Sultan Knish

The Obama-Media War

2013-05-20T23:32:00.000-04:00

Revolutions are rarely undone from the outside. Mostly they come apart from the inside as the forty thieves descend into petty squabbling over the loot.

The loot comes in different forms, but at its core it is always power. It may be the power to kill or to steal. It may be the power to claim a nice piece of real estate or to send a million people off to their deaths. The scale of it will occupy historians and shock the people of the future who leaf through the history books and walk through the silent museums, but it is all of one piece. The purpose of power, as a fellow in a little book by George Orwell once said, is power.

The quarrel between Obama and the Media is largely a lovers' quarrel, but the love is only there on one side. The media made Obama what he is. But what he is, among many other things, is a control freak spawned by a political ideology that distrusts everyone and consolidates power at all cost.

The media loved Obama, but it discovered early on that he did not love it back. Instead of basking in the adoration of the Candy Crowleys and the Anderson Coopers and the massive corporate machines behind them, the love child of every liberal fantasy shut them out, rigidly controlled their access and ruthlessly punished unauthorized conversations with the press.

The media had made Obama into a tin god, but were constantly suspected of heresy. Instead of being rewarded for their loyalty, they were kept at arm's length.

Obama Inc. knew that their biggest asset was the narrative. A close study of Obama's qualifications or accomplishments would have given no conceivable reason for voting for him. The only thing he brought to the table was race and even in this he was less qualified than most of the black men who had run for president.

The narrative was the dearest treasure of Obama Inc. It was the one thing that its cronies protected. The economy could tank, wars could be lost and an asteroid could smack into the Pacific Ocean and none of it mattered nearly as much as the golden narrative. They didn't trust anyone with it including the media.

The media these days doesn't have much. Its numbers are bad in every medium from the tube to the inky pages of newsprint to the crackling AM radio waves. It isn't very profitable. Often it's a dead weight. But it wields a great deal of institutional power. The New York Times and CNN may both be dogs when it comes to the balance sheets, but owning either one gives you an impressive amount of heft in the national dialogue; though not as much as working for one of them does.

Power is all that the media has. Its power is projected in a fairly narrow circle. Fewer people are reading, watching and listening to it, so its circle becomes more incestuous. Everyone has learned to act like a member of the D.C. press corps, interpreting events through the lens of old West Wing episodes. The resulting noise reaches fewer people, but helps form the shaky consensus on which the institutional power of the media stands.

In its dying hour, the media used that power to ensure the double coronation of a corrupt Chicago politician with a facility for mimicking speech patterns. And that politician rewarded it by trying to bypass it and set up his own media.

Obama's vision of the proper place of the media isn't just at his feet, but under his control. Instead of dealing with the media, he has tried to cut it out of the loop by putting a larger emphasis on social media and developing narratives through think-tanks and media influencing groups. It was a power struggle that the media was initially baffled by. It had held out an ice cream cone to the little boy, only to have the little boy kick it in the shin, grab the ice cream cone and run away.

For years the media had groused about a lack of transparency, the unprecedented prosecution of whistleblowers and the hostile relationship between Obama Inc's minions and many reporters. The grousing was usually understated. It could be mentioned offhand, but not too loudly. When Bob Woodward made the mistake of speaking his mind, he was swiftly punished for it by the avatars of the post-media media, while the old media sat silently and watched the show.

But then Obama pushed its limits by invading the sanctum of the Associated Press. It was one thing when the administration was targeting whistleblowers, but quite another when the media's power became part of the collateral damage.

The week of scandals was the media reminding Obama that his smooth ride had been provided by them and that the ride could get very bumpy if his media ponies decide to take the back road to Benghazigate or drop by the IRS headquarters. It's a bluff, of course. The day may come when the media takes Obama out back and disposes of him so that the new messiah, perhaps in a pantsuit, can ascend the old Camelot throne, but that day isn't here yet.

Scandal week was a game of chicken between Obama and the media to see who would blink first. Would Obama decide to respect the institutional power of the media or would be consider pushing forward until the media blinked. A brief history of Obama Inc. suggests that he will keep pushing on. Obama backs down from Muslim terrorists and Russian government thugs, but not from Americans.

Like most cowards, Obama only attacks those he knows won't fight back. And the only people who won't fight back are either helpless or bound by their politics not to resist the liberal messiah.

Obama knows that the media does not dare harm a hair on the head of the liberal agenda. And he made certain to appoint a Vice President whom no one in their right mind would want to see take over. Until 2016, it's Hussein or the highway. The media has shown that it can hamstring him even when the coverage is only mild. It is quite capable of turning up the temperature to boiling, though not without a civil war with Media Matters, Think Progress and a chunk of the liberal new media.

The media is a prisoner of its own ideology. It can't hit Obama too hard... yet. Not until they're making the case that Hillary will do a better job of governing than this inexperienced tyro did. Having abandoned any professional integrity years ago, it would be too late for most of the media to reclaim it now. Even in the name of its own institutional power.

This is the process by which leftists have collaborated in their own purges. It is why wealthy leftists financed revolutions that would rob them. The media's wealth is in its institutional power and it is being forced to accede to the redistribution of that influence.

Obama is not interested in an independent media, even if it is biased his own way. Leftists are great centralizers. They seize power by consolidating it under their control. The Democratic Party is struggling as Obama's OFA Super PAC loots their fundraising operations. Why does Obama need a Super PAC? Because it gives him another source of personal power while diminishing the power of established institutions. And the news media is just one more established institution for the children of the counterculture to beat to death with its own microphones.

The media is trying to make a statement about boundaries, but it lacks commitment. Even as it halfheartedly, though for the first time, covers actual misconduct by Obama Inc. with that smidgen of outrage which usually only creeps into its own when reporting on the dreaded (R's), it undermines its own show of force by discussing how quickly Obama will be able to get over the hump and back to his agenda. The media's blackmail of the man listening to its phone calls and scanning through its emails lacks conviction.

Obama needs the media, but the media needs him more. It doesn't need him for practical reasons, but for emotional reasons. It needs to believe that its corrupt institutional power has been put at the service of a higher purpose and a higher calling. It needs to believe this all the more as the ratings drop, the papers go unsold and the radio stations fill up with the voices of conservative talk show hosts. That emotional need makes the media the prisoner of this administration.

On his end, Obama has a practical need for the media, but no emotional need. Interviews, even of the softball media kind, challenge his control. They question him and Obama does not like being questioned. While media figures see themselves as serving a meaningful liberalizing institution, he sees them as carriers of a narrative. A narrative that can just as easily be carried anywhere else.

When Obama looks at the media, he doesn't see Walter Cronkite, he sees a bunch of radios, televisions and newspapers; which these days are little more than footnotes for the internet. There is nothing special about that to him or his cronies. Just mediums that distort his message because he doesn't control them. And so Obama chooses to control every medium he uses.

The Obama media war is good clean fun, but it's also a brief skirmish. Neither side can afford to extend the battle for very long. For the media the scandals will vanish as soon as they hear magic words like "Gun Control" or "Illegal Alien Amnesty". And for Obama, the war will end when one side or the other blinks.

Radicals, Moderates and Islamists

2013-05-19T23:41:00.000-04:00

The radical-moderate continuum that has defined the dialogue on Islam in the War on Terror is not an authentic perspective, it is an observer perspective.

To the Western observer, a suicide bomber is radical, a Muslim Imam willing to perform gay weddings is moderate and the Muslim Brotherhood leader who supports some acts of terror, but not others, is moderately radical or radically moderate.

These descriptions tell us nothing about Islam or about what Muslims believe, but do tell us a great deal about its observers and what they believe. They turn Islam into inkblots that reveal more about the interpreter than the splotch of ink being interpreted.

Muslims are not radical or moderate. The radical-moderate continuum is how liberal countries rate individuals and countries to decide how well they will harmonize with the national and international consensus. Even if that consensus only exists in their own mind. The label of moderate does not mean a rejection of violence. Otherwise it could hardly be applied to the Muslim Brotherhood. What it means is a willingness to collaborate with Western governments and progressive organizations.

The radical-moderate labels are useful for liberals, but useless for anyone who wants to asses reality. It is tied into a number of false notions that are necessary for maintaining the status quo of liberal democracies. Notions such as the equal moral stature and interchangeability of all religions and peoples are key to running a liberal democracy, but they make it impossible to have a rational conservation about Islam.

In liberal democracies, no one really discusses Islam as a religion. That discussion is preemptively aborted by the defense of the general category of religion. To criticize Islam is to challenge the category of protection for all religions, much as to attack Communism during the Cold War was to attack the First Amendment.

The general category makes it necessary to subdivide the specific religion or ideology into a moderate majority and a tiny minority of extremists. This categorization tells us nothing about Islam and everything about the political and intellectual classes that refuse to rationally discuss it.

Islam is neither moderate nor extreme. It simply is. Extremism and moderate are an observer perspective. That does not mean that Islam is all one thing, an impermeable block. But the one thing that it is not, is liberal.

Liberal Islam is secular Islam, in the same way that liberal Christianity and liberal Judaism are both secularized in their subservience to liberal values. There are indeed secular Muslims out there, but they are a tiny minority of secularists even in the secular West. Their influence is minimal. And it likely would be minimal even if the Saudis weren't spending fortunes in oil money to control the expressions of Islam in the West.

Even these secular Muslims are not necessarily non-violent. What they lack is the broader worldview of Islamic nationalism, that some label Islamism. They will support Arab Nationalist terrorism, which defines peoples by nation, rather than the Islamic Nationalism, which defines them by religion.

Islamic nationalism is not a religion. Nor is it a separate branch of Islam. It is influenced by movements within Islam, but those movements are largely reformist efforts aimed at returning to a more uncompromised Islam. And it is not limited to these movements. The majority of Muslims identify with Islamic nationalism to some degree.

Islamism is simply the political implementation of Islam which is already political. Islamism does not politicize an apolitical religion, it applies a political religion to politics. And most Muslims support that for the simple reason that they are Muslims and Islam is their religion. They may quibble over some of the details and they may be fooled by some smooth talk, but the same may be said of many supporters of National Socialism and Bolshevism. What matters is not whether every single German who thought Hitler had some good ideas supported the concentration camps or whether every single Communist supported the Gulags. Certainly not all did. What matters is that they supported the systems and leaders that made those things possible even when the warning signs were there.

No Islamist movement represents a complete break with Islam. Not even a partial break. The greatest stressors that Islamic terrorist groups impose on their religious codes is the treatment of other Muslims as infidels. And that alone is a telling statement about the tolerance for interfaith violence in their religion. It isn't war that stresses Islamic codes, it's internecine warfare.

Western observers may label those who identify with Al Qaeda as extremists and those who identify with the Muslim Brotherhood as moderates, but these are cosmetic differences. Islamist organizations are not a separate religion. They are the practical implementation of the religion. If we are to have a truer continuum, it would run from secular to religious, rather than moderate to extremist.

What makes Islamists dangerous are not their means, such as flying planes into skyscrapers, but their ends, which involve a global theocracy that reduces non-Muslims to enemies and slaves. Whether this end is accomplished through bombs or elections makes little difference. Hitler and Stalin would be no different whether they won elections or seized power by force. Not so long as their ends involved war, mass slavery and genocide.

The trouble with Islamic nationalism is Islam. There is no way of getting around that. Terrorism is an aspect of the problem. But the problem is a violent system that views the lives of non-Muslims and dissenting Muslims as worthless.

When Muslim terrorists set off bombs in Boston, Mumbai, Jerusalem or anywhere else, what they are really communicating is not some passionate grievance, but an ideology that has no regard for the lives of non-Muslims. That same message is communicated by the treatment of Western prisoners in Dubai or the treatment of Western hostages in Nigeria. It is a message rooted in the xenophobia of the Koran and it is a warning of the system that these acts of oppression and terror are intended to build.

The extent to which most Muslims are committed to the final ends of Islamism, including a total war with the rest of the world and its subjugation under Islamic law, may vary, but there is no denying the fact that in open elections, Islamists have won again and again. The Arab Spring conclusively demonstrated that the Islamist agenda is more compelling than any other. Indeed it is hard to find any political movements in ascendency in the Muslim world today except Islamist ones.

The tiny minority of extremists are not the Islamists who have dominated the Arab Spring as thoroughly as they have dominated the Islamic institutions of the West, it is the secularists who still cling to forms of solidarity based on national identity or economic class.

If their moderate Islam, which will have co-ed prayers in mosques, female prayer leaders and gay Imams is the solution, then there is no hope for a solution because it has no trajectory. The forces that forged a liberalized Christianity and Judaism in Europe are in decline. And they could hardly impose their worldview on a religion whose centers of power are out of their reach.

Liberal Islam is not in ascendency anywhere. In much of the world, including the Muslim world and totalitarian nations such as Russia and China, the continuum is not that of the radicals and the moderates, but the government clerics who are not moderate, but lack all conviction, and the Islamists who want to overthrow them.

Government clerics are rarely moderate. They often support terrorism, so long as it is aimed at other nations. The moderate cleric in Egypt supports war with Israel, but not domestic theocracy. The moderate cleric in Russia supports terrorism against New York, but not Moscow. The moderate cleric in Saudi Arabia supports war with Syria but not assassinations at home. There are exceptions, but these exceptions, when they are sincere, are the tiny minority.

Everywhere Islam is weaponized to be used against someone else, just as Carter once believed that he could use the Iranians and the Afghans against the Soviet Union. But it is folly to think that the means of religious violence can be directed toward any other ultimate end than religious supremacy.

Islamism is applied Islam. It is not extreme, only illiberal, but then Islam is an illiberal religion. It is a religion built on war and conquest.

The Islamist only reminds Muslims of what their religion stands for. It is not a separate entity from Islam because it is rooted within Islam. Its solutions are Islamic solutions. It may break in some ways with history, but not with theology.

The pragmatic solution of denying this is so to keep Muslims from embracing Islamist solutions to political problems is doomed. Muslims do not define themselves by Western standards of liberalism and extremism. They do not rely on Western thinkers to determine their religion for them. They are outside the consensus of liberal democracies and the best evidence of that is the triumph of Islamists in the political spheres of the Middle East and the West.

Tactics that ignore reality are doomed. We have learned that the hard way in many wars. We are learning it now in Afghanistan and in London, Paris and Boston. We can waste time trying to fit Muslims into our categories or we can understand that they are not part of our categories.

Islamism is not a sect, it is the Islamic consensus. It is the closest thing that the Muslim world has to match the liberal worldview of the West. The Islamist is not radical to his own. He represents the majority view of the Muslim world that power and politics should derive from Islam and that Muslims should assert a collective power based on their common Islamic nationalism,

Islamism won in the Arab Spring. It won the Western Diaspora. The idea that we can detach Islam from its political application by branding its political application extremist has failed. The two are intertwined. We cannot weaken Islamism except by weakening Islam, economically, militarily and demographically.

The End of Competition

2013-05-18T23:00:00.000-04:00

The American Dream does not actually require a red, white and blue flag or a dream. What it requires is a willingness to accept messiness.

Messiness is another word for chaos. And no one likes chaos. Chaos means that in the richest country in the world some people will be illiterate, others will be homeless and some will accidentally set themselves on fire because the fireworks don't come with enough safety warnings.

Those aren't good things. They're not things that governments and the squeaky wheels who make governments what they are think should be tolerated. They're messy.

Messy is all those things that people say someone should do something about, by which they don't mean themselves. What they really mean is that we should be living in a more orderly society. And an orderly society is one where things don't just happen. You have to file eight forms, duck six committees and debate four non-profits to have any chance of getting things done. And even then you probably won't.

Orderly societies have nailed down all the loose ends. There are fewer homeless people, mainly because they are now living in sixty thousand dollar per inmate shelters designed by progressive architects, but there are also fewer errand boys becoming Andrew Carnegie. What is really being lost is social mobility. The ladder up.

Meritocracy requires chaos. An orderly society isn't chaotic, it's stratified. The power has been parceled out to all the people who should have it. And there's only so much to go around. Newness is a threat because new things are unpredictable. They're chaotic. They disrupt the power structure.

The liberal argument is largely an argument for a society consolidated around government in service to progressive ideals. It's a tidy world in which governments and non-profits consume an always increasing share of everything else until there isn't anything else because it's been consolidated. The end result of that process however isn't progressive. It's tribal.

Power naturally consolidates along personal lines, not political lines. A society may begin by consolidating power so that all the non-profits can help the homeless and the people who can't read fireworks instructions, but, in a peculiar phenomenon, the homeless never seem to get helped much and fireworks accidents keep happening.

The phenomenon isn't really peculiar at all. Humanitarian work is a job that exists to eliminate itself. The only way to keep a job dedicated to solving the problem is to perpetuate the problem. Or to redefine the problem on a larger scale. All that is familiar enough from any number of non-profits and government agencies that exist to remind people to care about a problem that they don't care about.

Redefining the problem on a larger scale means more money, more power and more control. Any problem, whether it's homelessness, illiteracy or crime is a social problem and can only be solved by taking a holistic approach to everything. A city, a country and a world become a giant puzzle that can only be solved by manipulating all the pieces into place in the right order. The only way to solve the problems that never get solved is through total control over every human being on earth.

Power can only be consolidated ideologically for so long. Both the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions eventually collapsed into familial profiteering. China's Princes and Russia's KGB clans brought down Communism in both countries and resurrected it as profiteering oligarchies eager to live the good life.

To some measure, Capitalism beat Communism, but more accurately tribalism beat internationalism, powerful men built systems that lock in privileges for their friends and families while tossing out the lefty ideologies that allowed their grandfathers to get close to those privileges. It's an old story and it's how the progressive experiments in the ideological consolidation of power will end here.

Power is personal. As is wealth. A system that consolidates enough power turns tribal as fathers look to pass on their privileges to their children until, like so many social services agencies, the system exists for the sake of the system.

Tribal systems are not meritocracies. They aren't interested in talent, but in a sense of order that derives from the consolidation of power. Their idea of civilization does not lie in their arts or sciences, only in the orderliness of power. Only when chaos assails them, is talent released out into the wild where unpredictable things happen. But the chaotic period passes and the old patterns assert themselves again strangling the wildness and consolidating it.

Despite the proliferation of wild communications technologies, our society is becoming more medieval. We have guilds, a secular clergy and a population too fragmented for nationalism. Republics are giving way to feudalism as people value being cared for more than opportunity. Even the old religious wars are returning with the special forces as our knights, the skyscrapers as our castles and the dole keeping the peasants on the urban voting farm.

Much of the progressive infrastructure exists to eliminate competition. Jobs and higher education are assigned by race, gender, orientation union membership and political affiliation. Starting a business grows harder each year without political connections. Success has less to do with the marketplace, than with the political picture.

The entire "You Didn't Build That" platform is about the end of competition. Policy statements like that lay out the proper place of the individual. Success doesn't come from competition, but from the decisions made by the government. If the decisions are wise, then competition is unnecessary. If they are unwise, then competition is futile.

The merit in meritocracy doesn't come from individual striving tested against the real world, but from the decision making process of political leaders. Merit is redefined, not in terms relevant to the field, but to the bigger political picture. It's not a matter of the best engineer, businessman or architect, but the engineer, businessman or architect whose identity and vision are harmonious with the big picture.

Holistic think global and act local politics of that nature is very orderly, in that it has no room for the individual. It is too concerned with the forest to care about a tree, let alone the lumberjack or the family that needs an affordable home. And the outcome of that mass dehumanization is a politics in which only the people in the inner circle of power are truly human and truly matter.

China and the Soviet Union killed millions for ideas and then finally for personal power. The end of a system that dehumanizes millions for a collective is a system that dehumanizes millions for the few who run it, the few who really matter and the few whose decisions build everything. Once you reduce the worth of a society to the few philosopher-kings, the commissars of correctness and the technocratic czars, then it becomes very easy to dump all the ideas that got them there and fall back on the old notions that some people are better than others.

