan.

If all that wasn't bad enough, the left has not championed agriculture, but a purity of nature cult that demands that we leave the environment "unspoiled". That means seizing land that farmers might put to use and declaring it protected land. It means cutting off water supplies to agriculture and attacking any attempt at bringing industrial efficiency to agriculture. Instead the left celebrates a boutique agriculture which relies on hipsters buying overpriced organic and locally grown produce.

It does not take much to crunch the numbers and see that locally grown is a formula for starving some 60 percent of the country, denying children basic nutrients and driving the price of foodstuffs so far through the roof that Africans will start sending us aid.

This brand of militant individualism might be somehow defensible if it was being practiced by actual rebels, instead of by collectivists dressing up their latest meme and fad in the rebel's red shirt. While the left objects to the collectivism of the factory and the corporation, they are replacing it with a sonorous collectivism of the soul that pervades every aspect of society and demands total conformity. Instead of Charlie Chaplin caught in the gears of the great machine, we all find ourselves trapped by the demand that we all care about the same things, laugh and sneer at the same things, and buy the same things.

The left's moral consumerism elevates scarcity over plenty. It is hostile to mechanical organization that is not ideologically derived. Communism married the order of industry with ideological collectivization and the Nazis attempted to do the same thing. But the modern left only wants the ideology with no actual plan for how it will all work. Its approach to the market is elitist. It would rather have a few expensive products, than a great many cheap products. It would rather have a few million government jobs, than a few hundred million real jobs.

Had the left managed to get all this regulatory power before global transportation became cheap and simple, and other countries managed to hit their own industrial marks, then it is likely that our experience would have been similar to that of Venezuela under Chavez, with an economic implosion, spiraling prices and a civil struggle that would have left us a banana republic or shattered the left for a generation.

Instead the production shifted overseas, and subsidies and tax breaks protected the tail end of what had once been the industrial and agricultural engine of the world. The slow death of American industry put millions out of work, but that only made them into ripe territories for the candidates of social justice to plow. The more the ranks of the poor increased, the more the left could denounce the injustices of a society where there was such a gap between the rich and the poor, while disregarding the fact that they were the rich and their policies had set that gap in stone.

Not satisfied with having outsourced much of America's industry and jobs to totalitarian countries, the left set out to politicize food at every stage of the process, from water supplies to calorie counts. We now live in the peculiar area where the authorities are obsessed with what we are, staring into our plate as if we were the ones gorging, while they starved. Our diet is now officially a national security issue which means it is only a matter of time until Ronald McDonald is the new Osama bin Laden. And all the while there is less to eat and it costs more.

Looking over this spectacle it behooves us to ask what kind of society the left would want? What sort of life do they foresee in a civilization where everything is expensive and hard to come by? This scarcity was an accidental byproduct of a broken system in Soviet countries, but in the West it is not incompetence, it is policy. And what specifically happens to the middle class in such a system?

The Western lifestyle has been made viable after the death of its industry by its high value currency and lack of equivalent competition. That grace window is now expiring. The dollar and the Euro are endangered, and it is only China's razor sharp salesmanship that keeps its own currency artificially low. The day when that changes is the day that Wal-Mart becomes a luxury goods store.

Even the Western corporation which has helped maintain the illusion of economic power is likely to fall not to the left, but to the logic of the marketplace, as its foreign suppliers cut out the middle man and buy it up or bypass it selling directly to Western consumers. For anyone who has brought a Lenovo computer or an HTC phone, has already picked up a product created by a Chinese manufacturer of famous American brand name products which either brought up the business on the American end or just bypassed it.

When the Western corporations go, then suddenly the United States will just be another third world market for goods made by the actual economic superpowers in the East.

The left's adoption of a series of increasingly outdated and unworkable ideas that make Communism seem downright forward looking brought us this far. The left has combined central planning with an opposition to industry, which amounts to the captain dividing up the last food supplies on the raft. It is hostile to agricultural revolutions that can affordably feed an expanding population. It opposes any exploitation of the natural environment that would provide food, jobs and shelter for the people.

This utterly inhuman ideology is the sort of thing that decadent intellectuals like Rousseau or Tolstoy might have engaged in, but has frightening consequences on a national and international scale.It is both elitist and clueless, embracing the diploma as the only tool that matters in a postmodern age where the old verities of supply and demand no longer apply. Stripped of its rational tones, this is the elevation of the advanced degree to a measure of national enlightenment which will solve all our problems.

There is nothing rational about this mystical progressivism, a techno-luddite elite that believes unpaid cooperative efforts by degree holders can provide for a society better than the industrial and agricultural mechanisms that made the society whose cliff's edge they are approaching possible.

The fixation on problem solving by a technocratic elite comes down to nine people discussing how a machine should ideally work and a tenth man trying to actually make it work. The class of entitled problem solvers who have degrees in everything but living in the real world are incapable of understanding that they are the problem. That no amount of social tinkering can make people run the way they want to and that the day when the social tinkerers got the authority to remake the real into their ideal is the day when everything began to go downhill.

We do not need more sociologists, ethicists, workplace psychologists, politicians, human resources staff, chief experts on how to make people interact appropriately with each other. What we need to do is put all the experts back in the closet and let the engineers, farmers, workers and businessmen try to make the society work again.

Communism celebrated the worker but put the Party man at the top of the pile. These days we are running out of workers, but we have a frightening surplus of Party men to try and figure out what is wrong. What is wrong is that the left is insane. Its ideology leads to a completely unworkable system built on hypocrisy, lies and heavy doses of denial.

Even the Communists understood that there needed to be a means of production to seize. Even the South American left understands that. The Western left disregards the means of production in their ideology. The only thing they are interested in producing is a perfect world that is outside such mundane needs. Means of production are outdated. In the future we will all go to college and resolve social injustices without the need to resort to production lines. We will all have less, but be spiritually enlightened. We will eat one meal a day, make our own toilet paper and have three diplomas on the wall.

For all that the Freegans who dumpster dive to find food are mocked, they are the real future of the left's economic policies. One day, if the left goes on as it is, we will all be Freegans.

Halftime for Obama

2012-02-07T23:00:00.002-05:00

"Halftime in America" is a punchier version of Wag the Dog's reelection slogan, "Don't Change Horses in Midstream". They might have tried, "The Best is Yet to Come", but Bloomberg already took that one.

It's one of those wonderful side benefits of socialism that the gap between corporate advertising and a campaign commercial blurs. What's good for GM is good for America and what's good for Chrysler is good for Obama. We may not have the pipeline, but we're still pipelining taxpayer money to a few precious union jobs with car companies that look a lot like the UK's car companies did in the seventies.

You can't really blame Chrysler for trying to preserve its Motor City brand, even if it's with a commercial that wasn't actually filmed in Detroit. It's much easier to put together some inspiring scenes of a Detroit recovery if you shoot it in Los Angeles, a place that has its problems, but which is much more likely to have cheerful couples waking up in apartments that seem to be entirely made of glass.

The Motor City brand is one of those things that doesn't mean a whole lot anymore, but still stirs up sentimentality, like the immigrant experience or freedom of speech. That Detroit is as real today as the Chicago depicted in Sandburg's poem which served as the hog butcher, tool maker and wheat stacker to the world. Today Sandburg might have called it a food stamp scanner, scammer and welfare taker instead.

American industry is a ghost of that former vigor, its hog butchering, tool making and wheat stacking done in by the progressive vision of a post-industrial society. Today it's Shanghai that might qualify for a Sandburg poem and it's also the only place to find that kind of aggressive industrial growth, but Halftime in Shanghai doesn't sound the same even if Shanghaiing American industry is the name of the game.

Chevy, another government bailout recipient, eschewed the phony clip show patriotism and cut right to showing that their truck could survive an apocalypse. Unlike Halftime in America, that ad could have been filmed in Detroit, which has major apocalypse potential. If you have to choose between trying to convince Americans that Motor City is back or convincing them that the end of the world is near but that the right truck can help them make it out alive, go with the second one.

But Chrysler needs the Motor City brand, because it doesn't exist anymore. After a brief two year period of being an American company again after its sale by Daimler-Benz, it is now owned by Fiat, which is as All-American as its CEO, Sergio Marchionne, who does not sound very much like Clint Eastwood. It needs that image of American industry, even if it's an Italian company still employing some American workers and an American brand.

Everyone needs their myths, even if it's the myth of a booming Motor City created in Los Angeles, starring a California movie star by a company headquartered in Turin, Italy. It beats the tawdry reality of Detroit. It's not as if anyone confuses myths with reality, or commercials with substance.

Some of Eastwood's most famous Westerns were actually filmed by Italian directors in Italy. If Sergio Leone could give us Eastwood staging six gun duels in the Apennine Mountains off the Adriatic Sea, then why can't Sergio Marchionne give us Clint Eastwood pacing around an LA stage and breathily pontificating on how hard it is to keep the people and car companies of Detroit down.

We needed the Westerns at a time when the frontier was closing, and if toward the end they were ugly vicious little tableaux of unredeeming violence being filmed in Spanish ghost towns, no one really cared anymore. As the American car company goes the way of the Wild West, we have spaghetti car commercials instead of spaghetti Westerns reassuring us that we are still the same people we used to be. Strong, resilient and capable of recovering from anything with enough bailout money.

Halftime in America didn't explicitly set out to promote Obama, but it didn't need to. Its theme was hope. Its purpose was a defense of widely unpopular policies. It didn't need to mention him by name, any incumbent would have done. Its come on is the same one used in every casino and by every street corner three-card monte dealer. "Don't stop now. Sure you may be behind, but if you throw it all in, you'll double your money."

Halftime in America depends on the metaphor of halftime to convince us to discount the past and embrace hope and change all over again. Forget how badly we fumbled the ball and believe that this time we'll make the touchdown.

But the right metaphor isn't a closely fought game where the lovable underdogs are behind and they just need one golden moment to make it all worthwhile. It's a game where the quarterback has spent most of the game playing golf a 100 miles away, where the players are angry people who can't play football but sued their way onto the team, and the coaching staff only knows how to incite the home crowd to assault the opposing fans, but has no idea how the game is played and thinks rules are for suckers.

The coach has been reading Alinsky's Rules for Radical Players which teaches that the only way to win the Super Bowl is by completely changing the rules of the game on an ad hoc basis and that the only way to accomplish this is by taking over the NFL from within. No touchdowns have actually been scored, but the fawning coverage assures us that we are living in a post-touchdown world where the pigskin doesn't matter, it's all about the value of the brand.