Progressivism is about the management of chaos through the impersonal means of government authority. Eliminate enough of the chaos and what remains is a stultifying order that is not based on reason, but on power. The more power is consolidated in the name of something, the more institutions are mobilized to achieve its goals and the more every aspect of life is centralized, the less room there is for the wild creative chaos that moves societies forward through great leaps and bounds.

Civilization is haunted by the old industrial utopian idea that a rational society will be completely managed from the top down. Every progressive goal depends on a rigid system of authority that answers to calls from some civilian non-profits run by community organizers playing the role of the old soviets. The soviets were an illusion. A country was never going to be run by them. It was going to be run by powerful men like Lenin or Stalin who took control of the revolutionary chaos and imposed their own murderous order.

The progressive state is not going to be run by people who want more homeless shelters or more illegal immigration or more abortions. Those people are useful for putting the system into place by giving it the illusion of popular will, but they are unwanted once that has taken place. Once the power has been consolidated, the flimsy coalitions of activists who got it there quickly become a nuisance.

The trouble with all this isn't humanitarianism. It's not wrong to care about others. It is wrong to pass that caring off to an impersonal bureaucracy or to set up a system of mandatory caring or to disrupt the lives of others on a massive scale out of spiteful self-righteousness because they don't care enough. That is why studies show that while conservatives give charity, liberals give government.

A rational view of society begins with accepting an imperfect world. A demand for a rational society however is the irrational belief that government can perfect people. But how can government perfect people when it is made up of imperfect people? Consolidate power under a small number of people and their ranks will grow smaller and they will act no differently than every pharaoh, king and czar throughout history.

Worse than the tyranny is the death of so much of the energy that makes the next step possible. The managed chaos, the thin line between government intervention and anarchy based on a few documents, common sense and a national ethos is what made the American Dream possible. That dream is being strangled by the bureaucratic collectivism of liberal technocrats who imagine that piling one more institution, one more level of regulation and one more set of rules will produce only pros without the cons, product without pollution, wealth without poverty and good without evil.

The progressive consolidation imagines that organization can contain the messier side of man. Mostly it cannot. Instead organizations consolidate power in the hands of men who are worse than average in the name of improving mankind.

The end of competition is the beginning of tyranny.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Take a Penny, Take a Country

2013-05-17T17:50:00.001-04:00

From Maksim at the People's Cube

PINING FOR THE OASES

Two years ago, Obama had declared that he was the defender of Benghazi, protecting it against a massacre that was never going to happen. And once Benghazi was liberated to be under Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood rule, the man who had sent in the air force to protect Benghazi Islamist militias against Gaddafi, couldn’t be bothered to send in the planes to protect his diplomats against the militias.

There is not one single place where a major Arab Spring transformation has led to a happy ending.

Egypt is a political, social and economic disaster. Obama had been counting on Islamists transforming Egypt into another Turkey on a slow and sensible schedule. But Morsi had a little too much in common with Obama. Like Obama, he couldn’t wait a decade to crush his opponents and enact repressive policies that would fracture the country. He could barely wait a month.

How Syria Killed the “Arab Spring”

WAR ON ERROR

In February of 2012, Amine El Khalifi was arrested for plotting to carry out a suicide bombing in the US Capitol building. Before he began his mission, he visited the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center, whose former Imam was Al Qaeda leader Anwar Al Awlaki and whose parishioners included Fort Hood terrorist Nidal Hasan. At his sentencing, El Khalifi said, “I just want to say that I love Allah.”

But that did not stop the FBI from announcing a few days later that it had completed purging references to Islamic terrorism from its training materials. A month earlier, Tamerlan Tsarnaev had begun his trip to Russia and by the time he returned, the training materials meant to prepare agents for the reality of the terrorist plot that he and his brother would carry out had been buried out of sight.

In 2011, the year that the Russians were warning America about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole was issuing another kind of warning.

Cole, an Obama recess appointment, said, “All of us must reject any suggestion that every Muslim is a terrorist or that every terrorist is a Muslim. As we have seen time and again – from the Oklahoma City bombing to the recent attacks in Oslo, Norway – no religion or ethnicity has a monopoly on terror.”

How Many Americans Has Obama Killed?

FOR LOVE OF EVIL

A New York Times article titled “Jihadist or Victim” described Al Qaeda member and Gitmo detainee Moazzam Begg as a “soft-spoken man with a professorial air”. When the media finally succeeded in winning Begg’s release, he went back to the UK where he was invited to participate in the University College of London’s “War on Terror Week” by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Two years later, Abdulmutallab became the Christmas Day Bomber. The New York Times described Abdulmutallab as “soft-spoken” and a “gifted student”.

Most terrorists in the pages of the New York Times are soft-spoken, except when they are being passionate. Sometimes they are even soft-spoken and passionate. They have curly hair and piercing black eyes. Like Salim Hamdan, Bin Laden’s driver, they are possessed of a “quick grin” or like Walid bin Attash, a mastermind of the USS Cole bombing, a “wry smile”.

The difference between these Tiger Beat for the NPR crowd descriptions by the #FreeJihad media and the #FreeJahar collages is polish. Both romanticize terrorists and show a studied disdain for their victims. The New York Times is just better at hiding what it is about than some suburban teenage girl.

What the Media’s #FreeJihad and #FreeJahar Have in Common

LET THEM EAT ANTS

A new report from the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization says Western societies should get over their “disgust” at the idea of eating bugs and join in.

So are UN bigwigs eating bugs?

Oddly enough bugs don’t appear on the menu for the United Nations Delegates Dining Room. New Zealand Rack of Lamb, Roasted Loin of Lamb, Crispy Red Snapper with Langoustine and Medallion of Filet Mignon do.

Meanwhile at the 2002 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization summit on food security, delegates ate lobster and foie gras.

UN Bigwigs Eat Filet Mignon and Foie Gras, Tell Everyone Else to Eat Bugs

UNLESS YOU'RE BARACK OBAMA, YOU CAME FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE

The latest amnesty gimmick from Obama Inc. is the hashtag “Immigration Nation” and the declaration that, “Unless you’re a Native American, you came from someplace else.”

Technically speaking, American Indians came over the Bering Strait. DNA records show that they came out of Siberia. (That makes them the original Russian immigrants.)

Every Nation is an Immigration Nation

TAKE A PENNY, TAKE A COUNTRY

The Heritage study on the cost of amnesty (6.3 trillion) has gotten predictably tangled in accusations of racism. And we are now somehow debating IQ.

The social safety net, like the take-a-penny jar, is an honor system. There are all sorts of regulations and policing mechanisms, but the welfare state and the country are too big to police. Those who want to defraud, do. The rapid growth in the disability rolls tell the tale.

There are different motives not to cheat. Personal integrity. A sense of honor. But the largest one is a sense of investment in the country. Patriotism. The belief that we are all in the same boat and that we occasionally even sacrifice for one another.

Large scale entitlements use by a population is a cultural statement of a sense of detachment from the country and its people. You are more likely to take pennies, instead of putting them back, if you don’t identify with the people who put the pennies in.

The Amnesty Issue Isn’t IQ, it’s the Free Ride

IF ONLY THE ALABAMA DEMOCRATIC PARTY COULD PRINT ITS OWN MONEY

Acting state Democratic Party Chairwoman Nancy Worley lowered her head and slowly shook it side to side when summing up the financial condition of her once powerful party.

“This is my 18th day as chair and thirty minutes after I took over on April 22nd the landlord of the building where our party headquarters are came in and said he wanted us out, that the rent was overdue and was always overdue,” said Worley.

Next came the water company with a message, said Worley: pay up by the next day or we’re cutting off the water. Next came the same warning from Alabama Power. Next came news from banks that party credit cards had been maxed out and were now cancelled.

Alabama Democratic Party Broke, Faces Eviction for Not Paying Rent

IT'S A RACISM PARADOX

Slowly but surely, a growing number of states are eyeing policies to select academically stronger individuals for their teaching programs as one avenue to improve the quality of new teachers.

Academically stronger individuals is the politically correct way of saying, “Teachers who can both read and write.” Their counterparts are the Differently Academically Abled who dominate the Chicago school system.

Underneath the attention such plans are attracting, though, run deep-seated fears about their potential consequences–particularly whether they will result in a K-12 workforce with fewer black and Latino teachers.

On nearly all the measures states are considering, from GPAs to licensure-test scores, minority candidates tend to have weaker scores than their white counterparts.

Wait… but we support education… but not racism… but what if our support for getting better teachers for minority students leads to lower rates of minority teachers… it’s a racism paradox.

Hiring Better Teachers May Be Racist, Say Bad Teachers

THE FUTURE OF MARRIAGE EQUALITY

The pedophiles’ core issue was to bring down Section 176 of the German Criminal Code, which criminalizes sexual acts with children. With the Greens they found for the first time a political force that was willing to entertain this debate. Indeed, in March 1980, the Greens held their second national convention in the southwestern city of Saarbrücken, where they approved a program that opposed “discrimination against sexual outsiders.” The convention established a “pedo-commission” to specifically address the interests of pedophiles.

In 1983, an ad for the Greens ran in the gay newspaper Torso. It featured a drawing of the party’s trademark sunflower and the text: “Sections 174 and 176 should be amended to read that only the application or threat of violence, or the abuse of a dependent relationship in connection with sexual acts should be criminalized!” In plain terms, this meant: Adults could have sex with children, as long as they weren’t their own and they weren’t threatened with violence.

The pedophiles celebrated their greatest success in March 1985 at the Greens’ state manifesto conference in Lüdenscheid, in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia. There, the party approved a position paper that sought to generally allow “non-violent sexuality” between adults and children.

How Green Were the Paedos

REPUBLICANS ARE A SUPERSTITIOUS AND COWARDLY LOT

Reporter Bob Woodward, meanwhile, refers to Hillary as “the Jill Wine Volner of the impeachment inquiry committee,” much to her chagrin. Because of this comment, John Doar, who heads the committee, suggests that Hillary ditch her skirts for pants. “From this day forward, she will always wear pantsuits,” says the script.

So we even have a pantsuit origin story. Is Hillary Clinton a superhero? Must her costume have an origin story?

Are You Ready for Hillary Clinton: The Movie?

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS BAD PUBLICITY

You may be wondering what the Newseum is; besides a really stupid portmanteau with a suspicious resemblance to Nauseam. The Newseum is three things. It’s big. It’s ugly. And it’s in D.C.

With The New York Times–Ochs-Sulzberger Family Great Hall of News, the Bloomberg Internet, TV and Radio Gallery and the NBC News Interactive Newsroom… the Newseum exists to honor itself. It’s an example of the corporate media doing its own hagiography. It’s a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for the teleprompter crowd.

Despite costing nearly half-a-billion dollars, most people, who weren’t stuck in D.C. for four hours with no air conditioning and nothing to do, were not aware of the Newseum’s existence.

Newseum Honors Hamas Terrorists Alongside Daniel Pearl

AL GORE WANTS HIS ROUTINE BACK

"As some of you may know, I serve as the Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming in the U.S. House of Representatives. I have teleported here over the Internet.

"Ladies, gentlemen…avatars, thank you for joining me today on the virtual island of Bali created by One Climate in Second Life."

Ed Markey Claims Credit for Inventing Smartphones and Facebook

THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN THREE COMMISSIONS BY MORNING

Amazingly, the predators seem to have been allowed by local authority managers to come and go from care homes, picking their targets to ply them with drink and drugs before abusing them. You can be sure that if the situation had been reversed, with gangs of tough, young white men preying on vulnerable Muslim girls, the state’s agencies would have acted with greater alacrity.

UK Imam Blasts Muslim Racism Behind Sex Abuse of British Girls

ACCOUNTABILITY

The Real Deal is this: The higher-ups in the MSM won’t say much about the abuses they suffer at the hands of the Obama administration because they answer to an extra-political power base. You think the consumer has sway anymore? When the New Media erupted and the Old Media saw their chuck wagon headed over the cliff, they kicked the consumer-based power structure to the curb. They just didn’t tell the consumer. Or their advertisers. They have gladly embraced devils who wield more money and power in just a few hands, rather than put up with the likes of you.

There may be an Invisible Hand in the market place, but the executives of the MSM are no longer licking that hand. They are not in the losing, exhausting game of brands and marketing. They are now in the game of thrones unlike any we’ve experienced in our country before. They will NOT cede power or betray allegiances to their source of income. Oh, they’ll allow awful financial reports about their circulatory health to ease Tea Party types into a hollow sense of accomplishment, but even after all that, the neighbors are still watching the infernal evening news every night.

that's from Joan at Primordial Slack.

I have moved in these circles a tiny bit and I would say that the consumer-based structure in the big media never mattered much, just as it doesn't matter very much in fashion or television or most creative fields.

The difference is that in fields where the consumer does have buying power, consumer rejection is possible. The insulation is there, so that the creatives will keep running the same incestuous garbage that they like up the flagpole, accepting the occasional setback, but plugging onward (How many Iraq Anti-War movies got made? How many made money? How many lost money? The figures are staggering, but they changed very little) in the hopes of eventually scoring one win that will tide them over for a while and let them justify doing the same thing for another 5-10 years. (Gay TV shows are the new Anti-war movies.)

The situation in the news media is much worse because it's a monopoly. Yes, FOX will beat them with the majority of the minority of independent viewers, but they'll swallow up what's left. And their consumers are not the people watching television. Their consumers are media buyers, who are just as left-wing as they are.

Most professions are miniature societies. And the people in them don't work for the approval of the audience, but of the approval of their fellow pros. (How many awards are voted by pros and how many are voted by the public.)

All corners of the profession are largely liberal, from the writers to the on-air talent to the producers all the way up to the top executives and then vertically to the various buyers and branders who want to associate their product with the "seriousness" of their news network or news hour.

The New Media, as Joan mentions, has made it worse. Yes, the internet has cracked the monopoly. But it also unleashed a lefty blogsphere that pushes media coverage to the left and on the pro-side, at places like Think Progress, preps talking points for the media to use, essentially outsourcing their editorial staff to lefty Think Tanks. (Which is one more reason why the editorial side of the media has gone into the toilet.)

The big media business was always largely incestuous. It's now mostly impermeable. Financially it's in bad shape, but that just means it will be around in a reduced form. Its people have figured out how to plug in internet memes in place of their human interest stories and that's enough to keep them going.

There is no longer a big picture vision of Walter Cronkite's America. Just a bunch of guys and girls browsing Reddit and Think Progress and assembling their sites and stories that way. They don't care about getting everyone on board. They care about shaping their part of the fragmented consensus so that you don't just see the same thing on the 2 news networks no one watches but on the 1,000 sites everyone visits or sees in their news feed.

OBAMA OBER ALLES

In the afterglow of the last week I have come to realize that what is deeply wrong with this country is that so far we have neither heard enough nor seen enough of President Obama.

I now think we need to see more. Much more. We need to bask in his warm visage and be lulled with the hum of his valved voice. We need to have a morning message from the President every day on all cable news channel. Indeed, we need to have it broadcast on all TV channels, especially ESPN and other places where citizens dodge their need to know the truth and their duty to look up from their coffee and upon the wonderful latte-tanned visage that is Obama.

We need to see his face with his honeyed message oozing out of his mouth in the lead-in to Good Morning America and Fox and Friends both without fear or favoritism.

Weather Channel too.

We need to have Barack Obama’s message, whatever it might be on whatever day, delivered dripping from his lips to all of us on the front page of whatever newspaper we are still reading online with a video-embed set on autoplay.

More Obama I Say. MORE O!-BA!-MA!

YOU CAN'T STOP GOVERNMENT

WV Senator Joe Manchin has been trying to breathe life back into his background checks bill

Mr. Kercheval said Mr. Manchin’s legislation makes sense, but that the IRS situation doesn’t help the prospects of its reintroduction.

“Sure, it doesn’t help us – heck no,” Mr. Manchin replied. “But the bottom line is, you cant stop government; you can’t stop this great country, you can’t stop the entrepreneurial spirit.”

One of the three doesn't fit. See if you can spot which one.

A BRIEF NOTE

JewishNews.co.uk rolls out today across the pond. They will occasionally be running some of my columns.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Much of the book looks at the way Internet technology threatens to destroy the middle class by first eroding employment and job security, along with various “levees” that give the economic middle stability.

“Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”

This is a bit imprecise. Instagram does software, if you can even call it that. Kodak did hardware. The hardware is still being done, but much less so in the United States.

Kodak didn't make way for Instagram. It made way for an Instagram front end for hardware being made in China. And that's the real story of the destruction of the American middle class.

American brands employing a small number of creatives and slightly larger number of service people are creating the illusion of prosperity while the manufacturing jobs are gone because Asia had the determination to get them and we were making those jobs impossible.

How many Americans was Kodak employing toward the end when it was popping out mediocre cameras with clunky software? Software allows for the illusion that we're buying prime rib, when we're buying an overlay on poorly manufactured hardware that doesn't last and isn't designed to last and creates few American jobs.

The internet has made it much easier than ever to ship jobs overseas. Which is not a problem for the sort of libertarians who insist that the god of the marketplace will rebalance all. But what if the marketplace only works with a certain standard of civilization? The Middle East had marketplaces for a very long time. The marketplace alone doesn't get us to this point. It's culture that does.

The marketplace allows us to buy cheap crap while funding a war machine that shifts the balance of power. And one day we'll have to face that war machine, while using equipment filled with its chips. Or maybe we won't. Maybe we'll let it take Asia and get an even bigger monopoly. And then all that will be left will be for the worshipers of the marketplace to get jobs working for it and explaining to us why dying at 35 is now a good thing. For the marketplace. Their marketplace.

HOW PEOPLE LOSE THEIR FREEDOM

Seraphic Secret has a close friend who was born and lived in Communist Hungary until he and his family managed to escape to America in 1969.

...

A few days ago, my friend, a mild-mannered accountant who never comments on politics, told me that he fears for America. The Benghazi lies peddled by Obama, Hillary Clinton, the State Department, and (until a few days ago) covered up by a pliant press corps, remind him, he said, of the Communist regime he fled.

“America is not that bad,” he allowed, “but the model, the structure of state power supported by a state press, is how people lose their freedom.”

“It can’t happen here,” I quoted with no little irony.

My friend nodded: “That’s what they all say.”

from Seraphic Secret: It Can't Happen Here

IT'S OBAMA'S WORLD, WE JUST LIVE IN IT

Here’s Your $40,000 EPA Chief Waterfall Portrait

Or, possibly, Lisa Jackson was actually the embodiment of a nature spirit, who, when she was forced to quit after a fake email scandal, became transformed into a waterfall, and is now flowing somewhere in Virginia.

Socialism Causes Toilet Paper Shortage in Venezuela

Chavez died and reportedly returned to his successor as a little bird. Sadly the Socialist leader did not, while in bird form, warn Maduro, that the country would shortly run out of toilet paper

Kuwait Arrests 215 Gays and Lesbians in Internet Cafe Roundup

Article 2 of the Kuwaiti Constitution states, “The religion of the State is Islam, and the Islamic Sharia shall be a main source of legislation.” It also says in the Hadiths that “When a man mounts another man, the throne of Allah shakes.”

National Park Service Malfeasance Exposed in Battle Over California’s Last Cannery

But this isn’t really about the real world impact on the harbor seals. In environmentalist theology, animals are always victimized by human presence. Civilization destroys the wilderness and must be destroyed in turn for the wilderness to thrive.

WINNING!

Ruin the educational system in the name of federal compassion for the children, accuse those who give more to charity (namely, the working poor, the middle class, the Christians) of being cold-hearted. Applaud those who give the least to charity (namely, the idle poor, the rich, the Politically Correct) as being compassionate for their willingness to take more money via taxes from us and give it to the idle poor.