Cheering for a comeback for that isn't for halftime, it's for halfwits. There are baseball and football teams who can never win, but still command passionate followings because they keep losing. The more they lose, the more passionate their fans are about them someday winning. But there's nothing of the lovable underdog spirit about the people who ran this country into the ground. Instead of projecting the humility of those who tried and failed, they project the arrogance of winners even as they show off a track record that even losers should be ashamed of.

Their folly isn't that they tried and failed, it's that they never cared about the game, only about the money and the cameras. They never accept defeat, because they never accepted the rules. They don't believe in limitations. Theirs is the assertion of the motivational speaker that there are no limits but those you impose on yourself. Or as Aleister Crowley put it, "Do what thou wilt, that is the whole of the law."

Obama and his merry band of pranksters have been doing what they will. They have made countless rules for us to follow, but there are no rules that apply to them. And facts, like rules, are things that apply to other people. Their postmodern Sheenseque world is one where the assertion of winning matters more than achievement, where being entertaining counts for more than being right. Where it doesn't matter what the economy actually is, it only matters what it looks like.

The gap between Halftime in America and the reality of Motor City is positively narrow compared to the chasm that stretches between the actual economic situation of the United States and the one set out by Obama in his own halftime in America speeches. We are not recovering, things are not getting better, they are on the verge of getting worse. Rather than making adult decisions, the administration has been as greedy, vicious and corrupt as the former indicted mayor of Detroit.

But Eastwood's rasping narration was right about one thing. Detroit is showing us how it can be done. Not through gumption, hard work, determination and a little spit-- but through government handouts that can't keep the city together, but can help pay for commercials to encourage us to do it all over again.

Instead of fully compensating America for the nearly 2 billion in losses that we took on the Chrysler bailout, the company has spent the money on Super Bowl commercials touting its comeback. This is like the crook who gets out of jail and instead of compensating his victims, spends the money to take out an ad that boasts of how well he's doing now. The average cost of a Super Bowl spot is 3.5 million for 30 seconds and with a 2 minute running time, that comes out to 14 million dollars. And that's not counting Clint Eastwood's fee.

Sure that's less than 1 percent of the money we're out for the cost of salvaging Chrysler and turning it over to Fiat, but it might have been nice if instead of spending all that money on an LA ad about how hard the people of Detroit are fighting for a recovery, it had gone to the people who lost their jobs to cover the higher taxes that fund bailouts like these.

At the New York Times, Paul Krugman, the ideological champion of massive deficit spending, cheered the ad as the beginning of a new Democratic optimism, their very own Morning in America. The problem with that analogy is that it actually was morning in America in 1984 or at the very least a balmy afternoon. Reagan could sell optimism, because there was something to be optimistic about.
When Obama and his backers try to peddle optimism, the only thing they have to be optimistic about is themselves. It's not America that they are optimistic about, only their own prospects for victory. They were pessimists in 2008, now they're eager to be optimists because the oil tank is half empty when the other guy is driving, but it's half full when you're at the wheel.

Halftime in America has that same empty optimism, a working class ethos as can only be imagined by a poet from Portland, who wrote the text, and the director of Your Highness. It isn't patriotic, it invokes the working class romanticism that you can still see in Social Realism art or North Korean posters on behalf of a billion dollar corporation. It champions some vague struggle for progress, without defining what that might be. It tries to connect the plight of Detroit to America, but if that's so then we're already doomed.

Like period Communist propaganda, it treats work as a struggle and success as collective heroism, rather than a process. This nationalistic mythmaking disguised the basic reasons for the failures that made all that struggle necessary. Every aspect of Soviet or Communist Chinese industry was such a desperate struggle because the entire system was hopelessly broken. And so there was always a battle on to maintain a steel industry or bring in the harvest. And there always had to be villains who were in the way.

When your enterprises are desperately struggling to survive, then you can either try to romanticize the struggle or ask what is really wrong with them. The same goes for a government that can't fix the economy, but can issue forty press releases a day attaching the blame to someone else. Halftime for Chrysler is also Halftime for Detroit and Halftime for Obama. None of them actually want people to ask what is really wrong, instead they want us to emotionally and financially invest in their struggle. And if we do that, then we lose the game.

A UN Farce in Syria

2012-02-06T23:38:00.001-05:00

If anyone is to blame for Russia and China's vetoing of the Syria resolution in the UN Security Council, it's Barack Obama. Last year the United States and the Arab League brought forward a No Fly Zone to the UN Security Council. Instead of enforcing a No Fly Zone, Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy instead used it as an excuse for an invasion and regime change. If Russia and China refused to take another plan from the same suspects at face value, the blame lies with an administration that abused a No Fly Zone.

The message from Russia and China is fairly clear. Fool me once, shame on you. But don't even think about trying it twice.

A closer look at the whole process reveals the ridiculousness of it. The Security Council Resolution calling for peaceful democratic change was co-sponsored by Saudi Arabia, which is an absolute monarchy, and which recently used tanks to suppress protests in Bahrain. As the driving force behind the Arab League, Saudi Arabia was the key player in moving for regime change in Libya. Now it has rubber stamped regime change in Syria.

But why are we expected to take a call by one tyranny for the overthrow of another as a moral duty. As bad as the Assad regime is, Syria is marginally more open and democratic than Saudi Arabia is. And unlike Saudi Arabia, it isn't an Apartheid state that treats non-Muslims and women like dirt. If we were going to implement regime change on the basis of democracy and human rights, we would start with the Saudis.

Of the Muslim co-sponsors of the UN Resolution, virtually all of them have suppressed opposition movements and imprisoned political dissidents. Bahrain is another co-sponsor of the resolution and the only difference between it and Syria, is that Bahrain is a Sunni minority ruling over a Shiite minority, while in Syria it's the other way around. Kuwait ethnically cleansed the Palestinians back in the nineties. Turkey is still conducting an occupation and murdering Kurdish civilians. Libya doesn't have an actual elected government, but it's still somehow sponsoring UN resolutions for regime change in another country.

Of the nine Muslim co-sponsors that have actual governments... eight are monarchies. Most are even absolute monarchies. The only quasi-democracy on the list is Turkey which has prisons filled with dissidents, persecutes minorities and continues to deny its genocidal actions. Not to mention its violation of UN resolutions on Cyprus.

Muslim absolute monarchies are calling for implementing democratic change in Syria. Did monarchies which torture and execute dissenters expected anyone to believe that they were concerned because the Assad family was killing opponents of the regime? Two of the co-sponsors had been doing the same thing last year. One of the co-sponsors is busy torturing former members of its regime right now.

The UN Resolution was based around the Plan of Action of the League of Arab States based on an observer mission to Syria headed by General Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi. Al-Dabi headed up the Sudanese genocide, he is the pet thug of Sudan's indicted war criminal leader, Omar al-Bashir and helped create the Janjaweed rape squads.

Obama has been on the record opposing any military intervention in Sudan, despite the fact that an actual genocide did take place there. But now we are being led by the Gulf Cooperation Council members into another regime change plan. The loudest voice calling for military intervention is Sheikh Hamad Al-Thani, the fat smirking thug running Qatar.

Another of the Al-Thani clan, who serves as foreign minister, said, "We ask that the Syrian regime leave and hand over power. We are with the Syrian people, with their will and with their aspirations." The Al-Thanis, who rule in an absolute monarchy, are the last people to be cheering on the aspirations of the people. The Al-Thanis can't see the people from their palaces.

And who are the Syrian people anyway? Is it the Sunnis or the Alawites or the Christians? This isn't a civil war between a dictator and his people, no matter how often the media and foreign policy experts will repeat the lie, it's a religious conflict between a ruling Shiite splinter sect and Sunnis backed by Turkey and Arabian Gulf monarchies.

For all the talk of replacing Assad with an inclusive system based on elections, this will mean majority rule and the disenfranchisement of non-Sunnis, non-Muslims and women at the hands of the rebels handpicked by Turkish ruling Islamist party and the Emir of Qatar. Egypt's democracy led to an Islamist parliament. There is no reason to expect a Syrian election not to lead to the same thing.

Sheikh Hamad Al-Thani has already called for an invasion of Syria. Qatari special forces were the first on the ground in Libya, But as the usual the West will have to do the heavy lifting. Does the United States have an interest in removing Assad? It does, considering that Assad is an Iranian puppet and he helped kill quite a few Americans in Iraq. But removing Assad to replace him with the local Muslim Brotherhood leaders doesn't benefit anyone except the Brotherhood and its backers.

If Russia and China re reluctant to get fooled a second time, so are Americans who were never fooled a first time. The Libyan War was one of the most unpopular on record, and that was before the aftermath melted down into torture cells and Al-Qaeda flags. With the examples of Libya and Egypt before us, who's really up for a Syrian War besides the Saudis and the Emir of Qatar?

France's Sarkozy is tediously eager to crack the Gallic whip over another former colony, and he's dim witted enough to think that it will be French diplomats calling the shots, rather than officials from neighboring countries who actually have the contacts and the inside track, and who were backing regime change while Sarkozy was busy with Libya..

The UK's Cameron has dismantled chunks of the fleet and air force, but is still raring for another round of fighting. Selling spartan cuts to his own people, while fighting a new war every year would seem to be at odds with policy and elementary mathematics, but at least it's likely to create new jobs in the British defense industry if a new Syrian government begins ordering their equipment from the West instead of the East. But stimulating your defense industry by starting new wars every year is not sound economic stewardship.

Considering the amount of Russian arms sales to Syria, Moscow is protecting its own defense industry, if nothing else. But it's also protecting its access point to the Middle East. Russia has a naval base in Syria and Russia's aircraft carrier recently paid a visit to Tartus as a show of support for Assad.

But what did the Russian veto really come down to? The Russians attempted to introduce amendments calling for the Syrian opposition to disassociate itself from any armed attacks and blaming it for some of the violence. Had the NATO countries been willing to sign on, then the Russians would no longer have had an excuse for a veto. But rather than go that route, Rice bluffed the Russians, rejected the amendments and got shot down.

That can mean a number of different things. Either Rice really didn't care if the resolution passed. Bringing the resolution forward and letting the Russians shoot it down will score points with the rebels if they do win, and destroy the Russian connection. That's not an implausible scenario since Obama might not be racing to war as fast as Sarkozy might want him to. And if war becomes necessary then the same coalition which exploited a No Fly Zone for regime change will find another way to get it done. It's not as if anyone is going to hold them accountable.

But it's also an admission that the only purpose of all this is regime change. Placing blame on the rebels will challenge the absolute legitimacy required to topple Assad on their behalf. Russia knew that the backers of regime change could not accept a resolution that undermined the legitimacy of the rebels. Especially a resolution that would not have been the endgame, but the lead in to another one of the same.

This isn't the end of the push for regime change in Syria. Germany's UN Ambassador has been discussing how to move forward. And while the Assad regime is completely unsympathetic, its enemies are equally so. Absolute monarchies have no legitimacy when calling for democratic change and an administration whose head honcho built his rep on opposing military intervention is now swaggering around with one war under his belt and a second one behind his back.

The free world has no friends in Syria. None likely to take power anyway. And it has nothing at stake in a Sunni-Alawite civil war that will end with Syria as a puppet of Iran or a puppet of Saudi Arabia.

A Tale of Two Republican Parties

2012-02-05T23:19:00.001-05:00

There are two Republican parties. One is fairly liberal, it is hostile to the left but it also believes in stealing their thunder by adopting moderate versions of their policies.

This Republican Party is strongly pro-business, but it believes that to succeed in a global economy the government must provide subsidies to businesses and individuals. It believes that immigration reform is needed, though its chosen candidates know to avoid using the word amnesty. It believes that national health care is inevitable and that the only way to avoid a government solution is through the individual mandate.

It is loosely conservative, but disinterested in social issues. It thinks that the left has gone too far in upending traditional values, but has no interested in combating it and finds those who do embarrassing . It adapts to changing mores with an uneasy smile and tries to pretend that it was with it all along. It has no strong religious feelings and it believes that all religious, including Islam, are basically the same.

It is strong on national defense spending, but mainly to maintain stability and national influence, not because it believes that we face any real threats. It believes that America has a responsibility to the rest of the world and that we are obligated to give back through the United Nations and other international organizations allowing us to spread our values of free enterprise and democracy to everyone.

It is a big believer in the American Dream of economic opportunity, but is unable to think of any other national virtues beyond that. It maintains a strongly Federalist legacy and while it agrees that the Federal government has overreached itself in interfering with the business of states, it has no real interest in rolling back its powers, only in making certain that they are used "wisely".

The only area where it actively rolls back the left's program is its deregulation of businesses, but even this is limited to spheres that are objectionable to specific industries which lobby for deregulation. Small businesses can expect much less help, unless they band together and forcefully make something into an issue.

It has no passion for anything beyond deregulating a few specific industries. It supports the right to bear arms, not because it passionately believes in it, but because the political costs of not doing so are too high. It opposes abortion for the same reason, though its opposition is mainly a formality. It believes that gay marriage is inevitable, but isn't willing to pick a fight with its base over it.

Its leaders and members consider themselves rationalists and believe in Global Warming because "the science says so." They sneer at those Republicans who deny what they think is the obvious. While they are skeptical of government solutions to Global Warming, they are prepared to accept an approach that does not cause too much harm to business and is routed through private companies.

It views what the Republican Party has become as an embarrassment and while it doles out red meat to the base when it has to, it despises them and constantly dreams of ways of getting rid of them. In its fondest daydreams, a graduated amnesty program for Mexican immigrants by a Republican president turns them all into legal citizens and Republican voters, allowing them to tell their guns n bibles base to kiss off.

It does not believe that Obama is bad, only inexperienced and misguided, but basically well-meaning and its lack of support for him is not due to a firm belief that his agenda is destructive, but to political calculations and the need to appease their base.

This Party is not particularly worried about the future of the United States except as a place to do business. And even then it will easily move operations offshore to Dubai or Singapore. Overall it is optimistic that things will go on as they have, with a gradual process of reform advanced by the left and moderated by the right in the political process resulting in a workable center.

Then there's the other Republican Party. This party is deeply worried about the future of the country, and not just as a place to do business. It is socially conservative, strong on national defense because it believes that we do face real threats and enemies, it is opposed to amnesty and very skeptical of Federal power.

This party is more new than it is old, it's a party that evolved in response to the transformation of the Democratic Party at the hands of the left. It is the base from which the Republican Party draws much of its support, particularly away from the Northeast, and it is struggling to force the party to match its deeds to its words.

It does not believe that most of the national debates are a tempest in a teacup that can be settled amicably behind closed doors. It is uninterested in bipartisan great compromisers, it seeks fighters who will stand up for its agenda. It is not interested in the progressive voyage to the national future that has been taken up by both parties, what it would like is independence from their reign of policy terror. It would like to roll back the progressive policymaking of both parties.

It is concerned for its ability to earn a living, for the values of its children and the basic freedoms that it can see being lost every day. It remembers a time when people had more freedom and less rules hanging over their heads. The tide of paperwork, the omnipresent regulatory state infuriate it and lead it to vote for people who claim to want Washington off their backs. But next year there are even more regulations and paperwork to deal with.

It is deeply worried about the Bill of Rights, its right to bear arms, its right to speak freely and to practice its beliefs without interference from the government. It is worried about them because it has already witnessed the dramatic erosion of its freedoms and it expects the process to continue.

It is unenthusiastic about deploying troops to maintain global hegemony or aid other nations, it is however vigorous about defending the country from enemy attack. Its members often have a tradition of military service and a skeptical view of how the politicians have used and abused the military for their own purposes.

Its skepticism of authority transcends government and extends to elites in science, academia and the entertainment industry. It recognizes the major gap between its values and theirs, and accordingly distrusts them. It is much less subject to being cowed by absolute truths presented by the elites and often seeks out alternative opinions.

What it wants most is independence from outside regulations that impinge on its way of life. It has little interest in positive rights and a defense of its rights by the government, what it would like is the ability to defend its own rights, to maintain a separation from the elites and its own property and family.

These two Republican parties have been on a collision course for some time now. The collision repeats itself in every election as it has throughout the 20th century. The Republican establishment has never really come to terms with its new core constituencies, the people resistant to the New Deal who were then joined by the people resistant to every other liberal big government innovation that came down the pike.

Between an establishment committed to moderate progressivism and a base that is unwilling to accept less freedoms and more regulation for their own good, is a massive divide. It is a cultural, economic, social and regional divide that needs to be talked about.

Too many establishment candidates have cakewalked into office by paying lip service to the concerns of the base without believing a word of it. Each time the process repeats itself, the collision becomes more explosive until something has to give.

Either the Republican establishment needs to step up to the plate and honestly repudiate its base or it needs to step aside and decide which it cares about more, deregulation or its version of the progressive agenda, because it cannot continue as a contradiction in terms without a meltdown. The current ugliness is a manifestation of that yawning gap between the two parties that cannot be bridged without an honest dialogue about the different values of those at the top and those at the bottom.

Countdown to Zero in Tehran and Jerusalem

2012-02-04T23:26:00.001-05:00

There was a time when Israel did not deal with existential threats by urging the Americans to do something. That time was fairly recent. When Saddam decided he wanted to have his own nuclear reactor, fourteen Israeli Air Force jets put an end to his dream. The year was 1981.

The Reagan Administration supported a UN resolution condemning Israel which stated that it was in "clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct" and which fully recognized "the inalienable sovereign right of Iraq, and all other States, especially the developing countries, to establish programmes of technological and nuclear development."

Prime Minister Begin, easily the most conservative PM to hold the office, replied bluntly. "No "sword of Damocles" is going to hang over our head."

Four years ago Israel launched a quieter attack was launched on a nuclear reactor in Syria, this time with the likely approval and assistance of the United States. Now after all the whitewashing of Iran's nuclear program, it is coming down to the bottom line. Either a comprehensive attack will be launched or Iran's nuclear program will pass the point of no return.

While there are some doubts about whether Israel has the capability to take out the program, in the past they have found innovative ways to do the impossible. It is quite likely that there is a plan on someone's desk for getting the job done. The plan is probably bold, seemingly unworkable and reads as insane to experienced hands, but that would also describe the opening strike of the Six Day War or the Entebbe raid.

The question is why hasn't it been carried out yet and the likely answer is Obama. Not just Obama, but the oddball mix of Clintonites and left-wing Chicago radicals who would be in a prime position to oppose or support any such move. Just as with the takedown of Bin Laden, it is likely that there are figures in the administration who support such a move and those who oppose it.

Israel has no doubt been hoping for a repeat of 2007 and an operation that takes place with the support and cover of the United States. A quiet operation that will mostly go unmentioned. Israel has been hanging on in the hopes that if it walks through the steps laid out by Washington D.C. then it will finally get the go ahead and any of the equipment and local support it needs to get the job done as comprehensively and safely as possible.

The Israeli cabinet and defense establishment has been having its own quiet debate on the subject, just as it before taking out Osirak. As then the lefties are opposed, but their best ammo comes from D.C. which has doubtlessly been stringing Israel along and promising that if Israel is patient then the problem will be taken care of. To the right the argument has no doubt been that the United States will not do anything and that Israel needs to do it alone.

Panetta's statements in the past few weeks peg him as either an idiot or a man sending the signal that Israel is going to have to go it alone. If Panetta was an opponent of direct action all along, which may well be the case, then he is trying to sabotage any possible Israeli operation while disavowing any responsibility for it. Israeli Defense Minister Barak, who has been waiting for the Obamanoids to bring down the Netanyahu government and pave the way for his ascension, has begun talking tough on Iran. And talking in terms of a timeline. That's more significant than anything else, but with the double eye of politics it can be read two ways.

Either Barak is rushing to get ahead and claim credit for any strike. Or he's rushing ahead to claim credit for being tough on Iran, even as he knows that no strike will be carried out because he and his leftist allies have sabotaged any internal momentum on it. But as tempting as it is to be cynical about Barak, and there are plenty of reasons for that, the full substance of his remarks, which are beyond the scope of this piece, suggest a Barak and Netanyahu consensus has been reached on an attack. The triumphalist tone and the camaraderie indicate that the political cards have been dealt.

If the ball is finally rolling on the Israeli side then the situation in Washington has to be tense. It is doubtful that the Obama Administration would back any Israeli strike, openly or under the table. Whatever promises were made to the Israelis in exchange for patience were never sincere and if Israel seriously expected that when the checkpoints were reached and Israel stuck with a covert campaign, that Washington would support a strike, they were kidding themselves. And it would not be the first time.

The campaign of sabotage against Iran's infrastructure and scientists that is being conducted by unknown actors has gotten a lot of attention recently. While the campaign has been blamed on Israel, it is likelier a CIA project being conducted by existing insurgent groups opposed to Iran, with the Saudis as the facilitators. Because this isn't just an America or Israel deal, most of the Gulf oil states who have a lot more pull in Washington have a major stake in this and want something done.

The Obama Administration does not particularly care about Iran's nuclear capacity. Its priority is democratic change in the region. Some of the Chicago crew believes Iran has a right to nuclear development or that its nuclear program would help achieve the Kissingeresque goal of cutting Israel does to size. But this administration also has an affinity for covert ops and it has likely signed on to joint covert sabotage efforts to keep the Israelis from doing something drastic.