Disintegrate the bonds of faith, the standards of decency, the definition of marriage, and heap opprobrium on men of good character, and praise villains and mass murderers and sexual deviants as heroes and martyrs, and you will eventually get a generation that has no character, no faith, no reason, no logic, no courtesy, no honor, and no ability to distinguish true from false, valid from invalid, reality from television but which has but loads and loads of self-esteem and a selfish sense of entitlement. They will have so much self esteem that they will never listen again to a logical argument or a scientific proof, because their self-esteem tells them that no one is smartasticer than are they.

And once you have made a whole generation into selfish, whining, inflated-egoist know-nothings, they will beg for chains, and riot when they do not get them.

...from John C, Wright's excellent blog

I'm reminded of what Frank Capra credited the collapse of his career, post-Wonderful Life, to

Forgotten among the hue-and criers were the hard-working stiffs that came home too tired to shout or demonstrate in streets ... and prayed they'd have enough left over to keep their kids in college, despite their knowing that some were pot-smoking, parasitic parent-haters.

The winds of change blew through the dream factories of make-believe, tore at its crinoline tatters.... The hedonists, the homosexuals, the hemophilic bleeding hearts, the God-haters, the quick-buck artists who substituted shock for talent, all cried: "Shake 'em! Rattle 'em! God is dead. Long live pleasure! Nudity? Yea! Wife-swapping? Yea! Liberate the world from prudery. Emancipate our films from morality!".... Kill for thrill – shock! Shock! To hell with the good in man, Dredge up his evil – shock! Shock!

HOPE AND CHANGE

Article 2

Using the powers of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in disregard of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purposed of these agencies.

This conduct has included one or more of the following:

1. He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be intitiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.

... well that's one place to start.

#FreeJahar and the Media's #FreeJihad

2013-05-14T19:51:00.000-04:00

The media, in one of its bursts of manufactured moral panic, has turned its eye on the teenage girls tweeting and tumblring away in support of Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Serial killers have always had their fan clubs. Before the Boston Marathon bombings spawned the #FreeJahar crowd, there were the Holmies, who adored James Holmes, who murdered 12 people at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises.

Even if Adam Lanza hadn't committed suicide, it's doubtful that he would have his own Lanzies fan club or a #FreeAdam hashtag. It's not that he killed children. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev murdered Martin Richard, an 8-year-old boy. James Holmes murdered Veronica Moser-Sullivan, a 6-year-old girl. Murdering children is not a turnoff for serial killer groupies, but Adam Lanza's drawn gnomish face and bowl haircut would be.

Charles Manson had an entire cult around him. Some members like Squeaky Fromme went on worshiping him and trying to kill in his name even once he was behind bars. If Fromme were a teenage girl today, she would have a Tumblr and #InLoveThereIsNoWrong would be a hashtag.

But let's not pretend that there's much of a difference between New York Times reporters and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's groupies.

The day before the Boston bombings, the New York Times printed an op-ed from one of Osama bin Laden's bodyguards complaining how hard it is to be on a hunger strike and the media poured on the sympathy as thickly as any of Dzhokhar’s future groupies.

"It was impossible not to feel a pang of sympathy for Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel," Foreign Policy Magazine wrote. The Guardian described his situation as a "Supreme Injustice". The Daily Beast added that it was a "National Disgrace" and declared "There is no way on earth that you could read the recent Times op-ed by Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel and not feel abject shame." The Nation called for resuming Gitmo prisoner transfers and releases.

A day before the atrocity that would birth #FreeJahar had taken place; the media was in full #FreeJihad mode.

The difference between #FreeJahar and #FreeJihad is presentation. #FreeJaharists are teenage girls and write sentences without periods and upload GIFs to Instagram. #FreeJihadists have the news and editorial pages of every paper in the world, not to mention the evening news and the cable news networks with million dollar budgets, to hammer home their message.

#FreeJahar is really a poor imitation of #FreeJihad. For over a decade, the media had run itself ragged defending and minimizing the crimes of every Muslim terrorist. The #FreeJihad media had championed the cause of every Gitmo terrorist. The New York Times did not suddenly wake up one morning and decide to run a #FreeSamir op-ed. It had been running sympathetic articles and editorials about Islamic terrorists all along. The pace of these propaganda pieces slowed down during the Obama era, but did not stop.

Almost exactly a year before the Boston Marathon bombing, New York Times correspondent David Shipler wrote an editorial claiming that the FBI was breaking up terrorist plots that it had invented. "Without the F.B.I., would the culprits commit violence on their own?" Shipler asked, referring to Muslim attempts to bomb the Pentagon, the US Capitol and a number of synagogues.

A year later, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev answered the question in the affirmative, but that didn't end the outpouring of sympathy.

The New York Times headlined its feature piece on the murderous duo as "Far From War-Torn Homeland, Trying To Fit In." The paper whitewashed Tamerlan's domestic violence and blamed unfair setbacks to his boxing career for his killing spree. Despite all the extensive background, no mainstream media outlet showed any interest in talking to the ex-girlfriend he slapped around.

The only difference between this type of #FreeJihad journalism and the #FreeJahar Tumblrs was the illusion of professionalism.

The #FreeJahar Tumblrs were only doing what liberal papers and blogs had been doing all along; searching for extenuating circumstances and suggesting that their favorite terrorist had been framed and needed to be set free. Their only mistake was bad timing and worse judgment.

Media outlets knew better than to run op-eds by Osama bin Laden's bodyguard right after September 11. They also limited their claims that Muslim terrorists like the Bronx synagogue bombers or the Portland Christmas Tree bomber, had been set up and should be set free, to cases where the FBI had come in early enough to stop the plot and prevent anyone from being killed.

They were also better at using euphemisms, calling for prisoner transfers back to their homeland, even though a transfer to Saudi Arabia meant a stay at a luxurious terrorist rehab center followed by an inevitable return to terrorism, and at expressing their agendas in someone else's words.

After the Boston bombings, the New York Times doubled down on #FreeJihad, running an article titled, "Despair Drives Guantánamo Detainees to Revolt." It quoted a Muslim adviser as saying, "Only one thing, he predicted, will satisfy the detainees: if someone is allowed to leave."

And there it was. Around the same time that #FreeJahar was getting started, the #FreeJihad media was showing them how it was done.

#FreeJihad journalists, like their #FreeJahar counterparts, showed a troubling tendency to romanticize the murderers they were writing about.

A New York Times article titled “Jihadist or Victim” described Al Qaeda member and Gitmo detainee Moazzam Begg as a "soft-spoken man with a professorial air". When the media finally succeeded in winning Begg's release, he went back to the UK where he was invited to participate in the University College of London's "War on Terror Week" by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Two years later, Abdulmutallab became the Christmas Day Bomber. The New York Times described Abdulmutallab as, how else, “soft-spoken” and a “gifted student”.

Most terrorists in the pages of the New York Times are soft-spoken, except when they are being passionate. Sometimes they are even soft-spoken and passionate. They have curly hair and piercing black eyes. Like Salim Hamdan, Bin Laden's driver, they are possessed of a "quick grin" or like Walid bin Attash, a mastermind of the USS Cole bombing, a "wry smile". They are naturally gifted lawyers who have a knack for pointing out how ridiculous the government's case is.

The difference between these Tiger Beat for the NPR crowd descriptions by the #FreeJihad media and the #FreeJahar collages is polish. Both romanticize terrorists and show a studied disdain for their victims. The New York Times is just better at hiding what it is about than some suburban teenage girl.

The media's ideological hybristophilia is every bit as obscene as the #FreeJahar collages. The teenage girl attracted to a murderer because of what he did has something rotten deep inside. But what does that say about the ideological hybristophilia of a political movement that seeks out killers and mass murderers to worship?

Why waste time talking about the Holmies, when there are Che t-shirts on every campus, and why waste time on teenage girls who turn terrorists into pin-ups when the entire media does the same thing?

The left is in love with violence. It idolizes killers and then justifies their crimes. It denies the undeniable; that the only reason it is interested in them is because they are killers. The Red-Green alliance wouldn't exist if the Green Muslim side of the alliance wasn't explosively violent. The left isn't particularly interested in Buddhists or Hindus for the same reason that it doesn't wear Gandhi shirts or Martin Luther King baseball caps. Its attractions are strictly fatal.

A movement that once thrived on violence has receded into a mass of suburban radicals driving Subarus and working to undermine the system from within. All it has left are the nostalgic memories of terrorists like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, now involved in the same unromantic business of brainwashing students on campuses and exploiting non-profits for the profit of their agenda. Once upon a time they thought that they were Clyde, but now they are stuck being Bonnie.

Islamic terrorists are the closest they can come to the destructive power that thrills them. The siren
song of their revolutions isn't good government, bike paths and nutritious lunches; it’s murdering their way to power. Working within the system may work, but what truly makes their pulses race and their legs tingle is putting a bullet in the system and replacing it with their own.

The left lives its terror dreams vicariously through the terrorism of Islam. Its fatal attraction to death finds its fulfillment in their murderous arms.

The activists of the left would like you to believe that they defend terrorists despite their violence. That excuse is as thin as the claims by serial killer devotees like the Holmies or the #FreeJaharites that they are in love with their man despite the crimes he is accused of committing. It's not despite the terrorism that they defend terrorists; it is because of the terrorism.

They are not pro-terrorist out of principle. It isn't even the ends that they sympathize with. Few of them really want to live in the Muslim Brotherhood's Islamist oligarchy. It's the means that appeal to them. If they can't be Clyde, bombing police stations and offing the pigs, they'll settle for being Bonnie, hanging on Mohammed's arm while he flies a plane into the World Trade Center or sets off a bomb at the Boston Marathon.

#FreeJahar isn't some horrid aberration. It's a junior version of the liberal approach to the War on Terror. We don't have to ask where the idolization of terrorists comes from. It is spawned from the same #FreeJihad media that pretends to be outraged by the Holmies and the Jaharites. The Jaharites are the abominable children of an abominable ideology that hybristophilically worships the forces that destroy societies because they are all that allows them to feel powerful and alive.

The Post-Obama Democratic Party

2013-05-14T02:23:00.002-04:00

Two elections ago, the Democratic Party was on the verge of being torn to shreds. After a long series of dirty tricks and one stolen election later, there was an uncomfortable coming together.

Obama and his cronies kept most of the important positions, while the Clintonites got a few pieces of the foreign policy apparatus. The arrangement satisfied no one, but it kept ticking along until the Benghazi attacks happened.

By the time Benghazi happened, Clinton and Obama needed each other more than ever. Obama needed the Clintons on the campaign trail to sell him to more moderate Democrats who remembered that times had been better under Bill. Hillary needed Obama to anoint her as his intended successor.

The awkward dance, complete with an injury, a congressional hearing and a 60 Minutes interview and then the real fireworks began.

Hillary Clinton had turned lemons into lemonade, getting what she could out of Obama. State had looked like a good spot for her because it would insulate her from the backlash over the economy. And she would have gotten away with it too if it hadn't been for Benghazi. It wasn't quite leaving on a high note, but as bad as Benghazi was, no one in their right mind would want to be associated with what is going to happen in Afghanistan. At least no one who isn't as dumb as Hanoi John who began his career with Viet Cong and Sandinista pandering and will end it watching the Taliban take Kabul.

Benghazi hasn't slowed Hillary Clinton down. And her target is the same old target from 2008. We're back in that 3 A.M. phone call territory. The truce between Obama and Hillary Clinton ended on 60 Minutes. It's not exactly war, but it is politics.

While Obama and his cronies plot out the second term, Hillary Clinton is plotting out her election campaign. These days every presidential campaign begins with the ceremonial burial of your own party's predecessor. It wasn't just McCain who kept a careful distance from Bush, Gore kept a careful distance from Clinton and Bush Sr. kept a careful distance from Reagan. The reinvention invariably involves the ritual jettisoning of some portions of your predecessor's program and personality.

Hillary Clinton isn't betting on being able to ride Obama's coattails. Not only are the coattails short, but the same electorate of younger and minority voters whose turnout he could count on, won't be quite as eager to come out for her. Her people are not betting on Obama's strategy of dismissing mainstream voters and counting on making it up with a passionate base. To win, Hillary Clinton will have to win back some of the same voters that Obama alienated during his two terms.

The script is already written. You can spot it peeking through select mainstream media editorials. Watch for those instances where mainstream media pundits blame Obama's inexperience and his failure to reach out across the aisle for his shortcomings. Those mentions aren't so much an attack on Obama as they are a campaign sign reading, "Hillary 2016." It's subtle for now, but a year from now, those grudging admissions that Obama fell short in some areas will come with the strong suggestion that next time around, someone more experienced and more able to build bridges could do better.

Republicans will rightly wonder on which planet, Hillary Clinton is an experienced bipartisan leader. But compared to Obama, she is, and these days we are grading on one very gentle curve. Clinton had begun building that image for the 2008 election and now her people are taking it out and dusting it off again. The Democratic Party is being given the chance to choose the sensible experienced candidate that it failed to choose last time around. And the fact that the candidate in question is actually neither is one of those things that doesn't really make a difference.

In preparing for a Post-Bush candidacy, Hillary gambled that the public would want someone a little more to the right and so she cultivated an image as a conservative member of the Democratic Party. Not only did she cultivate the image, but she made an occasional effort to vote that way and build those alliances. It was good planning, but a bad bet. Unlike Bill, Hillary was never an instinctual politician. Bill plays it by ear, while Hillary makes long term plans and is caught by surprise.

The strange thing about her 2016 campaign prep is that she appears to be following the same playbook. But on the other hand it might not be so strange at all.

The Democratic Party is uneasily planning its own Post-Obama future and the news isn't particularly good. The Republican Party never became the Party of Bush, but the Democratic Party is the party of Obama. Obama and his cronies have built up a shadow party of the left made up of SuperPACs and think tanks that overlaps with the Democratic Party, but has no real investment in it.

The unveiling of OFA, completes the marginalization of the Democratic Party at the hands of a lefty technocratic infrastructure that looks a lot like the bare bones of a third party. Meanwhile the jackass party has been taking a political beating with no respite. It is doing even worse in the leadership department than the GOP and its party identification numbers are down in an imperial system where the voters care more about Obama's unilateral lawmaking, than about voting the Democratic ticket.

The Democratic Party needs a post-Obama future and the Clintons have the resources and names to tie the organization together and turn it into something more than a way to get names for Obama's private fundraising and mailing list. Hillary Clinton had too much of the wrong history attached to her in 2008, but in 2016, all that history may suddenly be good history. After eight years, everyone is tired of new blood and will settle for some old blood with more modest ambitions.

And that brings us back to Benghazi. State was supposed to be a smooth ride for Hillary Clinton, full of photo ops that suggest experience. No one was counting on her bringing a scandal back with her. But the one thing Hillary Clinton can be relied on to do is find a scandal and bring it back no matter where she is or what she does.

Benghazi intersected dangerously with the presidential ambitions of two candidates. Obama needed to shut down Benghazi in 2012 and Hillary needs to bury it long before the primaries, because if she doesn't, her party rivals will use it to bury her. And that's where things begin wandering into a new territory in which the old political rules no longer apply.

In Term 1, Obama and Clinton were untouchable by the media. As Term 2 winds on, they will become bigger targets for both Republicans and Democrats. And the media will begin bending against them. It's easy to read that as an accretion of disgust, but it's just politics.

The media appeared to turn on Bill Clinton toward the end, but it wasn't fed up with his sleazy ways, instead it was establishing Al Gore as an ethical contrast to Bill. The idea may be ridiculous, but it nearly worked and giving Bill Clinton a kick on the way out helped sell his own VP as an alternative to his own boss. Before too long, it will be Obama's turn to get kicked for Hillary's sake. And it will be both their turns to get kicked for the sake of a preferred alternative to either one of them.

No matter how much the media swooned over Obama, it will feed him to the dogs in a minute if the domestic or international situation gets to the point that it did for Bush toward the end. Any number of events, including a complete health care disaster or a series of Taliban victories in Afghanistan could bring that on. But even if nothing that big happens, the malaise will likely mean that Obama will not get the Great Leader sendoff that some of his supporters imagined he would. The media isn't loyal to Obama. It's loyal to the left and it will destroy Obama for the sake of its bigger goals.

But Obama may have his own agenda. The left succeeded in hijacking the 2008 election. And who is to say that OFA will go away when Obama does? The odds are good that it will not. And that means that a second civil war may be brewing, this time with a much tougher left taking on a weakened Democratic Party stripped of many of its moderate figures.

The Democratic Party may want someone who can heal some of the wounds of ObamaCare and
reassure gun owners that they can come back, but that isn't what the left wants. And if Hillary can't figure out how to sell her candidacy as being all things to all Democrats, the sort of trick that Bill used to be able to easily pull off, then things will get ugly.

All this isn't about what will happen in 2016, but what is already happening now. Clinton's people are planting stories undermining Obama. And what are Obama's people doing? That's the question.

A Republican leadership that is routinely inept suddenly had two breakthroughs; one in Benghazi and one in the IRS. The IRS material is being served up on a silver platter, suggesting that is a distraction. The two scandals cut different ways. Benghazi hurts Obama, but it hurts Clinton more. The IRS is all Obama. It can't be deposited at Clinton's door and its narrative serves her interests.

Benghazi isn't likely to keep Hillary out of the Democratic field in 2016, but after 2008, she is justifiably paranoid. Any appearance of weakness can only embolden another Obama to challenge her and for 2016, as for 2008, her strategy is to be so inevitable that she will never even be challenged. It's not much of a plan, but it's why she needs to see Benghazi dead and buried in every sense of the word.

Put Not Your Trust in Politicians

2013-05-12T23:13:00.000-04:00

The most obvious lessons of the defeat of gun control and the push for illegal alien amnesty is that politicians don't matter. People do.

The Tea Party invested its energy into electing the right people, but as Rick Scott and Marco Rubio showed us, there may be no such thing as the right people. Politicians are in the business of selling out. The difference between Marco Rubio and Charlie Crist was that Rubio hadn't really been tested.

But that doesn't mean politics is hopeless. It means politicians are hopeless. People however can still force politicians to do the right thing.

The NRA won its fight against gun control even though all the odds, political, financial and emotional, were stacked against it. Politicians had every reason to defect and evolve into a new understanding. And some did. But the ground held because enough of them knew that the NRA was in it for the long term and they would have to deal with it long after Bloomberg had moved on.

In 2012, amnesty and gun control both appeared to be equally unacceptable and were shunned by Republican politicians. If anything they shunned amnesty even harder than gun control. But one election loss later and most of the stalwarts, including Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan have jumped on the amnesty train.

Victor Davis Hanson observes that, "in these divided times ideology and politics can easily trump considerations about character." But accepting that character doesn't matter may just be practical politics.

There may be leaders of good character out there who firmly resolve to do the right thing and never waver from their course, but they are the exception and the political system is designed to weed them out.

The self-motivated politician who never wavers is a lot to ask of any man. Even Churchill eventually buckled to Stalin. What can one expect of the senator from Idaho or Virginia?

Politics is not about politicians. It's about people. Politicians are just the brokers in the political process. The real lesson of the Tea Party is not that you can intervene in a primary for the most conservative candidate and then sit back while he does the right thing, it's that the only way to get the right thing done is to have an organization that is constantly involved in the political process.

Prohibition, an insane policy, was largely rammed through by a clever and relentless organization that built alliances and forced the issue down the throats of politicians who didn't agree with it. The same tactics have been used for a variety of causes, including, most recently, gay marriage. In each case, most politicians who did not agree with a cause, came around on it because it was smart politics.

The politician who evolves concedes that he is up for grabs. Evolutionary announcements should be met with contempt, but they also signal that a politician who flips can be made to flop back again. Treating him as if he were an intelligent thinking individual with principles may be a mistake. It may be easier to assume that he has neither principles nor character and that he will go whichever way seems easiest. And the trick then is to reshape his environment so that he evolves into another shape.