Considering the sheer number of Clinton people around, some of them were probably involved in Operation Merlin which attempted to sabotage Iran's nuclear program by providing flawed nuclear plans. Operation Merlin badly backfired and helped the Iranians instead. Stuxnet was likely an idea that came from the minds behind Merlin that Israeli cyberwarfare specialists, namely hackers recruited to work on security operations, made into a moderately workable plan.

The blunt force assassinations may or may not have administration approval, but if they were they being carried out for the same reason, to keep the Israelis and Saudis from doing something more direct about the problem. The assassinations won't stop the program, but they are a warning shot across the bow. The problem is that warning shots don't stop nuclear missiles.

As the countdown to zero continues, it's become more obvious than ever that nothing short of direct action will. But everyone has their own interests at stake.

The Iranian opposition doesn't want an Israeli strike because it would politically benefit the regime, which might be the case but the opposition has already has its chance to overthrow the government and failed to do it. Diplomats may have confidence in a peaceful transition coming some day, but that day is much too far away, assuming it will even ever come. And should it come there is no reason to believe that the figures at the top of the opposition pile would be averse to a nuclear program or to using it against Israel.

Obama is not a fan of bombing Muslim countries, unless it is on behalf of other Muslim countries. His whole foreign affairs strategy was based around winning the Muslim world over and even an Israeli raid conducted with zero approval and even opposition would still be blamed on the United States. Additionally with an election coming up, a bombing raid could escalate into something bigger and affect oil prices. Given a choice between winning an election or a nuclear bomb in Tel Aviv, no one seriously doubts which he will choose.

The Saudis want Iran's nuclear program gone, but they don't want their Shiite rivals scoring martyr points in a confrontation with Israel. Their ideal operation would be as quiet as the Syrian reactor bombing, but even they know that isn't likely to happen, not with an operation of this scope. And if the operation has to happen, then it's better for Israel to get the blame, rather than fellow Muslim countries who might be involved in some small way too.

Finally there is Israel, where everyone who isn't working for Haaretz or the EU agrees that something needs to be done. The debate has always come down to when and how. In security matters most Israelis still assume that the government will eventually do something about a security problem, even as they curse its ineptitude in all other areas.

The primary calculus for this type of decision making is the United States. In the past the Israelis went full speed ahead and apologized to Washington D.C. for it later. That species of confidence is nearly extinct. Boldness and courage are atypical not only among politicians, for whom it was never typical, but among the top military brass who authorized insane operations and even participated in them.

Still the clock is ticking. Whatever arrangements Jerusalem made with Washington D.C. are reaching the end. Netanyahu is often timid, but he isn't stupid. The only thing that might still be slowing him down is the possibility that the elections will swap out Obama for a less hostile figure, but waiting until a new administration gets settled in would take too long. That doesn't mean he might not do it anyway, but it has become much less likely. And a Romney Administration might be friendlier than the current one, but the return of Sununu is not exactly a harbinger of excellent relations either.

Adlai Stevenson blamed Israel for his loss to Eisenhower over the Suez Canal War. That grudge was carried on by his son who served as the United States Senator from Illinois. Carter, who blamed the loss of support from American Jews over his hostility to Israel for his defeat, has turned his grudge into a full time career of bashing the Jewish State. If Obama were to go down to defeat and blame Israel, he could certainly do a good deal of damage, even out of office, more if he were to break with recent precedent and try to reclaim his Senate seat.

But Obama doesn't seem the type to let a single grudge consume this much of his focus and even if he were to go Full Carter, he couldn't do nearly as much damage as he has in office or as an Iranian bomb could do to Israel. Even if an Israeli strike were to make the election tougher for Obama, it is doubtful that he could do that much more damage than he has done already, particularly with plenty of partisan domestic fights to consume his attention.

As the clock counts down to zero, the only real element that matters is the atoms of political courage that have to reach critical mass for a strike that will either cripple or destroy Iran's nuclear ambitions to take place.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Free Market Dissolution

2012-02-03T16:55:00.002-05:00

A FREE MARKET SOLUTION

In her article, Three Cheers for Romneycare, Ann Coulter insists that Romneycare and its mandate was a Free Market Solution. Of course a government mandate to buy a product is not a "free market" solution, it is a slave market solution. Using a government mandate may be a market based solution but there is nothing free about it. The purchaser isn't free not to buy. The seller is only able to move the product through coercion and has to qualify with the government to be able to force-sell the product.

It's certainly not free market, and while it can be viewed as a "conservative" solution, it's only a form of conservatism that rejects human freedom and free enterprise. It's a nanny state conservatism, which is exactly the attack that Romney and his supporters have used against Santorum.

Coulter's only defense of Romney's nanny state policy is that it's state based, and did not take place at the Federal level. As I pointed out last week, if Romney supported a mandate as a state executive, there is no serious reason to believe that he would oppose one as a Federal executive, except "principle" and Romney does not exactly radiate principle.

The mandate allows for a less liberal version of national health care, and it's such a conservative free market solution that the famously conservative free marketer Barry from Chicago ended up adopting it. But the mandate is not conservative or liberal, it's certainly not free market, but it is corporate.

What the mandate really is, is Brooks' "free market socialism" that he called on Obama to adopt in his Times column that ran before the State of the Union address.

Free market socialism gives the left its program but routes it through corporate owners. Obama has been responsible for numerous variations of this across different industries, most notably in Green Energy. We know the maneuver better as Crony Capitalism.

The mandate gives the left national health care and gives health insurance companies mass slavery by forcing every American to buy their product. The left wins, health insurance companies win, everyone else loses.

But the truly brilliant thing about Coulter's defense of Romney is that it takes everything he did as Governor of Massachusetts off the table. No matter what he did, we are assured that he won't do when he gets to the White House because he is committed to states rights.

Suddenly Romney's record doesn't matter and everything hinges on the notion that is a staunch Constitutionalist.

And the mandate? As Coulter puts it, "No one is claiming that the Constitution gives each person an unalienable right not to buy insurance."

Coulter leaves out the words, "be forced to" but that's a natural mistake. Still supposing that's the case, then the Constitution doesn't give each person an unalienable right not to be forced to buy a subscription to the New York Times or a Chevy Volt.

There is a Jewish religious legal principle, "Menuval BiReshut HaTorah" which warns that it is possible for a person to follow the letter of the law and still act like an abominable human being. There is more to being a good person than just remaining within the boundaries of the legal codes. There is also more to believing in the Founders vision for America than in supporting repressive nanny state laws that serve corrupt interests, but do not technically violate the Bill of Rights.

If the left was really forced to implement its agenda while remaining within the limits of the Constitution, they could do it. It would take them longer than it might the way they are doing it now, but it is still doable. At one debate, Santorum pointed out that Ron Paul's ideology rigidity might have led to a serious blow against the Second Amendment. And that is also a reality. Just because the left rejects Originalism, does not mean that they could not operate within such a system and turn it to its advantage if they had to. That is why it is important to remember the principles of liberty in practice, not just the codes in abstract.

At the Daily Beast, David Frum lays it out pretty clearly in a column titled, Three Cheers for Ann Coulter.

More cheering yet is the logic implicit in Coulter's phrase "free-market alternative." Alternative what? Answer: alternative mode of providing universal health coverage. That's what Gov. Mitt Romney accomplished in Massachusetts—universal coverage via private insurance. Universal coverage is what Romneycare provided, and if you give Romneycare three cheers, universal coverage is what you are cheering.

So three cheers for Ann Coulter's three cheers—and for this public step toward a more humane and rational vision of conservatism.

Frum leaves out progressive, but that's implied. And why not a progressive conservatism. It can be like burning ice or oilwater.

When we see tens of millions of people going without insurance—and thereby either suffering much worse health outcomes or else dumping their costs onto others (or both)—we're not seeing a principled aversion to coverage. We're seeing a crisis of affordability.

Or, and this is a third option, purchasing services and products on an 'as needs' basis. But when you think in terms of national and global solutions, then individuals don't make "different" decisions, they make good or bad decisions. A good decision is in line with the technocracy, a bad decision is out of line with the technocracy.

Those who aren't on board either haven't gotten "access" to the opportunity and require a social justice remedy. Those who object are parasites who are exploiting the system. Not wanting to be part of the system is not an option for the humane and rational system of the technocracy.

Either you are with us, too deprived to be with us and need our help... or you are against us.

What's the soundtrack to that number? "You don't know how lucky you are, boy. Back in the USSR."

Three cheers.

THE TROUBLE WITH DEMOCRACY

After all the efforts made to keep the Sandanistas out of power, El Salvador’s supreme leftist pedophile Daniel Ortega is back in the Presidential Palace in Nicaragua. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez is polling well ahead of his left-wing opposition rival. In Brazil, former leftist terrorist Dilma Rousseff boasts even higher approval ratings.

Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the second largest party in the Russian Duma is the Communist Party. Its actual vote totals are probably higher due to the fraudulent nature of the elections under the control of Putin’s United Russia Party. This roster is rounded out by the Liberal Democratic Party, which is run by a career lunatic who has proposed conquering Alaska, dumping nuclear waste on nearby nations and rounding up the Jews into camps.

From my Front Page Magazine article, "Democracy's Demons"

WORDS MEAN NOTHING

A condensed understanding of the Obama strategy can be gained from two quotes from two articles.

Axelrod and other Obama political advisers saw anti-Keynesian rhetoric as a political necessity. They believed it was better to channel the anti-government winds than to fight them. As much as it enraged Romer and outside economists, the White House was on to something. A President’s ability to change public opinion through rhetoric is extremely limited. George Edwards, after studying the successes of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan, concluded that their communications skills contributed almost nothing to their legislative victories. According to his study, “Presidents cannot reliably persuade the public to support their policies” and “are unlikely to change public opinion.”

and Henninger's WSJ piece

It is beyond audacious. How can a president simultaneously hammer real job creation with the Keystone XL pipeline decision, then go into the country and claim kinship with the anxieties of the jobless? No problem. Just do it.

Condense that into a phrase and it would be, "Words mean nothing."

Obama's speeches are a strategy to gain ground with voters. They have no connection with his policies which are a strategy to gain ground by taking over or destroying American institutions.

ALINSKY'S GHOST

In the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx wrote, “A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.” Today it is Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals that is haunting America, and though we have access to the original text, the modern day disciples of Saul are far more reluctant than the authors of the Communist Manifesto to make their creed and agenda known.

Deception is the creed of the new radical who wraps himself in the flag while tearing it apart from the inside out. Who sings the National Anthem while knowingly mangling the words. Who uses American patriotism in the service of manufacturing a Post-American world order. This is the specter of Alinsky that we hear during each State of the Union address, which we read in the platforms of the Democratic Party and the proceedings of the Democratic-controlled Senate.

from my Front Page Magazine article, Exposing the Alinsky Party

BACKGROUND

from Debbie Schlussel, a bit of background on one of Mitt Romney's special advisers.

Weber now serves– along with the forces behind the Ground Zero mosque and leaders of several Muslim Brotherhood groups including ISNA–on the board of the U.S.-Muslim Engagement Project, the declared aim of which is to change the attitudes of the American public toward Islam and change American foreign policy

While Weber is partially balanced out by such figures as Dov Zakheim and Walid Phares, it is doubtful that Phares would have any real influence with a Romney White House. Weber does have an extensive history of being pro-Israel while in office, Recent interviews however have been far more ambiguous.

Obama has committed to bringing U.S. pressure for a settlement to the 60-year-old argument. He has done so not at the end of his term, as other recent presidents have done, but at the beginning. He has changed the traditional U.S. starting point -- that the security of Israel is the fundamental priority -- and made the achievement of a two-state solution the top priority. Obamaians, he said, point out that the old approach had been tried and tried and wasn't getting results.

Weber said, as he did on many of these topics, that he favors the approach.

But if you want a proper nightmare, here's Jeniffer Rubin's interview with Weber on how Romney would handle things.

Weber says that Romney supports the Administration’s approach (which includes a Middle East conference in the fall and a desire to work with the Fatah government) but recognizes the dilemma we face. On one hand, Weber notes that Hamas was rightly placed on the terrorist watch list by the Clinton administration yet it has shown itself to be “more competent” than Fatah politically and paramilitarily as well in its ability to provide social services. He notes that we are placing our faith in “the less competent” faction with the hope that Fatah will improve.

This is a downright creepy line, as it borderline suggests engagement with Hamas. That was 2007 so Weber is not endorsing Obama's policy as that did not yet exist. But it means that Weber has been a two time Romney adviser and last time around was answering questions on his foreign policy views.

If you want to amp up the creepy factor some, there's this...

A few days ago I wrote about John Kerry’s speech on the Senate floor touting the U.S.-Muslim Engagement Project. Yesterday Mr. Norquist’s group was briefed by Vin Weber, a member of the leadership group of the same U.S.-Muslim Engagement Project.

Weber is a managing partner at Clark and Weinstock, whose clients include the UAE government. C&W have lobbied on behalf of the UAE. Their proposal called for broadening the UAE's relationships with the US government, think thanks and opinion leaders and policy makers. Also on the menu was "enhancing the reputation of the UAE as a strategic ally."

This was after that whole DPW ports mess when there was some concern about American ports ending up in enemy hands. Weber has been connected to the DPW deal and lobbied for it.

"We always advised them that if we had a sufficient amount of time — 45 days — we had a real chance to educate the Congress and the public," said Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota who is a lobbyist for the emirates. "But that we needed time."

The rather clear problem here is that a member of Romney's team of advisers was identified as a lobbyist for the Emirates. Is he educating Romney now?

Clark and Weinstock is owned by Omnicom, which is every bit as creepy as it sounds, a multibillion dollar communications storehouse for just about everything. Omnicom has three operations running in Saudi Arabia. It has a Middle East HQ in Dubai.

THE ROUNDUP

Is this what the end will look like? If Obama and Panetta have their way, then yes.

Sudanese Religion of Peace military bombs Christian bible school.

Story #4551. Tourism to a Muslim country makes as much sense as skydiving into a cactus. It might end well, it might not. But there are safer places to skydive.

In utterly shocking news, Al Qaeda has actually been strengthened by Obama's Libyan war.

The Obama Administration's assault on the rights of traditional religious groups has gotten a lot of attention. Via American Digest.

(I would point out that while Catholic groups are in the center of the assault, other religious groups, including Orthodox Jews are also affected.) From the Orthodox Union.

Most troubling, is the Administration’s underlying rationale for its decision, which appears to be a view that if a religious entity is not insular, but engaged with broader society, it loses its “religious” character and liberties. Many faiths firmly believe in being open to and engaged with broader society and fellow citizens of other faiths. The Administration’s ruling makes the price of such an outward approach the violation of an organization’s religious principles.

And Agudas Yisroel

The Obama Administration had an opportunity to declare that there is a fundamental American value at stake here - religious freedom - and provide strong and unequivocal protections to religious employers. Instead, it took a step backwards by imposing religiously-objectionable mandates on countless religious entities, and by devising a cramped limitation on what “religious groups” are and what their public mission in society should be.

Looking Ahead to the Election Coverage of 2048

2012-02-01T23:12:00.000-05:00

Election Coverage 2048 - Al-CNN

As the election of 2048 approaches, the candidates from both parties continue to exchange strong views on the issues that affect the lives of Americans. The Party of Democracy and Justice (Hezb-Al-Dimukratie-Wa'al Adalah) continues to maintain that the election will come down to social justice issues.

“With 34 percent unemployment and the price of goat so far out of range of most working families that they have been forced to switch to chicken, it is time that our opponents stopped dodging the issues and took a serious look at the economic consequences of their policies,” Bashar Mohammed Hussein Al-Hamdani, said during a campaign stop at a HalalBurger in Peoria, Illinois.

However the ruling Freedom and Religion Party (Hezb Al-Hurriyah Wa'al Allah) denounced this as class warfare. Still preoccupied with the ongoing occupation of the Netherlands and Greece, the party has taken criticism for ignoring the economic problems of the United States while being preoccupied with waging foreign wars in the name of Islam.

Nevertheless President Mohammed Al-Thani, fresh off a pilgrimage from Mecca, vigorously defended his record while conducting a photo op at a San Diego Madrassa. “The Freedom and Religion Party believes in creating opportunities, rather than offering hand outs. Our subjugation of infidel nations has opened up new territories to be dominated by the believers and our vigorous drive for national morality has revived the family unit as an economic force. Our program of heavily fining women who go out with their naked hair exposed and raising the Jizya tax on the People of the Book has also raised billions of dollars that will go toward repaying the nation 93 trillion dollar debt.”

The high Jizya tax has provoked outrage in some parts of the United States, but the continuing decline of the nation’s non-Muslim population has made the Christian vote much less of a factor in the election. Hamdani has promised to cut the Jizya tax by 20 percent if elected, but it is unclear whether conservative elements in his own party will allow him to do it. National surveys show that since making the proposal, Hamdani’s ratings have gone down 9 points in Illinois and 14 points in California.

President Al-Thani’s advisors view the 2 million conversions to Islam since the Jizya tax was tripled as a major benefit to the party which lost its Christian support during the Great Transition. Since then the Freedom and Justice Party has picked up a Christian and Jewish bloc vote, but the value of that bloc has not held up well over the last two elections.

Christian rights activists attribute the decline of American Christians to the Jizya tax which has made it impossible for many Christian families to earn a living. They also blame the bloody 2045 Riots which marked the end of the Christian presence in former strongholds such as Nashville and Cedar Rapids, as well as rumors about the kidnapping and forced conversion of Christian girls.

However popular talk show host and pundit, Abdul Greene countered that the decrease was best explained by the large scale immigration of Christians out of the country. “The Christians are too bigoted to live in the same country with us, just like their parents and grandparents. If they can’t control the country, they refuse to live here and accept our laws.”

Christian rights activists have accused Greene of playing a major role in stirring up the 2045 Riots which torched Christian areas in major cities across the United States after a Christian man was accused of having an intimate encounter with a Muslim woman. Greene however insists that the Christians are the ones to blame. Greene's support of the Freedom and Religion Party has been controversial, but President Al-Thani has refused to disavow him.

The latest round of attacks by Greek guerrillas on liberation forces in Athens led to smaller attacks on Christian businesses in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles last month. They also accentuated the debate over the continuing occupation of Greece which began in 2031 when the United States government intervened to protect the territorial claims of the Turkish Republic of Cyprus. Much as in the Netherlands, the intervention to protect a Muslim community turned into a full blown occupation and a war against an insurgency that is believed to be backed and supplied by rogue states such as the breakaway Arctic Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany and the Zionist Entity.

The Freedom and Religion Party under President Al-Thani continues to take the position that American prosperity is closely linked to the welfare of the rest of the Muslim world. In the State of the Union address the president stated that, "We cannot repeat the folly of the Americans of the pagan period who believed that they could have material wealth without religion. Our prosperity comes from Allah and it is only by spreading the way of Allah and conducting our Jihad in the way of Allah on behalf of our endangered brothers and sisters in Europe and Asia that we will be deserving of Allah's bounty."

Hoping to exploit the widespread economic dissatisfaction, Hamdani, a former Wisconsin governor, has promised to withdraw troops from Greece within two years and the Netherlands within five years with the majority of remaining liberation forces being drawn from other Muslim countries. "We can best aid our fellow believers in the Muslim world by being a model of stability and a beacon of tolerance."

Yusuf Al-Amiriki, a member of Hamdini's foreign policy defense team and a first generation convert descended from two American presidents, courted controversy with a proposal to set up a coalition government of Muslim and moderate Christian groups in the Netherlands. Such governments had been tried in Europe before during the 2030's, but invariably fell apart. Leading Senators from the Freedom and Justice Party accused Hamdani of selling out Muslim interests in order to court the Christian vote. Hamdani's spokeswoman, Aisha Zubedi, has refused to comment on the Amiriki proposal except to say that Hamdani was open to any solution that would restore peace to the people of the Netherlands and protect the rights of European Muslims.

Hamdani courted further controversy by appearing at the funeral of former President Bob Thompson. Thompson had served two terms and while his administration had worked hard on outreach to the Muslim world, he also engaged in the targeted murder of Muslim religious leaders and provided aid to the Zionist entity. For these reasons, President Al-Thani chose not to appear at his funeral even though President Thompson had been a member of the pre-transition Freedom and Religion Party, which was then known as the Republican Party.

Despite the official disapproval, Thompson was viewed positively by many in the Muslim community. Tens of millions of Pakistani-Americans remember how after the India-Pakistan war, the Thompson Administration generously opened its borders to victims of the nuclear fallout in Pakistan. Without that step it might have taken decades more before America achieved a Muslim majority.

During the beginning of his second term, Thompson became the first president to take the oath of office on both a Bible and a Koran declaring that he wanted to make no separation between the books of god. At the Thompson funeral, Hamdani appeared to promise that he would repeat that gesture, but his spokeswoman quickly disavowed any notion that he would ever take an oath on a text that was not the Koran.