For all the complaints that we need leaders, leaders may be the one thing that we do not need. The sort of people that we associate with leaders tend to be self-willed men with their own agendas. Christie and Bloomberg are both leaders, but their version of leadership is to pursue their private agendas without any accountability or regard for anyone else. What we need are not leaders, but organizations that are better at holding politicians accountable.

Hunting for principled politicians is like searching for buried treasure. It's nice if we find some, but we can't assume that we will.

The professional politician excels at pretending to have principles and then selling them out. Finding an honest one is like trying to buy a Rolex watch at a folding card table near Times Square. You may get the real deal, but the odds are that you will be ripped off because the people you are dealing with are trained con artists. They have pulled the same scam a thousand times. They are better at reading you than you are at reading them.

What politicians really do is move money around. They push pork for their friends and supporters who then reward them by making sure that they get reelected. It's a simple financial transaction and any principles can only get in the way of it. They are salesmen for government spending and like all salesmen, they need a pitch strategy because "I'm going to give 10 million dollars of your money to the people who contribute to my campaign and organize groups that support me" is not a winner.

We may have reached the point where it's smarter to ignore the pitch strategy, the stories, the speaking style, the declaration of principles, the Heritage approved reading list, and reduce everything back to a simple business transaction free of any hero worship or commitments.

It's not smart for small government conservatives to believe in politicians anyway. If politicians were worth believing in, then one of the main arguments against small government trickles away. If there were a breed of politicians that weren't hungry for power and able to find the balance between rights and regulations, why shouldn't we trust them to run things? Such a breed of philosopher-kings doesn't exist. And will never exist.

Most people, of all factions, rightly hold politicians in contempt and are suspicious of governments. The Tea Party would have done better to keep its distance from politicians, instead of allowing too many of them to wrap themselves in the Tea Party brand. Too much energy was wasted in getting behind politicians, instead of getting on top of them.

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"was the old Roman question. Who watches the watchmen? Politicians are a poor accountability method. They aren't going to hold themselves accountable. Trying to play Diogenes hunting for an honest politician in Washington D.C. is an even bigger waste of time. There are hardly any and they may not be the ones you think are.

Politicians are tools. They were meant to be wielded by the people. A good politician understands that he is being held accountable. A bad politician doesn't. Politicians don't pay attention to people. They pay attention to organizations. The only way to lock in good behavior by a politician is to lock them into an organization that is capable of rewarding or punishing him.

The organization can't just be money. There is an entire political class built around activism that consumes money and does nothing. The 2012 campaign should have been an education in that.

The left isn't just successful because it has billionaires, but because it successfully organizes people. The successful organization of people is the difference between 2010 and 2012. If 2014 and 2016 are going to be any different, it will come down to building organizations that can transform the process.

Single-issue organizations like the NRA can be very effective. So can larger scale organizations. Many of them exist, but what they really require is ground level organizing. Money is cheap. People are hard to come by.

If conservative policies are going to win out, the decentralized conservative presence of the internet is going to have to be more directly leveraged in the real world. The people already exist. Bringing them into play in a structured way is what is missing.

The 2010 elections showed what is possible when the people get involved. And the 2012 elections showed what happens when the political class leaves the people behind. Sometimes the people class can win on its own, but even when it does, its victory, like all political class agendas, is a prelude to another sellout.

Principles can't come from politicians because politics is now largely an economic transaction. They can only come from people who do not benefit from those government class transactions. The left has built a shadow government of organizations, but it has done so while linking those organizations to small, but sizable numbers of organizers and activists, who can rally the base. The right will have to duplicate its accomplishments if it doesn't want to see the politicians that it wastes money and energy electing constantly "evolve" to the left.

Some readers have complained that this blog is too hostile or negative toward Republican politicians. If anything it's not nearly negative enough. Cheerleading for favorite politicians is a waste of time. The solutions will not come from messiahs in suits. It will come when the number of conservative issues that politicians come to see as the third rail expands beyond gun control. It will come when the professional political infrastructure is contained by a conservative activist infrastructure that is as least as effective and powerful as its counterpart on the left.

It will come when we stop believing in electing the right man and accept that the honest politician is the one who stays bought. It may not be romantic or idealistic, but it is far more practical than waiting for the next Marco Rubio to come around.

With Blood on Their Hands

2013-05-11T23:04:00.002-04:00

Lady Macbeth may have been one of literature's most famous villains, but at least she had the guilty conscience to eventually try and wash the blood off her hands. Even if by then it was much too late.

via American Digest

It is doubtful that Hillary Rodham Clinton will start hallucinating bloody spots on her palms during the book tour for her upcoming 14-million-dollar book or compulsively washing her hands during the 2016 campaign.

If she does make it into the White House, it is even more doubtful that she will wander it at night in a nightgown crying out for the blood that can never be washed away.

Lady Macbeth may have cried out, "Here's the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Araby will not sweeten this little hand." But the black perfumes of today's Araby are more than enough to sweeten a multitude of appeasements and cover the blood that flows out from them.

Real life villains are closer to Richard III than Lady Macbeth, offering to trade their stolen kingdom for a horse to the very end, rather than seeking some intangible repentance in a fit of remorse. They are more likely to ask what difference it makes; the solipsistic query of the sociopath to whom the feelings of others are abstract things.

The Benghazi hearings featured more hypocritical and trite eulogies than anything Richard III could have imagined. Congressman Elijah Cummings told witnesses that "death is a part of a life." A fact that they were surely unaware of. His colleague, Eleanor Holmes Norton asked, "What's the big deal here?"

"We had Benghazi I with Susan Rice, now we’re having Benghazi II with Hillary Clinton. Enough Benghazi,” Norton declared. It's not quite "Out, damned spot!" or "What, will these hands ne'er be clean?" and more "What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?"

The latter is a timeless villain's truth, whether in a fictional 11th century Scottish castle or in the all too real 21st century Capitol Hill.

For Lady Macbeth, power was not a sufficient defense against conscience. A thousand years later, in Foggy Bottom, Capitol Hill and at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; there is no conscience, only power. The arrogance of an Obama, a Clinton or a Norton comes from their confidence that none can call their power to account.

Norton and Clinton have more of a point than critics give them credit for. Benghazi isn't a big deal. Not compared to the rivers of blood they shed in Afghanistan. In Benghazi, four Americans were abandoned. In Afghanistan, it was over 1500 soldiers killed and nearly 15,000 wounded many of them denied air support and the ability to fight back under rules of engagement that likely also played a part in the betrayal at Benghazi.

Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, a Shakespearean villain, if there ever was one, who helpfully wrote his own soliloquies, once said that while a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. The four deaths in Benghazi are also a tragedy. Though we must of course, as Congressman Cummings told us, put them into the context of death being a part of life. Afghanistan however is just a statistic.

The day after Benghazi, the parents of Navy SEALS from Seal Team Six, along with military experts and former military officials, appeared at the National Press Club to demand a congressional investigation. The media responded with a collective shrugs and resumed providing non-stop coverage of the Jodi Arias case. Some Lady Macbeths go to prison. Others are meant to go to the White House.

"Why was there no pre-assault fire?" Karen Vaughn, the mother of Navy SEAL Aaron Vaughn, asked. "We were told as families that pre-assault fire damages our efforts to win the hearts and minds of our enemy. So in other words, the hearts and minds of our enemy are more valuable to this government than my son's blood."

"Why didn't they take them out with a drone," Charles Strange, the father of Michael Strange asked. "The Admiral told me, to win the hearts and minds. I says, to win the hearts and minds? How about my heart? How about my mind?" But not all hearts and minds are created equal. And not all blood is valued the same.

If Lady Macbeth had wandered through her Foggy Bottom castle or the Westchester mansion, complete with wine cellar, artist's studio and outdoor fireplace, mourning for a Muslim terrorist killed in a drone strike or a Muslim protester during the September 11 embassy attacks, that would have been a socially acceptable act of regret for a lost mind and heart that could have yet been turned to a moderate appreciation of a country where you can hate it, bomb it and still get an academic posting at Columbia University.

But why bother mourning for one of the expendable human drones who are expected to give their lives to remind Muslims of our respect for their culture and religion?

When a Muslim is killed by a drone, the media gathers its outrage, but when one of our soldiers or diplomats dies in the hopes of softening a Muslim's heart, then the men and women who sent him to die with his hands tied and a target painted on his back cannot see the red spots on their soft palms.

Muslim hearts and minds are the obsession of the policymakers of the dying West, but who cares about the hearts and minds of the men and women who ride Chinooks into danger zones, run marathons in cities where aspiring Chechen boxers feel marginalized and work in skyscrapers that Muslim students fly past on the way from Boston, except on Election Day?

"Under the current Rules of Engagement, if the enemy fires on you then runs behind a rock," Karen Vaughn told a press that was busy pressing its fingers into its ears as deep as they could go, "when he pops his head out from behind the rock, you're not allowed to engage him unless you can verify that he has not laid his gun down... in other words you must be fired on twice."

Today it's twice. Tomorrow it may be three times. And then four. The angrier they get, the more free shots we have to give them to improve their self-esteem and soothe the throbbing emotions in their hearts and minds.

The press release for Hillary Clinton's 14-million-dollar book declares that she "has redefined the meaning of 'trailblazer' in every phase of her career on the world stage." Considering the ambassador she left choking to death on the smoke from a fire set by the militias she helped empower, that might not be the best choice of words. The unnamed book will offer "dramatic moments", "vivid personal anecdotes" and "memories of her collaboration with President Obama and his National Security team."

Again, not the best choice of words. But all too apt.

"Your face, my thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters," Lady Macbeth advised her lord. But it isn't likely that readers who plonk down their thirty bucks will read any strange matters in this sixth or seventh Clinton book. Those who have already endured "Living History" with her and "It Takes a Village", not to mention "Dear Socks: Kids' Letters to the First Pets" are unlikely to learn anything new from Hillary Clinton's version of Decision Points.

The books after all take the next part of Lady Macbeth's murderous advice. "To beguile the time, Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye... But be the serpent under't." The time now is that of the successful career woman whose marriage may be a sham and whose career is littered with more bodies than Lady Macbeth could have aspired to in her most deranged fantasies, but who never lets that get her down or stop her from leaning in to offer some empowering advice for that big meeting.

The serpent is still underneath. And sometimes it comes to the surface, asking what difference it makes it four people died here or fifteen hundred people died there. It's been Benghazi I and Benghazi II and eventually Benghazi III and it's time to MoveOn.org to discussing some offensive thing about the reproductive process that a Republican in Iowa or Idaho said.

There will be no book titled, "Dear Hillary, I'm In a Burning Diplomatic Mission with no Security and Can't Breathe: Dying Ambassador's Letters to Former First Ladies" and no, "It Takes a State Department to Spend Money on Art in Embassies Instead of on Embassy Security" book either. Those books wouldn't look like the time, they actually would be the time. They would be the bloody handprints on the wall and that would distract us from the Jodi Arias 2016 campaign.

The families of Navy SEALS demanding answers will not receive a fraction of the coverage that Cindy Sheehan did for burping in Bush's direction. American hearts and minds only matter when they are being influenced to stop fighting back against all the hate in Muslim hearts and minds. Soldiers will go on fighting and dying with their hands tied behind their backs. Embassies will go on being attacked. And nothing will be done about it because fighting back is insensitive and hurts our chances of winning Muslim hearts and minds.

Lady Macbeth only wanted power, but she lacked an ideology that would allow her to believe that she was doing the right thing. There was no Wellesley College senior thesis about Saul Alinsky on her shelf and she was left unequipped to believe that the ends justified the means and that rivers of blood could be spilled in a good cause.

"If the ideals Alinsky espouses were actualized, the result would be social revolution," Hillary Clinton wrote in her conclusion.

The social revolution of her 1969 thesis is once again here, and like most revolutions, it's a bloody mess. Once again social values are under attack by radicals while soldiers die overseas without being allowed to fight back. And the radicals care for nothing for the blood that they spill for their radical revolution. Not the blood of a single man or of a thousand men.

"What is a traitor?" Lady Macduff's son asks his mother, before being murdered by Macbeth's assassins. "Why, one that swears and lies," his mother replies. "Who must hang them?" her son asks. "Why, the honest men," she answers. "Then the liars and swearers are fools," he says, "for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men and hang up them."

The liars and swearers have hung up the honest men from Benghazi to Kabul to Capitol Hill. And the traitors walk through the night with blood on their hands and do not even see.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Hearts and Minds

2013-05-10T19:56:00.004-04:00

HEARTS AND MINDS

The Benghazi hearings sucked most of the oxygen in the room on the right, which is why the press conference on the next day by SEAL families and military experts on the Seal Team Six attack got little attention from the conservative media.

Those that did write about it focused mainly on the Muslim prayer, but not on the bigger issues involving the Rules of Engagement. And those issues, believe it or not, are bigger than Benghazi.

Let's begin with Charles Strange, the father of Navy SEAL Michael Strange, calling out Biden and the administration's Muslim appeasement in true Philly fashion.

"They hate us. They know our rules of engagement," he tells the people, too many of whom aren't listening. "After the crash, the Taliban came up with kids in front of them to see if they could skin our soldiers alive." William and Karen Vaughn's layout of the appeasement that got their son killed is even more important.

“The hearts and minds of the enemy are more valuable to this government than my son’s blood. This is submission and the cost of that submission on August 6 was my only son,” Karen Vaughn says.

“If my son had gone in on an MH-47 that night with guns blazing and they had been shot out of the sky that night, it would have been a whole lot easier to live with. If the air weapons teams had been offering suppressive fire because a 3.5 hour operation was already underway in the valley, but you know why we were not… because according to a high ranking three-star admiral, Admiral Harward, made a statement to the grieving families that day. We want to win the hearts and minds of the enemy.

Aaron did not become a Navy SEAL Team 6 Gold Squad to win the hearts and minds of the Islamic Jihadists. He became a Navy SEAL to fight for this republic and defeat the enemy," William Vaughn says.

Former Pacific Fleet commander, James Aloysius “Ace” Lyons, Jr, and father of the Navy Red Cell, an anti-terrorism group composed of Navy Seals he established in response to the Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut offers more context of the political correctness killing national defense.

These are just excepts. The entire conference is well worth watching at The United West.

A FEARFUL SYMMETRY

According to Al-Ahram, Stone told prosecutors the attack took place while he was on his way to the US Embassy to finish some paperwork for his wife. A young man enquired about his nationality and stabbed him in the neck after he said he was American.

The man who stabbed an American in Cairo on Thursday says he was motivated by a hatred of the United States.

Ironically, hating the United States was something that Mahmoud had in common with Christopher.

When invited to a seven year old’s Israel themed birthday party, Stone declined by asserting that he didn’t just hate Israel… he also hated America, writing… “If she had invited me to a party celebrating the US I suspect my response would have been the same. This is not ONLY because of the odious behavior of the US and Israeli governments, but also because of the destruction wrought in the name of nationalism in general.”

American Professor Who Hates America Stabbed in Cairo by Muslim Who Also Hates America

PEACE IN OUR TIME

Whenever the media needed a “moderate” Palestinian Arab official to trot out, they would mention Jibril Rajoub.

CBS News describes him in its bio as “Rajoub, a moderate, was a longtime player in peace talks and truce negotiations with Israel.”

The New York Times wrote of him as, “the West Bank security chief, who is known as one of the more moderate and pragmatic Palestinian officials.”

The left-wing Geneva Initiative ran ads featuring Jibril Rajoub telling Israelis in Hebrew, “I am your partner” and informing them that there is a historic opportunity with a Palestinian leadership committed to a two-state solution.

Three years earlier, Rajoub had said, “Israel is a cancer in the region, by Allah, I’m sure every speck of Palestine from the sea to the river – will return to us!”

Now to everyone’s surprise, the moderate peace partner, when discussing the negotiations, made a series of outrageous demands and told the television hostess, “Listen we as yet don’t have a nuke. But I swear that if we had a nuke, we’d have used it this very morning.

Former Palestinian National Security Advisor: “if We Had a Nuke, We’d Have Used It This Very Morning”

CAFFEINE EVERYWHERE AND NOT A DROP TO DRINK

In true Obamaesque form, the FDA has put out a cheerful flyer warning that caffeine is everywhere. It’s in your jelly beans. It’s in your shoes. It might even be in the air you breathe. The flyer includes a bizarre Q and A with its own boss, echoing Obama Inc’s strategy of fake interviews that make it seem like they have their own in-house press.

“An instant oatmeal on the market boasts that one serving has as much caffeine as a cup of coffee, and then there are similar products,” the flyer ominously informs us. I haven’t seen this over-caffeinated oatmeal anywhere, but maybe it’s sneaking up on me right now.

FDA Moving to Regulate The Deadly Menace of Caffeine

DON'T WORRY, BE SWEDISH

Majed, a 17-year-old Iraqi immigrant, stabbed his sister Maria to death inflicting 107 wounds with two knives and a pair of scissors. His sister had returned to Landskrona after she broke up from a forced marriage in Iraq. She was found dead in his apartment in Landskrona on the evening of 23 April, the day after her birthday.

Majed’s lawyer thought that the original sentence of 8 years in prison was too harsh. “I thought the sentence was very strong, it was a very tough punishment. I do not share at all the district court’s perception of the seriousness of the offense,” says the 17-year-old’s defense attorney, Mr. Jansson.

And the defense attorney got his wish. The 8 year sentence has been reduced to 4.

Swedish Court Sentences Muslim Who Stabbed His Sister 107 Times to 4 Years in Prison

THE ARMY OF TINY MINORITY OF EXTREMISTS

The tiny minority of extremists is so great that law enforcement officials are having trouble finding names in the tiny 875,000 names on the list. The number of names on a highly classified U.S. central database used to track suspected terrorists has jumped to 875,000 from 540,000 only five years ago, a U.S. official familiar with the matter said. And worse still, this isn’t anything like a comprehensive list. These are just the names that came up and were entered into it. The actual list would be vastly larger than a mere 875,000 names. But even 875,000 names is the equivalent of an army. The United States Army only has 561,437 active duty personnel.

Terrorist Watch List of Tiny Minority of Extremists Approaching 1 Million

I BLAME THE BILL OF RIGHTS

It was dastardly of the 2nd amendment of the Bill of Rights to set up an illegal operation smuggling guns to Mexico. And the time when the 2nd amendment’s Attorney General was held in contempt of congress for stonewalling about the illegal operation was pretty bad too. There are some people who say that it was Obama who did those things, not the 2nd amendment, but accountability is so 1792.

Obama Smuggles Guns to Mexico, Blames 2nd Amendment for Mexican Gun Violence

ADIOS LOS ANGELES

California is already circling the drain. Its real hole is already somewhere between 150 billion and 300 billion (despite the glowing media stories on how Jerry Brown balanced the budget and turned the state around.)

California has 12 percent of the nation’s population but 34 percent of its welfare population. It is third in per capita welfare spending. And while a lot of illegal aliens are already cashing in, those numbers will jump in a big way after amnesty.

Will Amnestied Illegal Aliens Bankrupt New Jersey and California?

GREEN ENERGY POWERS WEINERS

So what was Mr. Huma Abedin doing after his retirement from politics and before his return to public life? The early profiles suggested that he sat around all day moping on the couch and learning how to speak entirely in cliches from self-help books. The reality is that he made more money than his wife did by cashing in on two liberal boondoggles.

ObamaCare and Green Energy.

Anthony Weiner’s post-scandal career is an education in crony capitalism and progressive payoffs.

Weiner Cashed In on Green Energy and ObamaCare During his “Break”

ANARCHY IN THE UK

L’s great obsession is the cultivation of empathy. Like most sociopaths, he is incapable of genuinely empathizing with others, but has a narcissistic obsession with the experience of emotion as spectacle.

Embodying the privileged empathy of the left, L promises to raise up the people, but instead degrades them, robbing them of their dignity, their humanity and finally their lives, in order to force them to identify with the sufferings of the less well off.