"No American president has taken an oath on a bible in over a decade, all that the governor meant was that he would keep both Christians and Muslims in mind as the people of Allah when he takes his oath to protect and defend the Sharia," Aisha Zubedi said.

While the Democracy and Justice Party has often appealed to the poor, its missteps have raised concerns in traditional Muslim communities that Hamdani is going too far in pandering to non-Muslims. "Next thing you know he'll say we should let the Jews come back to America," Congressman Mohammed Mogabe declared. "If Hamdani wants votes out of Cleveland then he is going to show he will fight for us, not for the enemies of the prophets."

Hamdani has hurriedly scheduled an upcoming visit to the Ground Zero Mosque, but it may not be enough to improve his image in the eyes those who have accused him of flirting with apostasy. While the Mosque is a traditional stop for presidential candidates, Hamdani is unlikely to pay tribute to the souls of the 19 martyrs as Al-Thani did during the previous election.

Hoping to refocus attention on his economic program, Hamdani called for higher corporate taxes and accused some corporations of abusing Islamic banking, in particular Hibah payments, to avoid paying taxes. Such charges are not new, but particularly galling at a time when over a third of the country is out of work and tycoons like Ahmed Shalafi and Sheikh Johnson have used their connections with the Al-Thani government to become billionaires.

To counter Hamdani, Al-Thani's economic advisers have offered up a stimulus plan that raises the Jizya tax on infidels for the second time in a year and vowed to cut spending even further without affecting subsidies to Islamic schools or military preparedness for the Global Jihad. Though the election is still some time away, the Al-Thani campaign has also rolled out a series of ads targeting poor communities which accuse Hamdani of plotting with Jewish and Christian tycoons to subvert the Islamic system of finance through freemasonry and Communist class warfare tactics.

Adding further drama to the election is the possibility of a third party campaign. Andrew McMillan who has been running as an independent in elections for almost twenty years without appealing to anyone but the same racist groups who have been disavowed even by most Christians and Jews, but there is talk that McMillan's America Party might consider replacing the eccentric millionaire with sports star Ted March. As leading goalscorer who helped the United States win the 2042 World Cup, March is one of the most admired non-Muslims in the country. With him on the ticket, the America Party might be able to adopt a new moderate image that is no longer associated with bigotry and intolerance.

But frustrating his own party members, the septuagenarian McMillan appeared to an event commemorating the 2045 riots and gave a rousing speech which hit on many of the same old themes. "For thirty-six years I've been involved in politics and the only thing that I can tell you about politics is that it's all bunk. We weren't talking about the things that mattered thirty-six years ago and we aren't talking about them now."

Muslim Firsters and Israel Firsters

2012-01-31T22:56:00.001-05:00

If you were to suggest in a public forum that just possibly Israel's failure to reach a peace agreement with a terrorist organization, run by kleptomaniacs and homicidal maniacs, which still continues to applaud the murder of Israeli children, might possibly be due to the terrorists and not because of Israel, then according to the consensus of the left, you are an Israel Firster.

The paradigm of the Israel Firster only works if you assume that the America First position is to support Islamic terrorists. Even if we were to dismiss the threat of Islamic terrorism to the United States then a position sympathetic to the territorial claims of Islamic terrorists in Israel would still not be the America First position, it would be the Muslims First position.

The left which deploys names like Israel Firsters is certainly not calling for neutrality in the conflict, rather it would like us to side with the Muslim Brotherhood and the assorted Islamic terrorists scattered throughout the region. Arguably the United States has been doing this for some time already.

Obama stuck his finger in Prime Minister Netanyahu's chest, but bowed to the Saudi King. When he visited Turkey, he made no mention of the Turkish settlements in occupied Cyprus, but when Biden visited Israel, he threw a fit over a partial approval for a few houses in Jerusalem. The United States doesn't fund many terrorist groups, but the bulk of the funding that it allots to terrorists goes to terrorists operating in Israel and killing Israelis.

Last week the State Department put out a list of designated terrorist organization. That list includes the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. The Brigade has not only committed numerous atrocities against Israelis, it at one point threatened to launch terrorist attacks against America. The Brigade is the military arm of the Fatah group which controls the Palestinian Authority. The Authority is the beneficiary of an average of 600 million dollars a year in direct assistance, and indirectly through the UNRWA which has already received an initial 55 million dollars from the United States in 2012.

Terrorists who murder Israelis don't just indirectly benefit from American aid, that money is going to pay the salaries of convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons. Some of those terrorists received training and weapons from the United States. I would like to be able to say that this sort of thing is one of the innovations of the Hussein Administration, but it's an an artifact of two previous administrations.

This is usually how countries treat other countries that they are at war with. In this case it is an artifact, not of an Israel Firster policy, but of a Muslim Firster policy. There is no interpretation of Israel Firster that accommodates the United States arming and funding terrorists. But there is an extensive global policy of rewarding and appeasing Muslims.

Opponents of Israel often complain that they are being "silenced" in some intangible ways, but the United States government has certainly never criminalized criticism of Israel, however it continues to conduct discussions with the OIC, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, on ways to suppress and censor criticism of Islam. Nor has the Secretary of State suggested that critics of Israel should be subject to "peer pressure and shaming", which she has for critics of Islam.

American soldiers have been dying incessantly to protect Muslims for decades now. They died in Somalia to protect aid to Somali Muslims. They died in the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait and protect the Muslim holy sites of Mecca and Medina from Saddam Hussein. They died over Yugoslavia to build a state for the Muslim terrorists of the KLA. Thousands of American soldiers have died to protect Muslims from other Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the last year alone, the United States has helped overthrow secular governments to make way for Muslim ones. When the Libyan ruler refused to resign, Obama sent in NATO jets to bomb his forces into submission so that the Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group could take power.

While the United States abandoned Iranian students protesting against an Islamist regime, it overthrew governments in Egypt and Tunisia to make way for Islamist takeovers. The Saudis got to use tanks in Bahrain, but Gaddafi was hunted down and killed for a genocide that never happened.

What do you call all that but a Muslim Firster foreign policy?

In The Audacity of Hope, a book title taken from a sermon of his vilely Anti-Semitic former Black Muslim mentor, Obama wrote, "I will stand with the Muslims." And he has done it.

Obama has stood with the Muslims in Cote d'Ivorie, where armed force was used to illegally seat a Muslim ruler against the ruling of the country's supreme court. He has stood with the Muslims in Kenya, where his cousin and his Muslim backers forcibly wrote Sharia Law into the Constitution. He has stood with the genocidal Muslims in Indonesia, not the Christian Papuans whose land is occupied and whose representatives are persecuted.

He has stood with Muslims against Denmark and its freedom of speech. He has stood with Muslims against France. He has stood with Muslims against Israel. If slapping down traditional allies on behalf of Muslims is not a Muslim Firster foreign policy, then what is?

The American flag may be burned, the Koran may not. Cartoons depicting Jews as monsters can run, cartoons depicting Mohammed cannot. Six year olds must be strip searched in airports, but the people who actually are a flight risk cannot be singled out in any way.

In Cairo, at Al Azhar University, the home of Egyptian Islamism, Obama boasted that his administration has gone to court to "punish" those who would refuse to accede to the Hijab's oppression of women. We have two new Muslim diplomatic posts. NASA is no longer able to actually reach space, its new chief mission is outreach to the Muslim world. While America is piggybacking on the Russian space program, NASA has gotten a Muslim chief scientist in order to better focus on its core mission of pandering to Islam.

If any other group had received this level of favoritism, this degree of pandering at the expense of everyone else, the outrage would have been boundless. But we dare not say anything. Those who offend Muslims are held responsible for the murder of American soldiers by Muslims. In this perverse moral landscape, to speak out against the bigotry and hate preached by the Koran is to be responsible for the atrocities that the bigots will commit in outrage that anyone has spoken ill of their genocidal text.

Meanwhile the Muslim Firsters keep chanting Israel Firster at anyone who doesn't agree that Israel is the worst country on the planet. Anything that gets in the way of the Muslim Firster foreign policy program is denounced in the most ruthlessly bigoted language possible, and when those who use it are called on it, they claim that there is a Jewish conspiracy to silence them.

This kind of obnoxious behavior has become routine. The consensus among Muslim Firsters is that Charles Freeman was a highly qualified candidate to head the National Intelligence Council, despite working at a front group for Saudi Arabia. In an interview, Freeman said that, "It is irresponsible not to question Israeli policy and to decide what is best for the American people.” But no one is allowed to question Saudi policy or decide if the Saudi Muslim lobby and its countless affiliates should be deciding what is best for the American people.

Israeli policy is questioned non-stop. Hardly a week goes by without editorials in every newspaper complaining that Netanyahu hasn't spent enough time at the negotiating table with one half of an unelected Palestinian Authority government. When a bunch of lunatics held protests outside a girls school in a town in Israel that hardly anyone in the media had ever heard of before, there were a thousand news stories. When Saudi Arabia beheaded a woman for witchcraft, the story was quickly buried, along with her body. Unlike the Israeli school story, Hillary Clinton did not feel the need to comment on it. Not that the Saudis would listen. Masters don't pay attention to slaves.

The thirty-five Christians arrested in Saudi Arabia at a prayer service and then beaten and subjected to body cavity searches last month, are not an item for our foreign policy agenda. No matter how many American soldiers died, how many more were wounded and how many have gone on suffering from undiagonsed ailments in order to keep the House of Saud safe from Saddam. The thousands of Americans who died on September 11 because an opponent of the Saudi regime saw the presence of American forces in the holy land of Islam as an opportunity to declare a holy war against the United States are all part of the price we pay for the Muslim Firster agenda.

Carter helped replace a secular government in Iran with an Islamist terror state. The United States has been protecting the Gulf oil clans for most of the 20th century despite the domestic brutality of their slave states and the covert war they have been conducting against us. Now Obama has turned half of North Africa into an Islamist paradise. And the Muslim Firsters still aren't happy.

They want Israel and they want Europe on a platter. They want to eliminate freedom of speech and silence anyone who speaks out about the countless dead and the destruction of free nations that will follow if they get their way.

After decades of the Muslim Firster agenda, we are under siege. There is hardly a nation in the free world that isn't scrambling to study Israeli anti-terrorism techniques, because they are all becoming Israel. France has its own Intifada. Oslo is dangerous enough that the American embassy has to put out an advisory. London is swiftly becoming Londonistan. The end of the last states that might have been described as Muslim and secular is swiftly approaching. And still the Muslim Firsters haven't had enough, but maybe it's time that the rest of us have had enough of them.

If they want to condemn a Pro-Israel bias in American foreign policy, then let's take a long honest look at whom American foreign policy really helps and which group it puts first.