L is Big Brother given form, substance and motive. His resentments and narcissism represent all too well the modern left. Obsessed with image, L is driven to be a cult figure and succeeds in achieving true cult status at the expense of millions for his grand experiment in enforced empathy

My Review of Jillian Becker's L: A Novel History

RESISTANCE IS FUTILE

In keeping with Marxist dogma, the wealthy men of "Mad Men" just can't help themselves. They are the bourgeoisie pawns of an evolving dialectical materialism, and so their arrogance and duplicity, which cannot be forgiven, come naturally to them. The class these "Mad Men" hucksters represent will be overthrown because their greed, avarice, selfishness, and corruption are internally self-destructive.

That's the slick but unspoken Marxist premise, the "hidden persuader," and schedule of coming events underlying the series. The "exploiters" will be exploited in turn and trounced by "the people." Don Draper, Pete Campbell, and Roger Sterling will all get their dialectical comeuppance.

In "Mad Men" this Hegelian process eventually leads to the depiction of the "natural" intrusion of the civil rights movement and the invasion of the hippy-dippy, pot-smoking "counter culture," of the rise of feminism and gays and lesbians coming out of their closets. Fans not entirely satisfied with the Progressivism of the series are watching it closely to see if Don Draper and his partners and the 60s culture dissolve into their deterministic futures. And soon all the monarchs of mendacity will be shown the door. It's "historical materialism," you see. Resistance is futile.

...from Edward Cline's look at Mad Men

THE RECKONING

After clearing the border the Tecate Truck followed Highway 94 north to it's merge with Highway 8 at La Mesa, California, and then drove west towards Highway 5. It pulled off the road at a rest stop where it picked up a technician in a Tecate uniform who was carrying a case with the necessary electronics and a couple of weapons. After that, the two men followed the road thought the heart of San Diego. It got off the freeway in downtown and quickly made its way to the intersection of North Harbor Drive and West Broadway. It's total travel time from the border to downtown San Diego was just over an hour. It was running close to schedule. It was about 11:30 in the morning.

The truck pulled over and parked along North Harbor drive and the technician took out some binoculars and scanned the harbor beyond the Navy Region Southwest Complex whose entrance was less than 100 yards away. Intelligence was correct. The USS Ronald Reagan was in its home port and riding comfortably at anchor.

The technician opened his case and took a wire that ran from the back of the truck along the floorboards. He plugged it into a jack in the simple switching device in the case. He looked at the driver and smiled. The driver smiled back. They both began to recite a prayer in Arabic while looking over the San Diego harbor. At some point in the prayer, without really thinking about it, the technician threw the switch. In the next instant, at the intersection of North Harbor Drive and West Broadway in San Diego, California on a warm August morning, a miniature version of the Sun appeared on the surface of the Earth.

Gerard envisions a possible and all too probable history...

CONFLATION INFLATION

The left does this on purpose and urges its mindless sheeple to not think, to be “tolerant” and to think that tolerance somehow means acceptance, even submission. It does not. I can tolerate something without accepting it, much less submitting to it. There’s a huge difference, actually, but the English language seems to be a bit problematic for shallow, unthinking leftists (probably why they feel the need to “revise” and “adapt” it so often).

For Leftists: Thinking, Hard.

PLAYING THE GAME

Once the bill makes it out of committee, Republicans are free to grandstand and pretend that they are concerned that the “triggers” that lead to a pathway to citizenship need to be strengthened, and will then note that in good conscience they cannot vote for the bill. Knowing full well that the Democrats already have the simple majority vote to pass it.

It is a fan dance, and one we’ve grown painfully accustomed to. And yet we do nothing to stop it.

...

Now, go hug an illegal. They are the best of us, after all, far more hardworking and noble than the crass Americans who won’t wash their own dishes or pick their own lettuce or tend to their own children but who nevertheless seek to keep down these industrious, god-fearing angels by stubbornly insisting upon the right of country to control the influx of citizens from other countries. They deserve it. Along with free healthcare, reduced-cost tuition, and welfare payments that they can send out of the country.

And after you’ve done that, go find somebody who’s made a YouTube video — it doesn’t matter who, or what, just express your OUTRAGE — then throw a sack over his head and lock him in a closet for the next several months.

At the very least, it’ll give you a feeling of belonging. And who doesn’t crave that?

Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom: A ruling class FYI

The Playgrounds of War

2013-05-09T02:09:00.002-04:00

America is becoming a more tolerant nation, we are told. Each new thing that we learn to tolerate makes us more progressive. But tolerance is a relative thing. For every new thing we learn to tolerate, there is a thing that we must stop tolerating.

Tolerance does not usher in some tolerant anarchy in which we learn to tolerate all things. Rather tolerance is a finite substance. It can only be allocated to so many places. While a society changes, human beings do not fundamentally change. They remain creatures of habit, bound to the poles of things that they like and dislike, the people that they look up to and look down on.

The balance of tolerance and intolerance always remains the same no matter how progressive a society becomes. A tolerant society allocates its intolerance differently. There is no such thing as a universally tolerant society. Only a society that tolerates different things. A tolerant society does not cease being bigoted. It is bigoted in different ways.

America today tolerates different things. It tolerates little boys dressing up as little girls at school, but not little boys pointing pencils and making machine gun noises on the playground.

The little boy whose mother dressed him up in girlish clothes once used to be a figure of contempt while the little boy pretending to be a marine was the future of the nation. Now the boy in the dress is the future of the nation having joined an identity group and entirely new gender by virtue of his mother's Münchausen-syndrome-by-proxy and the aspiring little marine is suspected of one day trading in his sharpened pencil for one of those weapons of war as soon as the next gun show comes to town.

The Duke of Wellington once said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton. What battles will the boys playing on the playgrounds where dodgeball is banned and finger guns are a crime win and what sort of nation will they be fighting to protect?

The average school shooter is closer to the boy in the dress than the aspiring marine, but the paranoia over school shootings isn't really about profiles, it's about personalities. It's easier to dump the blame for all those school shootings onto masculinity's already reviled shoulders than to examine the premises. And mental shortcuts that speed along highways of prejudice to bring us to the town of preconceived notions are the essence of intolerance.

The trouble with tolerance is that there is always someone deciding what to tolerate. It is a natural process for individuals, but a dangerous one for governments and institutions.

In one of George Washington's most famous letters, he wrote to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport that, "All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights."

The letter is widely quoted, including on a site that bills itself as "Tolerance.org", mainly for its more famous quote of, "the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance". But the tolerant quoters miss the point.

George Washington was not advocating transforming the United States government into an arbiter of tolerance in order to fight against bigotry; he was decrying the very notion that the government should act to impose the condescension of tolerance on some perceived inferior classes.

Tolerance is arrogant. A free society does not tolerate people, it allows them to live their own values. And a tolerant society is not free. It is a dictatorship of virtue that is intolerant toward established values in order to better tolerate formerly intolerable values. A free society does not tell people of any religion or no religion what to believe. A tolerant society forces them all to pay for abortions because its dictators of virtue have decided that the time has come to teach this lesson in tolerance.

An open society finds wisdom in its own uncertainty. A tolerant society, like a teenager, is certain that it already knows all the answers and lacks only the means of imposing them on others. It confuses its destruction of the past with progress and its sense of insecurity with righteousness.

To the tolerant, intolerance is the most powerful act possible. They solve problems by refusing to tolerate their root causes. School shootings are carried out with guns and so the administrative denizens of the gun-free zones run campaigns of intolerance toward the physical existence of guns, the owners of guns, the manufacturers of guns, the civil rights groups that defend gun ownership and eventually toward John Puckle, Samuel Colt, John Moses Browning and the 82nd element in the periodic table.

None of this accomplishes a single practical thing, but it is an assertion of values, not of functions. The paranoid mindset that cracks down on little boys who chew pop tarts into deadly shapes, little boys who point pencils and fingers at each other, is not out to stop school shootings, but is struggling to assert the intolerance of its tolerant value system over the intangible root of violence.

It's not about preventing school shootings, but about asserting a value system in which there is no place for the aspiring marine, unless he's handing out food to starving children in Africa in a relief operation, serving as a model of gay marriage to rural America or engaging in some other approved, but non-violent activity.

To understand the NRA's argument about the moral value of a gun deriving from the moral value of the wielder would require a worldview that is more willing to accept a continuum of shades, rather than criminalizing pencils and pop tarts for guilt by geometric association. A free society could do that, but a tolerant society, in which everything must be assigned an unchanging value to determine whether it will be tolerated and enforced or not tolerated and outlawed, cannot.

A tolerant society is as rigidly moralistic as the most stereotypical band of puritans. It is never at ease unless it has assigned an absolute moral value to every object in its world, no matter how petty, until it represents either good or evil. If good, it must be mandated. If evil, it must be regulated. And everything that is not good, must by exclusion be evil. Everything that does not lead to greater tolerance must be intolerable.

The FDA is proposing to regulate caffeine. The EPA is regulating carbon emission and encouraging states to tax the rain. Schools are suspending students for the abstract depiction of guns on such a symbolic level that Picasso would have trouble recognizing them. There is something medieval about such a compulsive need to impose a complete moral order on every aspect of one's environment.

These policies take place in the real world and in response to assertions of real threats, but they are largely assertions of values. The debates over them tap into a clash of worldviews. That is as true of Newtown as it is of Boston. The same tolerant liberalism that can see deadly menace in a pencil or a pop tart, is blind to the lethal threat of a Chechen Islamist. If a gun is innately evil, then a member of a minority group, especially a persecuted one, is innately good. The group certainly remains above reproach.

The arrogance of tolerance does not allow for ambiguity. There is no room for guns in schools or profiling of terrorists. Instead all guns are bad and all Muslims are good. In the real world, it may take bad guns to stop good Muslims, but the system just doubles down on encouraging students to recite the Islamic declaration of faith while suspending them for chewing their pop tarts the wrong way.

Liberal values are at odds with reality and they are not about to let reality win. In their more tolerant nation, there is more room than ever for little boys who dream of one day setting off pressure cooker bombs at public events in the name of their religion, but very little room for little boys dreaming of being the ones to stop them.

As a society we have come to celebrate the helplessness of victimhood and the empowerment of "speaking out" as the single most meaningful act to be found in a society that has become all talk. The new heroism is the assertion of some marginal identity, rather than the defense of a society in which all identities can exist. That is the difference between freedom and tolerance.

The little boy in a dress has put on the uniform of tolerance while the little boy making rat tat noises with a pencil is showing strong signs of playing for the wrong team. The wrong team is the one that solves problems by shooting people, rather than lawyering them to death or writing denunciations of them to the tolerance department of diversity and othering.

The complainer is the hero and the doer is the villain. Reporters and lawyers are the heroes because they are the arbiters of tolerance. Soldiers and police officers are the gun-happy villains because they respond to realities, rather than identities. They unthinkingly shoot without understanding the subtext. A free society is practical. It acts in its own defense. A tolerant society acts to assert its values. The former fights terrorists and murderers, while the latter lets them go to show off its tolerant values.

A free society teaches little boys that the highest value is to die in defense of others. A tolerant society teaches them that it is better to die as recognized victims than to become the aggressor and lose the moral high ground.

This is the clash of values that holds true on the playground and on the battlefield of war. On the playground, little boys are suspended for waving around pencils and on the battlefield, soldiers are ordered not to defend themselves so that their country can win the hearts and minds of the locals in the endless Afghan Valentine's Day of COIN that has stacked up a horrifying toll of bodies.

In their cities, men and women are told to be tolerant, to extend every courtesy and to suspect nothing of the friendly Islamists in their neighborhoods. It is better to be blown up as a tolerant society, they are told, than to point the pop tart of intolerance on the great playground of the nanny state.

The Road to Nowhere

2013-05-07T23:36:00.000-04:00

The Heritage Institute report estimates that under amnesty the average legalized illegal household will take in $43,900 in benefits while paying a little over a third of that in taxes. Those numbers are grim from the standpoint of a tottering economy being asked to take on an even bigger pile of debt and they reveal an even grimmer view of the future.

Set aside the political debates, the tensions over multiculturalism, entitlements and the great political divide, and those numbers reek of a country whose only future is poverty.

Subsidized poverty, even if we had the ability to continue subsidizing it forever, is still poverty. A Food Stamp Nation made up of slums full of bodegas and check cashing places does not offer any kind of future. Its only growth industries are in expensive government jobs or cheap service jobs leading to an economy of two tiers; one for workers and another for political workers.

"A report came out recently which showed what most Mexicans had long suspected - there is almost no social mobility in the country whatsoever. If you are born into poverty the chances are very high that you will die poor too," a BBC report from Mexico concludes.

Now substitute America for Mexico. Imagine a society sharply divided between the working class and the government class where political connections mean more than any single other factor.

The report begins with the daughter of the Federal Attorney General for Consumer Protection shutting down a restaurant because they wouldn't give her a seat and ends with two wealthy women abusing a police officer by calling him "asalariado" or "wage earner".

Asalariado is becoming an insult in the United States. And the irony is that amnesty for illegal aliens may complete the process through which the people who came here looking to find opportunities that didn't exist in Mexico will turn America into Mexico.

America hardly had any class issues because both the rich and the poor worked. A Carnegie or a Rockefeller might be able to buy and sell a thousand ordinary men, but still started out at the bottom of the ladder and never stopped working. To have proper class issues, you need a permanent leisure class to create that gap between those who work and those who do nothing.

In a dynamic economy, a leisure class is largely unsustainable. Inheriting a pile of money and then doing nothing is not likely to end well. But a dynamic economy depends on social mobility. An oligarchy regulates the economy into an impoverished predictability in which there is hardly any social mobility and a permanent leisure class. Its permanence depends not on the economy, but on its control.

Or to put it another way, suppose you have X millions of dollars to invest. Do you look for undervalued companies with a future or companies with political connections? In a dynamic economy, you invest based on merit. In an oligarchy, you invest based on political connections because the idea or the model are mostly worthless. The economy is divided up into spheres of influence carved out by interests and guilds.

In the age of Obama, a smart strategy is to invest in politically connected companies with bad business models and then get out before they go down. Nothing of worth or value will be created. Instead the wealth will circulate within the oligarchy and pay out profits with money harvested from the Asalariados, the suckers still trying to claw their way up instead of phlegmatically accepting their plight and cashing their government checks.

Eventually either the checks will get smaller or the price of milk will get higher. The Asalariados may look like suckers in the short term, but they're still getting ahead in the long term. The grasshopper may shop for groceries without checking prices while the ant grits his teeth at the cash register, but when the economic freeze comes, it's the ant who has the skills to survive.

But the oligarchy is designed to keep the ant from climbing too high. The last time the ants climbed too high, feudalism collapsed and gave way to the free enterprise economy, and most of the thinkers of Europe spent centuries trying to figure out how to put everything back into a neatly controllable natural order with lots of farms and lots of cheerful people working on them without complaint.

Communism was just feudalism in the name of the people. And once the revolution happened, the farmers got the worst of it. The Soviet Union confined them to collective farms after starving them. Communist China is throwing them off the land by the millions. American liberalism has become an urban feudalism without the labor. Its vision is millions of people sneering at the Asalariados from the bottom of the ladder while celebrating their freedom from labor and dependence on government.

Its romance of righteous wealth redistribution can only endure until the final triumph of liberalism occurs and then all the debts have to be paid and the oligarchy can begin to consolidate its gains. And then the only people who can safely sneer at working men will be the ones on top of the ladder.

The end of social mobility has been made to seem appealing. It's been dressed up in subsidies and entitlements, into gateways out of the barrio or the ghetto by becoming a sports star or a pop star, but those are all ways of disguising poverty.

The unemployment numbers can be massaged, welfare can be disguised as disability, the erosion of real jobs can be hidden in government jobs and debt can be turned into investments, but no matter how you dress up poverty, the rags still peek out from underneath.

While liberal politicians give speeches about the possibilities of the future, they know that the future is out of reach for everyone but their own circle. The future seems bright to them, but dim to everyone else. The big corporations are becoming oversized and interdependent, merging and coalescing into each other and into the government. Every industry is coming to resemble the old defense contractor model with government officials and CEOs trading jobs and making lucrative arrangements. Yesterday it was cars, energy and finance. Now it's medicine. And tomorrow some other sector of the economy will be consolidated and rebuilt into an arm of the government.

The mass migration of people, the influx of low skilled workers, exist to make money for some and votes for others, but there is no longer any place for them to go except to the welfare office and the quota machine that funnels a percentage of them into colleges and then government jobs and then back to their old neighborhoods to spread the word on behalf of whatever cause the people who set the quotas want them to.

Whether or not amnesty comes, the United States of America is becoming too much like Mexico; a society of limited possibilities and diminished social mobility. A road to nowhere.

Joseph Chamie, the former director of the United Nations Population Division, recently wrote an article proposing that the United States open its borders to become the world's largest country. All it would have to do is step up immigration from 1.2 million a year to 10 million a year. And then by the end of the century, the country would have 1.6 billion people.

As insane as the Chamie proposal might be, its insanity is just that of extrapolating the existing madness on a grander scale. It's the sort of madness that asks, why settle for drilling a hole in the boat when you can smash the entire hull? Increasing immigration tenfold is crazy, but so is our current policy. Aiming for 1.6 billion is nuts, but so is aiming for 1 billion. It's a difference in scale, not in content. The problem is the content and the context.

America's industrial infrastructure has been dismantled and a welfare state has taken its place. The country is not importing workers, it's importing voters. And the dismantlers are doing the importing. Territorially the United States may be able to absorb 1.6 billion people, though it will cease to be anything resembling its old self long before 2100, even without the insane UN plan, but it can't do so because the economic ability to absorb immigrants is being destroyed by the politics of immigration.

The 1.6 billion strong America of 2100 will look a lot like the places those immigrants came from. It will have the same oligarchies, the same uncontrollably corrupt politics and religious wars, and the same pervasive sense of hopelessness for the vast majority of the population. It will be a failed state.

Imagine an America in which the middle class has receded to a thumbnail but those at the top behave the same way that they do now. Imagine the massive economic burden on a country of wage slaves, the asalariados who are squeezed to pay for all the latest whims and gimmicks, for the thefts and spendthrift academics.

Imagine an Obama with no restraint on his power and no middle class to drain or credit rating to borrow against and you have a true nation of wage slaves in which democracy is largely useless because the political and economic institutions have been consolidated and the population is too powerless to do more than fight with each other for a piece of the government's subsidies.

Immigration is not the trigger for this; it is the accelerant. Even if the Rubio-Schumer strategy for destroying the country fails, the road still leads nowhere. Combining open borders and a closed economy is a disaster. But a closed economy and porous borders are still a disaster. The end of a closed economy is indistinguishable from feudalism and a preview of coming attractions is available in states with high immigrant populations.

Government control of the economy has made votes more powerful than labor. And when voting is more powerful than working, then a new leisure class that looks down on wage slaves is born.

The Burglar-Terrorist Alliance

2013-05-06T23:41:00.001-04:00

(The following is an adaptation of a talk that I recently gave.)

Every act of violence has two sides. The side of those who carry it and the side of those who let it happen. When a burglar breaks into a home and kills two people, we don't just discuss what made him do it, but why it was allowed to happen.

That's a conversation we rarely have about terrorism. The left wants us to talk about terrorism as a reaction to something that we as a society or a nation did. It doesn't want to talk about how it smoothes the way for terrorists to do what they do.

The left has a long history of being soft on crime and empowering criminals because it rejects the idea that society is good and criminals are bad. Instead it flips the equation around. Criminals are good because society is bad.

The man with a house full of stuff is bad for keeping it from the burglar who just wants to have some of the good life.

Now America is bad. It's bad for wanting to have the good life. It's bad for wanting to protect its own people. It's privileged. And to the left, privileged is the dirtiest word it can think of. The left will put on NEA sponsored plays full of every possible obscenity, but privilege is what it considers a really dirty word.

The left doesn't accept the basic parameters of our society. It doesn't accept that if you buy a house, it's yours. It doesn't accept that if you work 100 hours for 10 dollars an hour that you're entitled to a thousand dollars. It doesn't believe that you built anything.

And so it doesn't accept the idea that stealing or killing is wrong.

The left doesn't accept that the United States has a right to safe and secure borders. It doesn't accept that when it comes to immigration policy or to terrorism.

The left doesn't accept that the United States has a right to exist.

This is where the left finds common ground with Islamic terrorists. Islamic terrorists and the left both agree that the United States is an immoral society. They agree that the United States must be fundamentally transformed.

They just disagree on what it needs to be transformed into.

The left does not believe that violence is an illegitimate means of political change. If it did, you wouldn't see those Che shirts and the Haymarket bombers wouldn't have their own memorial in Chicago.

The left believes that there are two kinds of political violence; legitimate and illegitimate.

The difference between the two isn't about soldiers and civilians or about the scale. The Soviet Union killed huge amounts of innocent people. Bill Ayers was thinking in terms of killing millions.

It's about the ideology.

The left divides political violence into the illegitimate violence of the oppressors and the legitimate violence of the oppressed.

The violence of the oppressors is the violence of people who have homes that they want to keep. The violence of the oppressed is the violence of the burglars.

The left will ruthlessly suppress what it calls the violence of the oppressors, but it will make excuses for and even collaborate in the violence of the oppressed.

When it comes to the violence of the oppressors, the left will say that we need to use every possible means to stamp it out and destroy the mindset that makes it possible. We need to open reeducation camps, drag people out of their homes in the middle of the night and lock them up for believing the wrong thing.

But when it comes to the violence of the oppressed, the left will make excuses. It will say this young fellow had a bad life. He had some setbacks. He couldn't succeed as a boxer. He picked up some PTSD at his job. He was angry at American foreign policy. He was one of the oppressed. And the left lies about and makes excuses for the oppressed.

To the left, Islamic terrorism is the violence of the oppressed. It's not the evil violence of the homeowner shooting a burglar, but the moral violence of the burglar who just wants to redistribute some wealth.

Even moderate liberals don't want to deal with the reality of Muslim violence because it ruins their multicultural paradise. Muslim violence is the snake in their multicultural garden of eden. If they admit that Muslim immigration is endangering the country, then they have to rethink immigration. If they admit that there is something wrong with at least some forms of Islam, then they have to question their belief that all cultures are good... except Western culture.

And so the left picks up the encyclopedia of Muslim violence and puts it on a very familiar shelf. It's the same shelf that they began putting crime on in the 60s and 70s.

Don't fight crime. Fight the root causes of crime. Fight poverty. Fight neglect. Fight inequality. Spend billions to fight poverty in the Muslim world. Fight Islamophobia in America. Do all the other soft on crime stuff that nearly destroyed most American cities.

And most of all... deny that there is a problem.

Liberals or leftists don't see Islam for what it is. They see it for what they want it to be.

They see it as the burglar trying to break into Uncle Sam's house. They don't want to talk about how to stop the burglar. They want to talk about how to make the burglar feel better about himself.

And so they tell NASA that its prime directive is to make burglars feel better about themselves.

And the thing that makes burglars feel bad is to be associated with crime. Instead the word goes out to emphasize that only a very tiny minority of burglar extremists is associated with breaking into houses. The rest just practice some form of moderate breaking and entering.

We have to recognize that all the breaking and entering comes from legitimate grievances, not criminal intent. Deal with the grievances and there will be no more burglaries so long as we don't make the burglars feel like criminals.

If we don't believe they're burglars, they won't be burglars, the ostrich says.

If we don't recognize terrorism, then terrorism won't recognize us, the left says.

The left operates on this strange kind of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It believes that if we don't recognize that Islamic terrorism exists, then Muslims will stop being terrorists.

If we stop calling Islamic terrorism, Islamic, then Muslims will stop seeing Al Qaeda as Islamic. This is the actual argument that gets made by liberal experts on terrorism over and over again.

If we stick our heads in the sand, the Muslim world will do it too.

That doesn't work. The Muslim world will not put on a blindfold just because we put one on. Instead the blindfold makes it impossible for us to recognize Islam as the connecting principle of the War on Terror.

What links a Major Nidal Hasan to a Tamerlan Tsarnaev to the next guy plotting a terrorist attack? If you take Islam out of the equation then there is no link. There is no motive. Just random acts of workplace violence by failed boxers and army doctors. Terrorism denial takes motive out of the equation. There is no longer a motive. Just senseless violence. And without motive, you can't profile or predict. Without motive, narrowing down suspects becomes very difficult.

If the Boston bombers hadn't struck at a public event in an age where everyone totes their own smartphones, how much time would law enforcement have spent chasing the Tea Party tax protesters that the establishment wanted them to find?v Would the terrorists have been able to buy enough time to make it to New York City and carry out the next phase of their plan while law enforcement was knocking on the doors of people who are angry about paying too many taxes to subsidize the likes of Tamerlan Tsarnaev?

Why was Tamerlan Tsarnaev given a pass despite his history of violence and interest in Jihad?

Because there is no such thing as Islamic terrorism. Just anger over foreign policy. As a Chechen, it was assumed that Tamerlan was angry about Russian foreign policy. And this isn't Russia. So there was no problem.

Islam was the missing link. Without Islam, there was no reason for Tamerlan Tsarnaev to carry out an attack in Boston rather than Moscow. With Islam there was every reason for him to fight on the front that he was most familiar with.

There is a reason the burglar got in the house, killed 4 people and wounded many more. It's because we refused to recognize what motivates him.

A Chechen Muslim Jihadist, like a Mali Muslim Jihadist and a Syrian Muslim Jihadist and a Taliban Jihadist fights locally, but thinks globally.

We didn't deal with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in time because we thought it was a local problem. What do the Taliban have to do with New York or Washington?

What does Chechnya have to do with Boston?

There is no such thing as purely local Islamic terrorism. Islam is transnational.

An Islamic terrorist anywhere is a potential threat everywhere. Bring him to America, let him into the country and he is a threat right here, the same way that a Communist was a threat to any country he ended up in.

Understanding that is the key to fighting Islamic terrorism. But the media and the political
establishment insist that we go deeper into denial after every terrorist attack. Stick our heads deeper in the sand and maybe whatever is trying to eat us will stop being angry and go away.

Terrorism denial is the biggest threat to America. The terrorists alone can't destroy us. Not even if they detonate a weapon of mass destruction on American soil. But pretending that they don't exist can give them the time to get big enough.

It takes two parties to break into a home. The burglar and a society that accepts crime as normal or misunderstood.

When it comes to terrorism, most Western countries have taken the attitude that terrorists are misunderstood. And that's true. Terrorists are misunderstood and they are the ones who refuse to understand them.

Muslim terrorists are not suffering from too many blows to the head or secondhand PTSD. They have a purpose. Terrorism denial ignores that purpose and makes it easier for them to win.

The Muslims the Media Doesn't See

2013-05-05T19:00:00.000-04:00

The media coverage of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has one theme and one tack. Like 30 of the 31 men on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list, they were terrorists who just happened to be Muslim.

While the New York Times dispatched its best and brightest lackeys to Boston to write sensitive
pieces on how hard it was for the two Tsarnaevs to fit in leaving them no choice but to bomb the Boston Marathon and then send LOL texts to their friends, it fell to a UK tabloid like The Sun to conduct an interview with the ex-girlfriend of the lead terrorist and learn that he wanted her to hate America and beat her because she wouldn't wear a Hijab.

There are all sorts of jobs that Americans won't do. Like pick lettuce, bomb the Boston Marathon and report honestly on the motives of the bombers. The only news network that operates outside the media consensus is owned by an Australian mogul who also owns The Sun.

Americans like to think of their press as freer, but it's only free in the sense that it voluntarily puts on its own muzzle. European tabloids get into bloody brawls with regulators. American newspapers have nothing to brawl about. They will gleefully report anything that undermines national security at the drop of a hat, knowing that they won't be touched, but there is a long list of subjects that they won't touch with a million mile pole.

In Europe, editors risked their lives to publish the Mohammed cartoons. In America, on the rare occasion that they were depicted, they were usually censored. CNN, which could show Kathy Griffin trying to molest Anderson Cooper, without the benefit of pixelation or a suicide button, blurred out Mohammed's face; assuming that Muslims would appreciate the sensitivity of treating their prophet's face like an obscene object.

The American media does not need to be censored. It censors itself.

Did the New York Times really fail to come across Tamerlan Tsarnaev's ex-girlfriend and domestic abuse victim while they were busily interviewing every single person in Boston who ever ran into the future terrorists? Doubtful. The New York Times may be incompetent, but it isn't that incompetent. If it could track down Tamerlan's old coach, it could track down his old girlfriend. It chose not to.

So did every other paper.

Either The Sun is staffed with crack journalists who could do what no American newspaper, news channel and network news program could, or The Sun got the scoop on Nadine Ascencao because no newspaper on this side of the ocean wanted to touch it. And it's easy to see why.

Nadine talks about being beaten in the name of Islam, forced to memorize Koran verses and being taught to hate America. Most journalists on this side of the ocean want quotes on what nice boys the two Tsarnaevs were and how, in true liberal fashion, no one could have expected them to do something like this.

Every background story on them is filled with the same pabulum, because the endless march of “We couldn’t have known” quotes provides the government-media complex with the plausible deniability it needs to continue doing the same thing all over again. If the people couldn’t have known, then it stands to reason that their government or their media couldn’t have known either.

No Islam please, we're American was the mainstream media's unspoken message. We don't do Islamic terrorism. We only report on terrorists who happen to be Muslim.

The only newspaper besides The Sun to do an interview with Nadine Ascencao was the Wall Street Journal; which just happens to be owned by the same tabloid mogul. But there is an interesting difference between The Sun and the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ piece doesn't mention Hijabs, Koran verses or hating America. It doesn't mention Islam at all.

Co-written by a Pakistani journalist, it emphasizes only that Tamerlan was a bully of no particular religion. That reporter's twitter feed features a retweet from another Muslim WSJ reporter who broadcasts that the plans of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to head to Times Square amounted to nothing. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Nothing to see here is the theme of the media's coverage. Like a movie, it begins with inspirational tales of courage, and then just when the villains were about to come on the scene, the credits began to roll. It's only been twenty minutes, but the audience gets hustled out of the theater and told to leave their sodas and popcorn behind.

The "folks who did this", in Obama's patently false folksy parlance, were caught. Or at least one of them was. The sacred liberal ceremony of the Miranda warning was recited by a judge at his bedside and the trial will now move through the traditional phases of expensive lawyers paid for by the taxpayer pleading that their client was traumatized by our foreign policy and the entire story being shoved to the back of the media's coat rack behind the next sports star who comes out of the closet.

This is the surreal world of the American media, which wields its weapons of mass distraction with clinical precision, so that the news hour and the local paper are virtually indistinguishable in content from an old episode of The Jerry Springer Show. But it can't possibly spare the time for a coherent discussion of the real world motives of two men who carried out a major terrorist attack in Boston.

Soviet citizens listened to the Voice of America to find out what their own government wouldn't tell them. American citizens have to read The Sun and the Daily Mail, publications whose standards are slightly above that of The Huffington Post and yet, like the National Inquirer, have become one of the few outlets that will chase after the stories that the media has embargoed as effectively as Pravda.

Instead of wasting time on a dead end like Islam, the media has spent its time chasing down every other possible angle.

Did Tamerlan turn terrorist because he took too many blows to the head while boxing? Could the Boston Marathon bombing have been prevented if only we had let him win?

The New York Times assembled a touching story of an aspiring immigrant boxer radicalized by the petty restrictions of a government that wouldn't let him apply for citizenship because of his history of domestic violence and appearance on a terrorist watch list. But how does that jibe with the Tamerlan from five earlier who beat up a boy that his sister was dating because he wasn't Muslim?

When the media must deal with Tamerlan's theology, it keeps him in the category of the troubled man who turned to some wacky extremist version of Islam propounded by a YouTube convert. The man who beat his sister's boyfriend because he wasn't a Muslim and beat his ex-girlfriend because she wouldn't wear a Hijab wasn't some brainwashed drone who had his mind stolen by YouTube videos. He was a Muslim.

The Tamerlan of 2007 might not have watched as many Jihadist videos, but it would be a mistake to assume that he would have disagreed with their content. That Tamerlan might not have been looking at bombing targets, but neither would he have been upset and angry if some other Muslim had done what he would go on to do. Like Dzhokhar's two Muslim friends, his first reaction would have been to cover it up.

When it comes to serial killers and mass shooters, the media is conditioned to look for a break that follows some life crisis. But with Muslim terrorists there is no discontinuity, only continuity. A few setbacks might have made terrorism more appealing to Tamerlan, but that would not have happened if it had not already been on his menu of life choices. Or that of his brother.

That angle is the most terrifying one that the media can think of. It's the one that they can't touch. It's the one that they won't let anyone else touch either. If they have to mention the "I" word, they will sandwich it between "extremist" and "radicalization". But it's not Tamerlan who was the radical extremist. Among Muslims, his views were mainstream. The Wahhabis are in ascendance in most parts of the world, including the United States. Islamist parties roundly won the Arab Spring.

What was the difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and any of the Syrian Jihadists held up by the media as the epitome of courage and bravery? What is the difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the Hamas and Fatah terrorists that the media peevishly contends Israel must make peace with? What is the difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and any of the tens of thousands of Muslim terrorists fighting in conflicts around the world?

While the European media, for all its faults, occasionally grapples with the incompatibility of liberal values and Muslim values; on this side of the ocean the topic is all but untouchable. There is no national censorship body that does this. Instead stories are held down by the weight of a consensus that insists the media exists to promote liberal values. All else follows from there.

The stories that promote liberal values are reported. The stories about a future Muslim terrorist beating his girlfriend because she wouldn't wear a Hijab are not because those stories create a sneaking suspicion that Muslim multiculturalism is incompatible with liberal values. And the incompatible Muslims, like Mohammed’s face, have been pixelated out of existence in reports on the terrorist attacks by disgruntled boxers, doctors and perfume salesmen who just happen to be Muslim.

These are the Muslims that the media doesn’t see. And it is doing everything possible to make sure that we don’t see them either.

"The Golden Apple" - A Socialist Fairy Tale

2013-05-03T07:05:00.000-04:00

Once upon a time there was a street fair. It had striped awnings and bright colors and from far and near, farmers came with wagons full of produce to sell at the street fair. The produce was plentiful and cheap and the crowds it drew were huge which created all sorts of concerns for the government.

So the government created a Ministry of Street Fairs which it funded by taxing the produce sold at the fair. At first the Ministry brought some some order to the street fair, but it would periodically launch new "street fair initiatives" to justify another expansion and pay for them by raising taxes on the produce.

At first the taxes were small, but as the ministry grew, so did the Produce Tax. The Ministry of Street Fairs built itself a towering stone headquarters overlooking the street fair. In its shadow, the street fair dwindled as its produce was now more expensive than anywhere else in the city.

The empty fair would once have been a relief to the government, but was now a source of concern because it had grown dependent on the Produce Tax and plenty of its nephews and nieces had picked up lucrative positions in the great stone building.

So after some consultation the Ministry of Street Fairs launched an "Emergency Street Fair Stimulus Plan" to promote shopping at the street fair. The stimulus plan offered people credit for shopping at the street fair, but the credit was paid for by borrowing against the expected returns from an enlarged produce tax. The stimulus plan also piled on new regulations to be enforced by new branches of the Ministry of Street Fairs detailing exactly how many pears can be placed in a basket and the exact shade of green that a Granny Smith apple should be.

A short term burst of shoppers excited by the credit arrives and then fades away. The new taxes and regulations force the fruit sellers to raise prices again. The credit goes away, but the high prices remain.

Worried, senior members of the Ministry of Street Fairs do the unthinkable and consult with some of the vendors at the fair. They learn that their old customers are choosing to shop for their fruit at supermarkets where all the taxes and regulations don't apply because there is, as of yet, no Ministry of Supermarkets.

Tackling the problem head on, the Ministry of Street Fairs demands that supermarkets be classified as indoor street fairs and put under its jurisdiction. The "Supermarkets are now Indoor Street Fairs" bill is introduced and not only puts the supermarkets under the Ministry's authority, but taxes them at twice the rate of street fairs. Supporters of the bill denounce the evil "Supermarket Lobby" for its indoor unregulated street fairs which use a legal loophole to profit at the expense of starving children who need fresh fruit.

The bill passes. The Ministry is congratulated for its commitment to fighting for the right of everyone to buy fruit at vastly inflated prices.

Produce sales fall drastically as fruit becomes a luxury. Most fruit now spoils on the stands with no one to buy it because no one will buy it at the minimum price necessary to turn even the most minimal profit. Fruit sellers and merchants raise their prices again to compensate for decreased sales volume. Many supermarkets and sellers go out of business, so that even fewer people can afford fruit. In a ripple effect, fruit growers and importers also go out of business further destroying the market.

The Ministry of Street Fairs responds to public protests by creating a "Fruit Dole" which entitles every child to one apple a week. This dole comes at the expense of the fruit sellers, which again raises the price of fruit for everyone. Charismatic young politicians demand "Fruit for the People" and denounce the corrupt interests who keep the people from having access to fruit. A radical "Fruit People's Party" is created with a call for nationalizing the orchards to ensure equal fruit for everyone.

The Ministry announces that fruit may only be sold at a fixed low price. The taxes on fruit sellers however remain just as high. Most of the fruit sellers go out of business. The few who remain in business, sell bad fruit at the mandated price to the public, while selling good fresh fruit under the table at much higher prices. Now everyone can afford fruit, but the only fruit they can buy is rotten.

The charismatic young politicians and the "Fruit People's Party" demand to know why the only fruit available to the people is bad fruit. An investigation is launched and several of the sellers are arrested for covertly selling good fruit at much higher prices. The sellers are sentenced to jail, and a new Fruit Inspection Squad is launched to patrol the street fair to see that no one sells fruit at higher prices.

The Fruit Inspection Squad's salary is paid for by an even higher Produce Tax and the fruit sellers are forced to begin covertly selling fruit that they would have once considered bad under the table. The fruit that they sell to the public at the mandated low price is so rotten that it is completely inedible.

Within a few days, the Fruit Inspection Squad members have made arrangements with the fruit sellers to pocket fresh fruit for themselves and their families in exchange for looking the other way at their covert fruit sales. Soon there is an outcry and an investigation. More fruit sellers are arrested, along with members of the Fruit Inspection Squad, who receive lengthy jail sentences for corrupting their high office and taking fruit out of the mouths of children.

A new Fruit Inspection Squad is appointed, with twice as many members. Additionally, a Fruit Secret Police composed of undercover agents who are tasked with rooting out corruption in the Fruit Inspection Squad, is unleashed to watch the fruit watchmen.

All this new manpower comes with an even higher Produce Tax. The fruit sellers are no longer able to meet the demands of the taxes, as well as the bribes expected by both the Fruit Inspection Squad and the Fruit Secret Police to allow them to stay in business. Instead they go over their heads and suborn a few senior members of the Ministry of Street Fairs with fresh fruit. The fruit sold at the street fair and in the supermarkets is now more rotten than ever and draws flies from miles around.

Politicians rise to denounce corruption in the Ministry of Street Fairs, and its Fruit Inspection Squad and Secret Fruit Police. New Ministry members, drawn from the ranks of fruit equality activists, pledge their absolute devotion to the highest standards of ethics. Instead they collude with members of the Secret Fruit Police to create a secret fruit cartel which sells fresh fruit to the very rich at high prices. The Fruit Cartel extends into the highest levels of the government.