American Tyrants

2012-01-30T23:20:00.004-05:00

When Elizabeth Warren went on MSNBC to deny that she was a member of the 1 percent despite her nearly 15 million dollar net worth, the denial had a cultural element to it. Despite being a millionaire, Warren did not see herself as "wealthy".

The current debate over the 1 percent and the 99 percent is notable mainly for the shifting boundaries that are not based on economics, but on identity. For all its 'Power to the People' antics American liberalism is not a movement of struggling people, there is a reason why the word limousine so often comes before liberal. Its roots lie in an upper class New England strata that relentlessly fought against Southern Baptists and working class Catholic immigrants. Those roots define modern day liberals much more so than the Jacksonian populism that they occasionally try to imitate.

The American liberal is not a populist, he is still a New England preacher, but without a religion to preach. He has a great faith in the virtues of an ordered moral society, even if that ordered moral society would have been completely incomprehensible and unacceptable to his forebears. It is a society based on the virtues of tolerance and the rule of the enlightened.

The inflow of the European left has brought in a strain of power to the people populism, but that has not made the American liberal take seriously the notion that the people whose rights he defends are his intellectual or social equals, no more than the 19th century New York Republicans patting African-Americans on the head while stomping on the Irish viewed either group as equals.

American liberalism has traveled a slightly altered road to get to the same place. But its place is still at the top and everyone else's place is still at the bottom. Its persistent denial of this basic truth leads to the perennial absurdity of millionaires like Elizabeth Warren playing class warrior when the only class they represent is the class of people who work for the government.

The oligarchy which is busy bleeding the country dry does not represent any group of working people anywhere in the country. Not Protestant or Catholic, black or white, or of any other creed or identity. Like every ideology incarnated in a system, it represents its own interests. The Democratic Party is the government party. It exists to create jobs in government, to dispense government subsidies and to expand the power and scope of its organization. It is not fundamentally any different than Putin's United Russia or Israel's Kadima or similar political creatures around the world.

The strange intermarriage of New England moralists, New York merchants and European radicals eventually led to a system of pushing immigrants into government service, mandating tolerance and running every aspect of human life through Washington D.C. It took a while to get there, but the system is a decade or two away from being complete. When it is complete then all our lives will be run in every possible way by the Elizabeth Warrens who will smile condescendingly at us, nudge us in the direction we are supposed to go, and when we don't go there, then the fines and the tasers come out.

No matter how far back you go, the roots of American liberalism lie in a fear of the people, a distrust of the great unwashed. American liberals have championed voting rights, so long as they were confident that those voting were their inferiors and could be herded into voting the right way. They have always distrusted the instincts of the public, no matter how much pious ink they spilled fighting on their behalf.

That view of man's sinful nature still informs their deepest thinkers, and the sins are still the same, the failure of fellowship, the refusal to consider the welfare of others and march in lockstep to create that ideal society. The New Jerusalem of universal brotherhood. Those ideas have been dressed up in modern clothing, transmitted as denunciations of racism and bigotry, immigration advocacy and hate crime laws, but underneath is the same notion that a society of good will to all can be forced through rigorous regimentation by the truly enlightened.

The populism of the American liberal is a cynical dumbshow where representatives of the oppressed gather in conclaves to demand more oppression by their liberal oppressors. This spectacle is at the heart of a political oligarchy, which like every oligarchy is built on government subsidies and special access to power for the privileged. And like all oligarchies it must disguise its nature by playing the protector of the people. Unlike them it must also disguise its true nature from itself.

The convergence of the ideal society and the government society was inevitable from the start. It took a while to overcome the technological and cultural barriers to running an entire country from a central point. Those barriers have never been truly overcome, but the technocratic mirage makes it seem as if they have been. And the ongoing faith in a perfectible society run by the saints makes it seem as if it must be.

The American liberal would still like to play at being humble, a 99 percenter fighting against the chimera of a 1 percent oligarchy. But the entire 99 percent theme is that the 1 percent isn't paying enough taxes. And whom do those taxes go to but to the administration and employment of the professional class warrior millionaires.

It is the very Everest of hypocrisy for the members of the oligarchy to be bemoaning all the extra tax money that could be used to pay their six figure salaries, while passing off their naked greed as a crusade on behalf of the oppressed.

There is nothing of working class advocacy in a government party looking to shovel more tax revenues into the insatiable gaping maw of its bureaucratic machinery. The idea that those monies will be used to help the downtrodden is a delusion that a brief glimpse at how much money went to connected companies and to the expansion of the government bureaucracy should easily cure. This isn't any 99 percent at work here. It's the 9 percent against the 63 percent.

Warren thinks of herself as not wealthy because despite her millions, she is engaged in the pious practice of public service. However big her financial resources may be, they are part of the collective whole of the oligarchy and in a different category altogether from the wealth that is earned or inherited.

To the American liberal, riches are not a matter of economics, but of identity. Wealth is a moral entity, not an economic one. What distinguishes pious millionaires like Warren from the heathens who make their money the old fashioned way is that the former achieve it through the moral pursuit of the public good, which is all the more pious for taking them to a Harvard professorship or a job in government, while the latter achieve it through economic transactions in the private sector. The former is a form of public service, the latter is public exploitation.

But a closer look at the bones and carcass of this system turns those definitions on their head. It is the Warrens who are the exploiters, consuming the wealth of a nation and spawning more committees, regulations and regulatory committees to keep on feeding off the wealth. What they give to us in exchange for what they take is not a service, it is oppression masquerading as feudal protectionism.

The American liberal is eager to protect us from powerful interests, but who will protect us from his protection, and who will turn off that protection and the money it costs us to pay for it, and worse still the freedoms that are consumed in order that we may be properly protected from ourselves.

No tyrant looks in a mirror and sees an oppressor. Tyrants are always protectors of the people. And our own American Tyrants are equally certain that they are the protectors of a people who would otherwise run off cliffs, throw lawn darts at each other, tear the tags off mattresses, make racist jokes, open pill bottles too easily, have inappropriate opinions and reinforce the oppressive heteronormative patriarchy which they have thoughtfully replaced with a vast echoing bureaucratic state in which everyone is free to be different in the same way.

The American liberal does not like the people very much. Most disguise it a bit better than Elizabeth Warren but that discomfort is always there. And the discomfort comes with a distrust. They don't like us and they don't trust the sort of shenanigans we might get up to when they aren't looking. Instead they are always looking, always nudging, always telling us what to think and how to live and otherwise protecting us from ourselves.

The tyrannical impulses were always there in American liberalism and like water on lilies, power brought them forth. Now we live under a system which strangles us to protect us from ever getting rid of it. The men and women strangling us smile awkwardly and tell us that it is for our own good. This tyranny for our own good requires that they toss aside our laws and replace them with their own. It requires that they spend us into bankruptcy, with much of the proceeds going to them, but in the name of a higher cause. And it demands that we praise them and if we won't do that, then it demands that we shut up and stop broadcasting our dissatisfaction. There is no place in their ideal national community for people like us.

Weaponizing the Passenger Plane

2012-01-29T23:36:00.000-05:00

On September 11 the passenger jet as a weapon came crashing into the consciousness of the citizens of the country which had made international air travel viable. Muslim terrorists had viewed planes in terms of the passengers and hijacked planes to take people hostage. But at the beginning of the millennium it was no longer the people that mattered, only the use of the plane as a makeshift missile aimed at the institutions and infrastructure of the free world.

This change of tactics was a game changer because it meant the potential casualties of airplane hijackings were no longer limited to the passengers in the air who were now flying around in ICBM's with much less explosive payload, but enough to take down skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. Every passenger was no longer just a risk to other passengers, but a risk to everyone in the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower or any other clumping of people in target areas that could be hit.

Jet engine aircraft had passed from military to civilian applications, but the military applications of high speed transportation now returned to dominate the civilian tourism and travel industry that had sprung up and become widely available at the cost of jet travel went down.

The most obvious military application of high speed travel is troop transportation and the Muslim world had been using the jet plane for transporting millions of settlers to Western countries. To most citizens of the free world, the military applications of this wave of settlement were not obvious. They would not become obvious until the settlers had given birth to second and third generations which became demographic and domestic terrorist threats. And even then it would remain mostly undiscussed.

With the settlement project going full swing, transforming the vehicles of Muslim demographic conquest into flying missiles was dangerous, but the use of domestic flights sidelined much of the security and the discussions that would have followed had the 9/11 hijackers hijacked flights from outside the country. The use of domestic flights by Muslim terrorists who had spent extensive time in America and Europe revealed just how comfortable the Jihad had become operating on infidel soil.

Muslim enclaves in America and Europe made it easier for terrorists entering the United States to operate and for the rise of native born Muslim terrorists. At a time when Bin Laden's role had declined, the man who eclipsed him briefly even before his death and played a role in a series of attacks against the United States was Anwar Al-Awlaki, born in New Mexico, whose termination by drone is still agonized over in some liberal and libertarian circles.

September 11 went beyond previous airline hijackings which had managed to make air travel more dangerous, but not permanently so. Those hijackings had temporarily hijacked the infrastructure of air travel, but the weaponization of passenger aircraft did so permanently. The damage extended beyond international air travel and border security, it reached deep into the infrastructure of domestic air travel which Americans had come to rely on to transverse a large nation with a handicapped rail system.

The rise of Muslim populations in the West made Islamic terrorism into a domestic problem in societies under a legal and cultural mandate to eliminate any negative or discriminatory attitudes toward minorities. That attitude made profiling too dangerous a topic to discuss openly, just as the specific sources of terrorism could not be discussed except in terms of American foreign policy. The only way for those societies to cope was with broad range laws and tactics that applied to everyone.

Nanny state nations had been drifting into police states through the inevitable logic of centralized bureaucracy and urban malaise. There was a growing number of regulations that had to be enforced and immigration, economic uncertainty and industrial decline created crime problems that made entire portions of world capitols uninhabitable without increasingly systematic police tactics.

The creeping militarization and federalization of American law enforcement had kept pace with the rise of crime syndicates, rapid transportation, deadlier weapons and regulatory overreach. As civil liberties monitoring increased, the laws became broader and law enforcement discretion vanished. Combined with doses of sociology and psychology, law enforcement no longer enforced laws, it enforced attitudes. Statistical analysis allowed for broad targeting of neighborhoods and cities with crackdowns meant to change the attitudes of residents on quality of life offenses.

While this was considered a triumph for conservative politicians, it meant that law enforcement had become the billy club of the nanny state. Laws mattered less than nudging, fining and terrorizing the residents into maintaining the right attitude toward their neighborhood and their city. Systematic procedures developed by experts to be carried out by anyone with the right training were the future of law enforcement. The police officer with instincts and a feel for the neighborhood was on the way out. The future was the TSA.