The fruit at the street fair is more rotten than ever, but the Fruit Dole is doubled to two apples a week, though employees at the Ministry usually steal and resell the fruit intended for the fruit dole during their inspections. The cartel creates a thriving underground fruit market. Young boys throughout the city earn a few coins by whispering to passerby, "Hey Mister, would you like to buy some fruit."

The fruit cartel transforms into organized crime. Rival fruit sellers engage in knife fights. A number of children are killed while selling fruit.

The public demands that the government do something and the government increases jail terms for illegal fruit sales and doubles the size of the Ministry's budget by doubling taxes on the fruit sellers. The fruit sold at the fair is positively horrifying, but no one is there to notice. In the shadow of the gray Ministry building, the street fair stands empty as the fruit trade has moved into the back alleys.

A major research study is undertaken, its results overseen by a blue ribbon commission, which calls on the Ministry to address the fruit shortage by nationalizing all the remaining fruit sellers and supermarkets promising a new standard of excellent and absolute control over all fruit sales.

The government dithers, encouraging people to grow fruit in their own backyards, for their own use-- which can be sold only after an expensive licensing and approvals process, but this only increases the illegal fruit market, as many citizens begin growing fruit and reselling it on the black fruit market.

The Fruit Cartel, enforced by the Secret Fruit Police, attempts to control this market. Daily radio broadcasts denounce "Fruit Hoarders" and declare a "War on Backyard Fruit." Home fruit growing is banned, but nevertheless thrives. In an attempt to stamp out Illegal Fruit Growing, a ban is introduced on many agricultural supplies which might be used by illegal fruit growers.

The public outrage against crime, the high price of illegal fruit and the low quality of legal fruit, combined with the Ministry's blatant corruption, encourages support for the Fruit People's Party's revolution. The entire government is shot. The Ministry of Street Fairs becomes the People's Ministry of Street Fairs, and promises an end to put an end to corruption and provide "Fruit for Everyone".

As its first act, the People's Ministry demands that the fruit growers and importers provide "Fruit for Everyone." The few fruit growers and importers who have not gone out of business, have gotten used to selling their fruit illegally. The People's Ministry has them tried and executed and their orchards and businesses are nationalized "In the Name of the People." In their place, the government sends unemployed wagon drivers, who know nothing about growing fruit except that it has to be delivered, to work the orchards. A new "Golden Age of Fruit for Everyone" is declared.

The fruit orchards go mostly untended. The new workers know nothing about agriculture, their salaries are minimal and their motivation is entirely absent. At the beginning of each growing season, the "People's Ministry of Street Fairs" sets out a target number for the crop that they expect to grow. When the workers fail to meet that quota, the People's Secret Fruit Police accuses them of economic sabotage and has them executed. Prisoners takes their place working under the rifles of armed guards.

After a few seasons of this, there is still no fruit. In fact there is less fruit than there ever was. The People's Ministry compensates for this by importing fruit from abroad which it distributes in small amounts through the "Fruit Dole". What little fresh fruit is grown goes to the Fruit People's Party, as well as the numerous lackeys of the Fruit Inspection Bureaucracy that evaluates and weighs the produce for weight equality.

At the end of every harvest, the People's Fruit Propaganda Corps declares that under the wise leadership of the Fruit People's Party, with the insightful guidance of the members of the People's Ministry of Street Fairs, with the tireless efforts of the Fruit Inspection Bureaucracy, and through the hard dedicated labor of the Fruit Growers (those who hadn't been shot yet), the target for the fruit harvest has been both met and exceeded. Posters depict ripe shining fruit surrounded by shining rays and radio broadcasts exclaim over the great number of fruit grown. Children memorize speeches about how lucky they are to be living in the greatest country in the world where fruit is available to everyone on the Fruit Dole; whether or not they can pay for it.

Meanwhile the only fruit at the street fairs will kill you as soon as you take a bite. The only reason anyone goes there is make a connection with illegal fruit sellers, who resell fruit stolen by members of the Fruit Inspection Bureaucracy. At private parties, the members of the People's Ministry and the People's Party dine lavishly on pears and apples, and decadently spoon handfuls of grapes into their mouths... little aware that in the outside world any working family could afford what has become a delicacy in the People's Republic of Fruitania.

When families go out for a night at the movies, the only film playing is the impassioned epic FRUIT HARVESTERS OF THE NORTHERN SLOPES, which depicts the struggle of brave fruit growers who battle the elements and greedy corrupt Fruit Gangsters. It took 2 years to film, and it is the first new movie to be released in six months. And the people are happy to have it. They don't remember that before the Ministry of Film-making was formed, several movies used to be released each week.

After the Newsreels which show the brave People's Army preparing to invade local fruit producing nations, whose "fruit hoarding aggression" threatens them, and members of the Fruit Inspection Squad rounding up seedy looking Fruit Gangsters-- the main feature begins.

Even as the film tells the story of Peter, the brave fruit grower, who romances Latya, the beautiful daughter of Lovak, the fruit hoarder, who insists on growing and selling his own fruit, rather than working for the benefit of the people-- the audience pays little attention, focusing on the gorgeous fruit orchards, their mouths salivating furiously at the sight.

At the end of the movie, an official from the People's Fruit Party rises to proclaim that this year's fruit harvest has been the biggest and most tremendous harvest ever. Unfortunately, he says, the first priority of the People's Fruit Party must be to provide fruit to the starving children who go without fruit all the time. Which is why 90 percent of the harvest will go to a special Children's Fruit Dole, to be distributed to starving children, somewhere else. Somewhere they've never heard of.

The remaining fruit will be sold to the filthy Fruit Hoarders abroad in order to buy the weapons that the Fruit People's Army needs to protect the fruit orchards of Fruitania from those who seek to steal their fruit.

He congratulates them for their dedication to the principles of Fruitism, and promises that with their continued hard work and effort, a day will come when everyone around the world will have as much fruit as they want,.. when the World Fruitian Revolution comes.

The audience joins him in singing the revolutionary hymn, "Fruit of My Homeland", their voices rising with impassioned fervor on the verse, "The fruit of my homeland is the sweetest fruit of all. I will die for your orchards and perish for your pears. The fruit of my homeland is dearest to me." That is followed by a chorus of "Fruit-Guardians of Fruitania", "Workers of the Fruit Orchards" and "Death to the Fruit Hoarders".

And then they all go home. The People's Party member to what he considers a lavish repast of a fresh pear. If he moves up in the party, he can expect to dine on many pieces of fruit a day. A few lucky audience members return to suppers of moldy fruit baked into pies that are mostly crust. Others have rice clumped into the shapes of pears, apples and grapes, covered in food coloring and glazed with sugar-- a delicacy that they claim is almost as good as the real thing. Not that any of them have ever tasted a piece of fresh fruit in their lives. And never expect to.

The radio comes on automatically with a stirring broadcast from the Chairman of the People's Fruit Party who announces that the world revolution is now closer than ever. "The decadent Fruit Hoarders abroad are part of a decaying social and economic system that cannot last much longer. Their fruit hoarding has made them weak," he declares, "and ripe for takeover. They cannot conceive of sacrificing their fruits for others as we can. All they care about is their own gluttony. Soon their fruit orchards will be ours. And then they too will live just as we do."

The broadcast, heard by millions of people who have never tasted a fresh piece of fruit, closes with the revolutionary anthem, "Fruit for Everyone".

(Fortunately this is only a fairy tale that could never ever happen in real life. Still it might be worth remembering that when you kill the golden apple of the free market, all that's left are moldy pears. And that "Fruit for Everyone" usually means "Fruit for No One")

Springtime for Bloomberg

2013-05-01T23:29:00.000-04:00

Spring is in the air, which in New York means that it's time to launch the bike-share program. The bike-share program, which stacks racks of bikes out in the street in the hope that eveyone will stop driving cars and rent bikes instead, failed in Paris, Melbourne and Montreal. But Mr. Bloomberg is not about to stop his wars on obesity and global warming long enough to let the failure of a senseless program everywhere else slow down his bid to implement it.

In Paris, 80 percent of the bicycles were stolen. Some ended up in Africa and Eastern Europe. But surely that won't happen in a law-abiding place like Gotham.

Citibike, better known as a plan to stock Craiglist with secondhand bikes at taxpayer expense, was supposed to launch last summer, but the software developed by the Montreal parking authority didn't work. In only two years, the Montreal taxpayer funded company and its bike share plan had managed to get into enough financial trouble to require a 108 million dollar bailout. But then the big contracts from Chicago and New York City arrived and in a fortuitous coincidence, the Chicago Department of Transportation intern who wrote up the proposal was hired and given a top position in the company.

Bicycles are one of the obsessions of Mayor Bloomberg and his transportation secretary Janette Sadik-Khan. Khan is the granddaughter of Imam Alimjan Idris, a Nazi collaborator and the principle teacher at an SS school for Imams under Hitler's Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini. The bio of his son, Wall Street executive Orhan Sadik-Khan, frequently mentions the bombing of the family home in Dresden and surviving trying times after World War II. It neglects to mention that the times were only trying because their side was losing.

In 1933, Idris wrote a letter asking why Allah would have chosen the Jews, whom he described as, "the most despicable, repulsive and corrupting nation on earth". It's hard to say what Imam Idris would have made of his granddaughter marrying a Jewish law professor and peddling bikes that no one wants from a nearly bankrupt Montreal government company.

But considering that Imam Idris was at times accused of being a Soviet agent and did some work for Imperial Japan, it seems likely that he would have understood.

In partial revenge, Khan has made many New York streets nearly as impassable as those of her grandfather's wartime Dresden. Bike lanes have turned two lane streets into one lane streets. Infidels sit in their cars and honk while bike lanes go unused and midtown bus lanes sit empty except for the occasional daring taxi driver braving the bus lane camera and the 150 dollar fine.

Don't even think about giving your regards to Broadway, not unless you're on foot, and if you happen to remember Herald Square, forget about it. Times Square is now a giant outdoor plaza where the homeless sleep at night and unlicensed men in greasy Disney costumes shake down tourists for a photo and a few bucks.

Nightly a roar rises from the streets as an island full of people heading home curses Bloomberg until long after the sun has gone down. And from his townhouse on East 79th Street, he sneers at them, having gotten his revenge on the off-island drivers who sabotaged his congestion pricing scheme, borrowed from London's former mayor Ken Livingstone, who just got done blaming America for the Boston bombings on Iranian television.

Of such strange alliances is the technocratic banana republic on the Hudson woven. A Muslim Nazi collaborator's granddaughter oversees the de-car-ing of a city after a plan based around a plan from the tenure of a modern collaborator with Muslim Nazis falls through. Imam Idris might have called it the providence of Allah. But more likely he would have found a way to get his piece of the pie.

Springtime for Bloomberg also means that it's time for the ritual planting of swamp oak trees. Swamp oaks are not your ordinary city tree. Pre-Bloomberg, New Yorkers walked under the peeling bark of the ubiquitous London Plane tree, the dark gnarled branches of the Goldenrain tree and the occasional majestic Silver Linden.

All was well in Gotham’s curbside arbors, until Bloomberg discovered Global Warming was about to destroy all of mankind and began making the appropriate preparations by planting swamp oaks everywhere.

“When I have a chance... to walk down to Lower Manhattan, I’m going to sit under one of these sweet gum trees, I’m going to reflect in the glade and give thanks for the courage of so many New Yorkers,” Governor Pataki had said, while picking out the trees for the September 11 memorial.

But then Bloomberg issued his command and out went the sweet gums and in came the swamp oaks. New York City joins Chicago in the swamp oak frenzy. The white oak, Illinois' state tree, can no longer be planted in Chicago. It's swamp oaks all the way down as Mike and Rahm prepare for the intemperate apocalypse, the rising oceans and the arrival of hordes of hippos looking for watering holes on the Upper West Side and Hyde Park.

Two years earlier, Bloomberg had warned, "We cannot wait until after our infrastructure has been compromised to begin to plan for the effects of climate change now."

While Bloomberg's preparations included urging businesses to paint their roofs white, planting swamp white oaks and making it impossible to drive a car in Manhattan, they did not include a plan for a major snowstorm or a hurricane.

The snowstorm hit leaving one elderly woman and one newborn baby dead and many stranded. The path to Mayor Bloomberg's East 79th Street townhouse was cleared, but very little else was.

Instead of stocking up on road salt, Bloomberg had spent the spring lecturing New Yorkers on their salt content. But during the storm, the people being treated for heart attacks weren't suffering from an excess of salt in their French fries, but a shortage of road salt and common sense in City Hall.

Two years later, optimists might have assumed that Bloomberg had learned a lesson. Instead he was struggling with the bugs of a useless bikeshare program designed to stop Global Warming coastal flooding in 2080. Every other bus stop was decked out in alarmist government ads urging the people to prepare for a disaster, but that message never reached the billionaire mayor who had authorized the ads, who had bought three elections, but couldn't be bothered to buy a brain.

While Bloomberg was wasting time proposing to put windmills on top of bridges and skyscrapers to stop Global Warming, one of the biggest power plants on the island remained separated from the East River by only the lanes of the FDR Drive and a lot of wishful thinking. When Hurricane Sandy hit, it flooded, the transformer blew trapping workers inside, and the power went out in much of Manhattan.

On the third day of the blackout, with disaster relief nowhere in sight and people getting by on whatever leftovers blacked out stores still had in stock, Bloomberg held another of his press conferences, complete with sweater, broken Spanish and an overly energetic sign language translator, to tell the remaining stores to shut down and stop selling food. New Yorkers briefly debated whether he had gone insane or was just opening another front in his war on obesity.

It's hard to remember that twelve years ago, Bloomberg ran for office promising to be the education mayor. All that was buried under a shower of eccentric schemes and nanny state obsessions. The man who campaigned as a savvy technocrat who could cut through the red tape became the reason red tape was invented.

Mayor Bloomberg never understood good government. He ran the city like a liberal activist, jumping from one crusade to another, building a wall of expensive consultants around ridiculous projects and then ramming them through regardless of the criticism. He bought off everyone using his money and city money. The debt doubled and the problems mounted while he raced off to fight obesity, global warming, gun control and every other gimmicky liberal billionaire crusade.

It's easy to zero in on Bloomberg's fussy nanny state antics. The wars on soda and salt make good copy and so do windmills on bridges, but the real story is not what Bloomberg did, but what he didn't do.

Bloomberg lectured and hectored about apocalyptic Global Warming floods in 2080, but failed to prepare for more basic snowstorms and hurricanes today. He wasted his time on gimmicks like bike shares and swamp oaks, instead of dealing with the structural problems that made the snowstorm and Sandy so devastating.

Twelve years ago Bloomberg ran as the education mayor and took control of the schools. As a symbol of what was to come, he moved the educational bureaucracy into the old Tweed courthouse, a building whose grossly inflated construction costs, more than the Houses of Parliament, had made it a byword for corruption. Gimmicks, chancellors and failures followed in short and long order.

The failure of his education policies still haunts Mayor Bloomberg. It lingers behind all his other gimmicks and a more cynical man might even suggest that all of the stunts, the war on salt, the soda ban, the war on cars and the white roofs and bridge windmills are there as a distraction. Bloomberg would rather that people resent him and be infuriated by his petty nuisances than recognize that he is a failure.

Americans still elect nanny-state technocrats, but they don't like electing failures. And Bloomberg, with his government bikes that don't work, his swamp trees that die by the curb and his plan to defeat soft drinks, is both.

Springtime has come to New York and enthusiastic youths are making off with bike share bikes and tanning on roofs painted white. The sun is shining and even the gloomiest Gothamite has a spring in his step, except for the surly man in the townhouse on East 79th Street. For though the sun may shine and all the flowers may bloom, Bloomberg's last spring has finally sprung.

The Best Minds of My Generation

2013-04-30T23:31:00.000-04:00

The one thing that gave me hope for my generation was our cynicism. We might not believe in anything, but at least we wouldn't believe in everything. We might be apathetic, but that just meant it was harder to enlist us in causes. We didn't just march to the beat of our own drummer, we questioned the need for having a drummer and a beat. We were burnt out on everything and done with it all.

Of course it wasn't really like that.

Generation X became obsessed with authenticity the way that the Baby Boomers had with realization. Reality TV overseen by Baby Boomer producers and catering to Generation X combined the two and made it seem revolutionary. The Baby Boomers may have given us navel gazing music, but Gen X's obsession with authenticity gave us grunge and rap as their defining genres.

In its on way, Generation X was as narcissistic as the Boomers. It just didn't want to be seen that way. Like the Baby Boomers it was obsessed with selling out, but in a generation that had already sold out, it had no one left to sell out to and nothing to buy. The worst Boomer excesses rejected tangible accomplishments for narcissism, but by the time Generation X got to it there was no longer a culture with tangible accomplishments, only a long slide downhill.

Generation X was born into Weimar Germany. It came of age among decadence. And its own decadence, its sour obsessions, its media skills, set the stage for another generation that would be defined by the media. It would no longer be obsessed with authenticity. Instead it would embrace its own inauthenticity. Defined by the media, it would see fakeness as the true test of reality. Born in a life defined by the image, it would treat the ability to recognize and subvert the fourth wall of the audience, the recognition of the unreality of reality as the ultimate form of reality.

Each generation further fragmented what was already broken. Each spent far too much time looking into mirrors. Each had undeniable talents and skills, but employed them in a way that was autistic, disconnected from others, giving up the culture of builders for a lonely life as craftsmen, hobbyists learning to make small things while letting the big ones go to rust.

There is something medieval about our world. A strange dazzling house of technological mirrors filled with the caves and straw huts where hermits make their own homes and every hundred people become their own community. Connectivity has disconnected physical communities, torn down towns and nations and replaced them with online communities making for a world that is defined less by family, neighborhood or even work, and more by the movies you like and the celebrities you hate.

The Boomers laid the cornerstone of that world when the culture began breaking up with nothing to replace it, but Generation X built much of the rest of it out of its eccentric talents and social unease. It was left to its successors to properly populate it with a broken culture coming together around nothing.

Generation X wanted to be defined by taste. Taste was the thing it thought was lacking in the Baby Boomers who were creatures of many enthusiasms, embracing the terrible and the tacky for the sake of novelty. Generation X wasn't going to settle and it didn't. It is still unsettled. Many of its members are unmarried, childless and still looking around for a world that suits them. Like the Boomers, they want the ideal, but the ideal can only be found in the flaws of the real world that they tore apart.

Some Baby Boomers had developed a penchant for abusing their generation as the one that wrecked the country and some Generation X'ers couldn't help but join in. But it's a simplistic picture that doesn't entire hold up. The static image of frozen generations divided by fundamental characteristics is a simplification of a more fluid reality.

The line between Generation X and the Baby Boomers is blurred. Generation X was what the Baby Boomers were becoming in the shards of their own culture. The Millennials are what Generation X became lured by its solipsistic siren song. Generationsim fragments each generation further until we have generations not of decades, but of years. And looking back, it is easy to see not a dozen generations, but only one generation.

The problem did not begin with the Baby Boomers. Each generation only takes up the qualities of its parents. The flaws and triumphs of each generation can be found in subtler forms in the preceding generations. The 70s would not have existed without the 50s or the 20s or for that matter the 1890s. Every obscenity and absurdity, each form of irresponsibility and depravity, has its origins in prior generations.

The collapse of social mores, bizarre interests in the supernatural, a fascistic obsession with government power and complete economic irresponsibility all happened before in American history. There was no Tabula Rasa out of which evil was born. The evil came, it was suppressed or survived, and then it rose again. It is tempting to look back and imagine a perfect past that became corrupted, but that perfect past didn't exist. What did exist was an ongoing struggle in which the bad did not succeed in destroying the good and in which the good passed on its qualities to the next generation.

Look back enough and you find that the heroic generation of pure men and women were considered a band of scoundrels and rapscallions by their forebears. And usually they were right, not because we were in an inevitable state of decline in which each generation was worse than the last, but because change churns out different qualities, bringing both bad and good to the surface.