That this process had worked well enough in urban areas said less about its effectiveness and more about the dysfunctional cities created by half a century of liberal regulationism. In the wake of the programs the cities had not become any better, the process of managing their residents however had vastly improved. But all the management really did was keep the lid on while the subsidies were poured in. And the most vital element was still the old fashioned cop who understood the area, while his captain was hard at work meeting with community leaders.

The TSA emerged out of this environment as another reflexive denial of the problem and applied the same solution. Broad range security procedures that applied to everyone, but this time they were overseen by people who would not have been accepted to work in any police force in the country. This was the age of the mall cop set up as the first line of national defense with the power to steal, grope and single out passengers for the most trivial of reasons. The one thing that the mall cops of the TSA were not allowed to do was profile terrorists.

Strip searching children was fine, alienating Muslims was not. Children after all were not likely to become offended and blow up buildings. Muslims were and the entire purpose of the TSA was to apply broad range security procedures that did not single out or offend Muslims.

Like most mall cops, the real purpose of the TSA was to provide the perception of security, rather than the reality. The TSA was never really meant to stop an actual terrorist and it never has. All it could hope to do was discourage them. Its real goals however were to restore confidence in air travel and reshape public attitudes to make flyers easier to manage.

The latter seems to miss the point of the crisis, but it actually is the point. Leaders who don't know how to cope with a crisis respond by limiting the freedom of action of those under them. Generals, CEO's or directors all follow the same pattern of ensuring compliance in subordinates to make the system more manageable and remove as many possible sources of chaos from the system.

Islamic terrorism has shut down the decision making process of the modern Western state by attacking their core assumptions about the future being a place of open borders, multicultural populations and international consensus. Instead rapid air travel is a threat, multicultural cities are becoming No Go Zones and the future is heading toward a clash of civilizations.

The assumptions on which they built their vision of the future are crumbling under them creating the kind of situation where good leaders reevaluate and admit their mistakes while bad leaders try to keep pushing forward in the hopes that this is only a temporary problem. A passing phase that can be resolved by reaching out to the Muslim world, encouraging their reforms and stabilizing their conflicts. Any remaining tensions would be dealt with the time honored methods of liberals, fighting discrimination and promoting positive role models, while covering up the mess by giving law enforcement broad powers over everyone.

A single major successful terrorist attack that gets by the TSA will result in major cosmetic changes for the agency, but no substantial ones. And the lack of meaningful debate over the nature of the problem that it exists to solve means that we are stuck in a debate between broad range security measures and hard line libertarians, both of whom deny that there even is a war on terror. The one thing to come out of a debate between Eric Holder and Ron Paul is that neither believes that Islamic terrorism is a problem, which means that neither of them has anything to say about a solution.

The war against us has been made possible by a leadership that is unable to identify the problem, let alone formulate a meaningful response to it. The weaponization of the passenger plane represented one aspect of how the enemy undermined and exploited our assumptions. Everything that has happened since then has been more of the same.

The jet plane brought the world closer within reach, without considering the consequences of what that growing proximity would mean.The airline hijackings, mass migration and deployment of hijacked aircraft to cause mass destruction all shifted the balance of power over global transportation away from the builder societies of the free world and toward the destroyer societies of the Muslim world.

Free Market Socialism

2012-01-28T22:19:00.000-05:00

Before Obama got around to digging up his copy of last year's State of the Union address, crossing out a few lines, adding something about Iraq and Bin Laden, before heading out for another round of golf, David Brooks wrote a New York Times column urging Obama not to forget to mention the importance of promoting education for a free market economy. He titled it, Free-Market Socialism.

Now the idea that Obama or any Democratic politician running for the presidency would forget to mention what has become the chief talking point of their political class on jobs and globalization is about as likely as Bill Clinton taking a vow of chastity. When the working class timorously asks where the jobs are, that are always told the jobs are mostly gone and the only way they will ever come back is if they educate themselves for the better jobs that are out there somewhere.

Obama has added the refrain has added to it a warning that if we don't spend more money on education that China will out-compete us. Given that China's biggest asset is cheap labor and our assets are factories that are too expensive to run, natural resources we can't touch and a massive over-educated and over-entitled class that was promised jobs and instead got student loans, it's hard to see how more of the same will fix the problem.

If our chief competitors in the economic arena were Russia, Japan or Sweden, pushing college degrees might make more sense. Or at least engineering degrees, but we're not losing a competition for college jobs, we're losing a competition for industries. American manufacturing hasn't gone down the tubes because we don't have enough college grads, it's gone down the tubes because it became too expensive and too difficult to be worth the effort.

New York, Minnesota and North Dakota have some of the highest degree rates in the country. New York has 8 percent unemployment. North Dakota has 3 percent unemployment. Because as it turns out degrees do not magically create jobs. They can only fit existing jobs. New York has a surplus of graduates. North Dakota seems to have just about enough though I suspect a sizable amount of that 3 percent are degree holders too.

To prop up his thesis, Brooks reaches for an Atlantic article that studies the case of a South Carolina woman who works on an assembly line, who had to drop out of school due to a pregnancy and is raising two children as a single mother making it difficult for her to continue her education. Instead she makes 13 dollars an hour in a unskilled job.

Brooks expects us to see this as a tragedy when quite a few college graduates would kill for a 13 dollar an hour job. The woman had planned to go to a four year college to become an animal control officer. The website for one South Carolina county advertises an animal control officer position at 15 dollars and 28 cents an hour.

Would Brooks' victim really be better off if she had gone into debt for a four year college program only to earn less than 2.50 more an hour? And would anyone really be better off with another government employee on the payroll instead of a productive worker?

The ability to get a decent paying work in the manufacturing sector is what really built a prosperous middle class in the United States. The decline of that middle class has been proportional to the growth industry in bureaucratic activists. Take the factory that is the topic of piece. Why is it located in South Carolina? Among other things, South Carolina is a right to work state and a business friendly state. Moving to South Carolina is a patriotic alternative to moving to China.

Rather than ask why there's a factory in South Carolina that's operating close to the economic redline as a family owned business competing with international conglomerates, the Atlantic and Brooks wonder how the workers can be moved into better paying jobs. As it turns out they can't be because there is no money for it. And there's no money for it because the cost of manufacturing is too high.

For decades the Democrats have offered the same technocratic prescription, more education for the high paying technology jobs of tomorrow. Never mind that our technology revolution was the brainchild of college dropouts and outsourced to Chinese factories. The high tech jobs of tomorrow are still in Shanghai and technology has made outsourcing much easier than ever. The technology revolutions of tomorrow will only do the same thing. Americans can take the lead in innovation, but unless those innovations are translated into viable manufacturing jobs than all the brilliant ideas coming out of Harvard and Yale grads will still end up being assembled in Chinese factory towns.

When Democratic presidents went around touting the college mantra did they seriously believe that we could replace every lost job with a college job without further raising the costs to employees and employers resulting in a continuing diminution of purchasing power? And did they really believe that those jobs wouldn't be able to be outsourced either? If Clinton could have feigned naivete back in the nineties, today when radiology, records and programming jobs are being organically outsourced at the establishment level it's more ridiculous than ever for Obama to make the same old college pitch.

We already have David Brook's "Free Market Socialism" which has done a fantastic job of attracting unskilled workers who take jobs at lower rates than American workers do. All those policies have done is attract illegal aliens who want the benefits and are willing to work at illegal per hour wages and without the rules and regulations. They haven't empowered Americans to work, all they have done is expanded the underclass by undermining working class jobs.

The higher education boondoggle has done an excellent job of shifting jobs from the private sector into the public sector through government or government subsidized jobs. The shift is as much cultural as it is economic, its mainspring is the perception that ordinary jobs are worthless and the truly meaningful jobs are their kinds of jobs. The culture extends to the kind of people that they seek to create. Out with the working middle class, in with the college graduate who has spent an extra four years being programmed by the more sophisticated model of their indoctrination machine and who will think more like them and live more like them, who will share their values and politics.

Mass education also devalues the actual education being received. Today's college students know less than yesterday's high school graduates. Today's high school graduates know less than a middle schooler from 50 years ago. And there is no way around that. Tossing everyone into the same system and expecting the same results leads to a lower quality system. The more education is universalized, the more it is simplified.

Making matters worse is technocratic standardization which insists that the only reason some students fail is inadequate teaching or funding, which leads to more money being tossed into the shredder and more national standards that expect teachers to accomplish the impossible. Either the results have to be faked or the standards have to be lowered. Usually a combination of both which leads to a nation where everyone has a degree and no one knows anything.

Russia, which still leads the world in degrees, mastered this version of universal education in the Soviet period, pumping out degrees for everyone, while still lagging behind the rest of the world in every area that mattered. Like so many other collective efforts, its mass production and central programming did not lead to success, it led to worthless results and purely statistical achievements.

Like the Soviet Union we can push to be the nation with the most degrees dispensed, which will be a costly statistical achievement because our educational system costs a good deal more than the Soviet one did. The USSR could afford to process students like cattle, but trying to duplicate this achievement with a college education that often costs as much as a house, will lead to a huge burden on the taxpayers and on the students.

Obama's response to this economic reality was equally predictable. Faced with high costs, socialists demand that the producers lower their prices. Obama demanded that universities bring tuition down, which if he is really serious about it they will do. At a price. The cost of higher education may be inflated, but it's not going to be reduced by cutting the non-essentials, it's going to be reduced by cutting the essentials, which means an education that will be increasingly worthless as the mass production model is used to drive costs down.

In the State of the Union, Obama demanded that all states compel students to finish high school. And after that why not make higher education into a mandatory mandate as well? If everyone can be forced to buy health care, then the same economics can be applied to forcing everyone to buy a higher education as well. Sallie Mae will get more customers and colleges will get reluctant students that they can quickly dispense with at low cost and high profit. Call it ObamaEducation.

Will any of this help us beat China? About as well as the Soviet Union beat us with its degree mills. Our problems are not that we don't have enough education options, it's that we have a liberal elite with a disdain for traditional jobs and a conservative elite with a disdain for protecting American jobs. Combine the two elites together and you get the Free Market Socialism that Brooks is calling for. But there's no need to call for it, it's already here.

Between the socialists and the free traders, we're bleeding jobs and industries, we are overwhelmed by immigrants and the cost of subsidizing a post-American society on a post-American economy. And no amount of degrees is going to fix that as long as we have a surplus of ideologues talking about jobs, without considering the real world consequences of their policies.

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.