The collapse of America is largely a failure of education. Not the education of the behemoth systems which transmit the latest politically correct nostrums from degenerate academics drunk on their own theorizing at the hands of incompetents with Master's Degrees and union entitlements, but the passing of values from one generation to the next.

The growth of the media made that difficult. The rise of the state collapsed the notion of the family. The world in which the virtues of the healthy family and the larger culture did not contradict each other is gone. The two are at war and each succeeding generation is born into a world in which excesses and eccentricities are no longer marginal, but defining.

The Baby Boomers became the defining point because for the first time each generation became actively hostile to the future. They embraced ideals over realities and destroyed realities in the process. The narcissism of each generation made the demand of an ideal, on their behalf or on their own behalf, second-nature. It became routine to call for a world without war, without hunger or without any of the other realities of life and to expect that someone would deliver it.

That ideal world was never delivered, but the real world was torn apart trying to deliver it. Interest in the real incremental future diminished while an obsession with changing the world into something perfect by letting go of reality increased. Media exposure weakened the walls between the real and the ideal. Natural disasters looked like special effects. Ordinary people became famous. Famous people became ordinary.

While the family is the province of the real, the media is the province of the unreal. Generations raised by the media were being raised to seek out unreality and to live unreal lives. That is the legacy not only of the Boomers or the Gen-X'ers alone, but of the generations that preceded them. The growing influence of a collective culture that made the ideal seem real, that encouraged everyone not to sell out, to seek self-realization, the authentic experience and the deconstructed everything, killed the real future and replaced it with an unreal future of fantasy politics, fantasy economics, fantasy values and fantasy people.

Idealism and cynicism are flip sides of the same narcissistic coin. The search for the ideal sometimes brings back beautiful things, but in an entire culture it only produces a decaying self-obsession. In a culture where everyone is an artist, no one is an artist. In a society where everyone shatters taboos, there are no taboos left to shatter. In a world where everyone is searching for truth, there is no truth.

That is the beautiful ugly world we made. A world enraptured with its own preciousness while giving no thought for the future.

Obama is the perfect intersection between the two generations, idealism made cynicism and cynicism made idealism, the authenticity of the fake and the reality of the unreal. He doesn't belong to any single generation. He is the fluid transition point between Generation X and the Baby Boomers and also the Millennials. The decay he represents transcends generations. To believe in him is to believe in everything and nothing except the empathy and cleverness that makes each of us a better person.

A narcissistic culture besotted with its own reflection is bad news for the future. Those who spend too much time looking in the mirror rarely have time to gaze out the window.

The Big Fat Red Line

2013-04-29T23:12:00.000-04:00

Someone chalked a long red line along the street outside my building. The line is sloppy, it turns, wavers and meanders. Car tires have already rubbed it pink in places and dogs have done to it what large four-legged animals do naturally when taken out of the confines of narrow apartments. The line turns a corner and dives inside a pothole near an exposed sewer grate. And then it is gone.

Obama's red line is more famous than my red line. It appears in the Washington Post and the New York Times. There are reams of speculation over what the nature of the red line is, whether the red line has been crossed, what Obama should do about the crossing of the red line and how many devils can dance on the edge of a red line while juggling Sarin canisters.

Despite being much more famous, Obama's red line matters about as much as the one in front of my building. It's there one day and gone the next and no one really cares.

The red line, the famous one in D.C. is meaningless. It exists because politicians and reporters expect it to exist. It's a necessary optical illusion that convinces them that Eisenhower or JFK are still in the White House and that the United States of America is a rational world power with standards on truly important matters such as human rights and the percentage of cow flatulence that is to be allowed to ascend into the atmosphere.

Obama's red line never existed. It was the sort of thing that Obama occasionally said because people expected him to say it. Chemical weapons are bad, okay? If you use them, we'll get really upset. And the White House press corps pawed its iPads, hardly able to type for the thrills shooting through their nervous systems at being in the presence of a leader they could truly respect for his compassion and wisdom.

But Obama and his teleprompter are far too elegant wordsmiths to get bogged down in red lines. “That would change my calculus. That would change my equation,” Obama declared at one point, channeling his inner Stephen Hawking, but sounding more like a punchline from Big Bang Theory. Whatever changes have happened to Obama's calculus equations from the possible use or non-use of chemical weapons, the equation is still up there on the blackboard and it has no solution.

The idea that Obama has a red line governed by the number of people who are killed is slightly sillier than the plot of every big budget summer movie rolled together. As far back as his campaign, Obama made it clear that genocide in Sudan or the Congo was not a criteria for military intervention. But when Gaddafi took the initiative, Obama went to war in defense of a lovely peaceful city named Benghazi that the Nobel Peace Prize winner declared was on the verge of being exterminated.

What set one African country apart from another? Cynics might point to oil and race, but those are just elements of the larger calculus equation that makes Obama do things. It's his real red line that doesn't show up at press conferences because it doesn't sound good. The real red line has nothing to do with how many people die in Syria. It has to do with how those deaths slot into the larger agenda for the region.

That might be okay if the agenda were remotely coherent. It isn't. It might be okay if he didn't have a habit of saying stupid things and then flailing around afterward.

Obama allowed the thin red line myth to go forth and now he's stuck with it. The old liners at the Washington Post who still think that we're living in 1958 keep calling on Obama to show leadership. But how is he supposed to do that? He's not a leader. And even if he were, he certainly would not be their kind of leader. Or at least he is the kind of leader they deserve.

The left has a long history of marrying incompetence and malice. It excels at taking power and fails at trying to use it. It is good at convincing people of things, so long as those people are out in the streets shouting about jobs and food. It is quite capable of looting a country, but incapable of building it up except through the crudest brute force forms of industrialization that fail before too long.

Behind the big fat red line of the Soviet Union was a monstrous regime that got its ass handed to it by its Nazi allies in a hot war and then got its ass handed it to it again in a cold war by the United States. The United States saved the Soviet Union twice, once from famine and once from war and nearly saved it a third time economically. The Soviet Union had thoroughly infiltrated Western elites and even received nuclear weapons technology from them that it could use to destroy the world. And it still failed miserably.

Obama's red line leadership marries incompetence and malice. The left's big idea of dismantling American power leaves it with few ways of using American power. Like the idiot who campaigns against hammers only to realize he has no way of nailing up his anti-hammer posters, he is stuck between making empty threats that no one believes in and then having to either back down or nerve up and carry them through because the threats alone have no credibility.

The foreign policy establishment threw itself into the idea that the Arab Spring represented a historical movement that could not and would not be denied. (Except in Bahrain where the protesters were Shiites going up against the House of Saud which happens to own the White House mortgage.) The dictators, the ones without oil, were told that standing in the way of a historical movement of price protests hijacked by left-wing and Islamist mobs was futile. Either they would step down or the people would throw them down.

Gaddafi chose to test the force of history and won. And once it was clear that he was winning, the jets that no one thought of sending out to stop genocide anywhere in Africa were dispatched to protect that jewel of democracy, Benghazi, the heartland of the Libyan revolution. Now Assad is testing the farce of history. And while he isn't winning, he hasn't lost either.

Obama's real red line has nothing to do with how many Syrian civilians die. No one in Washington cares about dead Syrians. They care about who is going to win in Syria. Their credibility has been staked on a rebel victory. Their red line is a rebel defeat like the one that forced Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron to jump into the Libyan War on the pretext that they were protecting the civilians that they couldn't give a fig about anywhere else in Africa.

Dead civilians are worth a stringer's photo with the contrast enhanced to show the magnificent desolation of war. It's the sort of thing that Bush might have naively cared about, but we all know he was a moron who just wanted to start crusades, kill Iraqis and paint dogs. His far more moral successor only starts smart wars in defense of grand historical movements that globalist flat earthers like Thomas Friedman insist will usher in a new age in the old Middle East.

If Syria actually did use chemical weapons, then all it did was embarrass the emperor of peace by exposing the nakedness of his pretensions. The State Department hemmed and hawed and the occasion was seen as sufficiently drastic that the New York Times for the first time ever told the truth and admitted that there are no secular forces fighting in Syria. It's Assad or the Islamists.

It's nice of the Times to tell the truth on a Sunday to explain to its readers why the grand crusade for human rights that they were expecting hasn't begun yet. The pity of it is that by Tuesday, the Times will be back to talking about why we should be aiding the Syrian secular forces that it already admitted have the same level of material existence as the Easter Bunny, the moderate Muslim and the shovel-ready job.

But Times readers should be used to it by now. Clinton shrugged his shoulders at Rwanda and Sudan, but spent a good deal of time bombing Yugoslavia over false claims of genocide. It did not take very long for his ideological successor to do the very same thing in Libya. It doesn't matter how often George Clooney goes a week without shaving, shoots his cuffs and has his assistant chain him to the fence of the Sudanese mission, the right to protect is never going to show up over Sudan.

None of this is about human rights. It's not even about humans. It's about big pictures and even the
devoted readers of books about the Post-American world order still have their big pictures.composed of grand historical movements and massive chess games in which leaders can be raised and toppled, in which power can check power until a perfect stabilizing point is reached and the rest of the world decides to start killing its own babies, dismantling its own industry and dedicating all its efforts to turning out graduates with three degrees to teach small children about transgender identity.

That obviously isn't going to happen. The plan to turn over the region to the moderate Islamists worked out about as well as the plan to use the Ayayollah Khomeini as a stabilizing force in Iran. Fortunately believers in grand historical movements don't back off because they have been proven wrong. They don't stop when the bodies begin piling up. Instead they move forward certain that they are doing the right thing, even if the dimmest man alive would have figured it out by now.

The red line in Syria isn't chemical weapons or blood. It's ideology. It's the red-green alliance exacting its deadly toll while the Great Teleprompter squats behind his curtain making shadow puppets on the wall and telling self-deprecating jokes to the press corps that waits for leadership and worries that the dictator, the other dictator, has called his bluff and one of these days he is going to have no choice but to ante up or fold.

The Snake in the Bloody Garden

2013-04-28T23:37:00.002-04:00

The left has a clearly defined set of responses to a terrorist attack. After all the hopes for a properly right wing terrorist have come to naught, it begins the long slow process of rolling back the laws and emotional attitudes stemming from the attack.

For it, terrorism, like anything else, either fits into its narrative or conflicts with it. The narrative defines the world, past, present and future, in terms of the political agenda of the left. An event that clashes with the agenda must have its meaning changed so that the power of the narrative is restored.

Most violent attacks, from a street mugging to September 11, cause people to seek out security by combating the attackers. The left's task is to shift the narrative so that people see it in an entirely different way. The perpetrators become the victims by the trick of transforming the real victims into the real perpetrators. The lesson shifts from going on the offense to learning not to give offense.

The process is gradual and the playbook is infinite. Weapons of mass distraction are brought out. New villains are introduced and the emotional resonance of the events is drowned in ridicule. The tones are also many, from urging everyone to let love defeat hate to displays of virulent hate against the people "truly" stirring up trouble, but they all share a common agenda. Only the tactics vary.

Unlike the right, the left is systematic. It studies structures and people and plots its lines of attack accordingly. It pits emotion against emotion and law against law. It waits for the initial shock to fade before launching its first wave of attacks over process.

The left's honest response, the one that shows up on its Twitter feeds and in posts on its own sites, is that the country is overreacting. Some leftists will even be bold enough to say that we had it coming. But its public response is more discreet. It exploits the grief for its own ends, diverting shocked city residents into interfaith memorials, some of which are progressive enough to include denunciations of American foreign policy and vigils for the dead on both sides.

But even here, the left generally restrains itself. It waits until the weeks or months have passed to begin deadening the emotion surrounding the event with sarcastic remarks and jokes until the sacred becomes fully profane. It waits somewhat less time to begin lecturing the country on how our foreign policy made them hate us, knowing that in a contest between the establishment's narrative of inexplicable Islamic radicalization for unknown reasons and their narrative of American evil, they have the upper hand because they provide a realistic motive and the establishment does not.

Still this too comes later. The left knows that there is a window on human emotion. There is a time when people need to mourn and a time when they will feel a diminishing outrage and even begin to agree with observations whose thrust is that the United States of America is the real terrorist. And so there are things that the left will say on DailyKos and then on Salon that it will not say on CNN or the editorial page of the New York Times.

The editorials explaining how a lack of American support for Chechen independence led to the marathon massacre are coming. They just haven't splashed ashore in mainstream liberal newspapers yet. Timing is everything and the difference between the left of the counterculture and the left of the culture is that it knows what people will be willing to listen to and when. And it knows where to begin.

Against the horror of the bombing, the left juxtaposes the horror of police state. It pits the fear of terrorists depriving us of our lives and freedoms against the fear of the government doing the same. And considering the history of government abuses, it does not take long for this line of argument to make a compelling emotional dent in the responses of even many ordinary people to the attacks.

The left begins by raising all sorts of procedural questions about how law enforcement and the military are treating the enemy. It develops a burning conviction that our civil rights are the only thing about the country worth keeping. It hammers away at any law enforcement or military mistake, no matter how minor, and collects these together to amass a narrative of the police state.

At this stage the left puts on a show of maintaining its objectivity. It pretends that it is the principle that matters, not the perpetrator and most of those gullible people nodding along never notice that there is only one issue and two groups of perpetrators that this principle applies to: terrorists and leftist activists working in support of terrorists.

For months or even years, the left wraps itself in a Constitution that it does not believe in on behalf of those who want to abolish and destroy it.

The attacks on law enforcement and the military prove the left's core thesis that America is the oppressor and therefore deserving of terrorism. Whatever action, no matter how little, we take to defend ourselves proves that the terrorists were justified in attacking us. Even if all we do is lock up terrorists or shoot back at them when they shoot at us, the left will find enough grounds for indicting us as irredeemable monsters who deserve all that we have coming to us.

The left doesn't put it that way of course. It begins by asking us to believe that the terrorists are not attacking us, they are attacking our government, even if they keep murdering people who are by no means in the government. But once we have accepted the notion that the terrorists are justified in attacking our government, the left is then able to argue that we deserve to be attacked because living in a democracy, we elect our governments.

It's a neat trap that the left uses to turn questioning government policy into supporting terrorism.

That line of argument is cushioned at first. The left understands that arguments are won on emotion, not reason. It seeks out any family members of the victims who agree with its views and surrounds its spokesmen with them to give them moral sanction for their vileness. It emphasizes that understanding its theories is the only way to prevent another attack thereby making its negative tack seem positive.

And so the left moves from issues of process to polarity using our defense against terrorism to argue that the terrorists are only defending themselves against us. The arguments that seem initially untenable when the blood is still on the streets slowly sink in as baffled people try to come to terms with what happened.

All this is old hat for the left which has been excusing violence and revising history long before Islamic terrorism was an issue for anyone on this side of the Atlantic. Its tactics are polished and effective; though they would be far less so without the high ground of the media, the arts and the educational system, but the same could be said of any group. If David Icke had the unquestioning allegiance of 95 percent of media outlets and universities, most people would consider the existence of reptilians nothing more than common sense.

It is that very power which makes the narrative so insidious. The views of the streetcorner lunatic handing out pamphlets can be transformed in context without being transformed in content by the simple expedient of being read on the air in a sonorous voice by a news network anchor. But the greater insidiousness of the snake in the bloody garden comes from its ability to break up the narrative into stages to make it more palatable.

The left understands that it is working against natural emotions of loyalty and loss, and so it uses deception. It pretends to grieve, when it is sneering on the inside, and it pretends to want to help, when it is really seeking to destroy. It waits long enough to be able to pit the imaginary suffering of terrorists against the real suffering of their victims. It encourages its own brand of cynicism for the suffering of the victims and the heroism of their rescuers, while defending the sacred nature of the misfortune of its terrorists. It insists that its defense of terrorists in a time of terror invests it with a superior moral power and it uses that power to support terrorism.

The Fire Burns

2013-04-27T23:54:00.005-04:00

The circle of men whirls around the fire, hand in hand, hand catching hand, drawing in newcomers into the ring that races around and around in the growing darkness. A melody thumps through the speakers teetering unevenly with the bass, the sound is both old and new, a mix of the past and the present, like the participants in the dance, the traditional garments mixing with jeans and t-shirts until it is all a blur.

It is Lag BaOmer, an obscure holiday to most, even to those who come to the fires. The remnants of the Jewish Revolt against the might of the Roman Empire are remembered as days of deprivation in memory of the thousands of students dying in the war, until the thirty-third day of the Biblical Omer, part of the way between Passover and Shavuot, the day when Jerusalem was liberated.

Deprived of music for weeks, it rolls back in waves through speakers, from horns blown by children and a makeshift drum echoing an ancient celebration when men danced around fires and shot arrows into the air. The fires and bows have remained a part of Lag BaOmer, even when hardly anyone remembers the true reason for them.

The new Yom Yerushalayim, the day of the liberation of the city, is coming up soon, but the old Yom Yerushalaim, came thousands of years ago and ten days before it on the calendar. Time is a wheel, and, like a circle, everything comes around again. Hands pulling on hands, years pulling on years, on and on like the orbits of planets and stars. The Divine Hand of G-d pulls us along, and we pull each other in the dance of life.

The circle speeds up, men racing faster and faster, the children left behind, as the flames sputter and night falls. The rebellion, although bravely fought, failed, and Jerusalem fell again, and then Betar. The joy of the celebration turned to ashes, but, even in the shadow of the empire, their spirit endured. The stories were changed a little, the rebellion encoded into a story of Rabbi Akiva, the pivotal scholarly figure in the war, and of his students who perished because they had not been able to get along with one another. The failure of unity had been the underlying reason for the Roman conquest and the Jewish defeats. It is the ancient lesson still unlearned that the circle of the dance teaches us.

Lag BaOmer is not the first Jewish story of physically and spiritual heroism to be encoded for fear of the enemy. There is much that we know, without knowing what it truly means, messages from the past, that exist only as echoes reminding us of our purpose. Few of those in the circle passing around the flame know what they are truly commemorating and yet the act is its own commemoration. Thousands of years later the echo of a fierce joy, the pride of a people emerging out of a momentary darkness in a burst of wild energy, is still here. Though the details are forgotten, the joy endures, the song is sung and the fire still burns.

In the darkness, there is nothing but the fire and the dark shapes racing around it, leaping with the guttering flames. A teenager pours oil on the flames and they rise higher and higher. A new song begins but they are all the same song. Even the new songs are old. The music changes, but the words remain the same. Arms rise and fall, feet kick and the participants run around the fire only to end up right back where they began.

Codemaking is a dangerous business, for the keys to the code can be forgotten. In Spain and in the American Southwest there are men and women who keep odd rituals, but who no longer remember that the reason they keep them is because they are descended from Jewish Conversos. They have lost the most important part of the code, the part that explains everything. The men dancing around the fire have not lost that. They may not remember the liberation of Jerusalem, but their feet remember it, their arms remember it, their hearts remember it and most of all they remember who they are. They retain the key to the entire code. They remember that they are Jews.

It all began with fire. Avraham was cast into the fire and emerged alive from the flames. Then Chananya, Mishael and Azariah. And then millions more turning to ash in the ovens only to rise again in a new generation. "Is not this man a brand plucked out of the fire," G-d asks Satan in the vision of the Prophet Zechariah. "But who may abide the day of his coming?" the Prophet Malachi says."And who shall stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner's fire."

A piece of heavy wood chars, bright sparks rising into the night air. It is cool outside the ring of fire, but here it is painfully hot, the air thick with heat. The children gaze wonderingly at the sparks, flying up like tiny stars, their eyes recording the memory with a purer fidelity than any of the cameras outside the circle. Their minds will record the memory of the light, the feel of it on their skin and the awe of seeing something new for the first time. They will remember the circle and the fire.

The story of Moloch is the tale of men who worshiped the fire with the bodies of their children. But the children who race around the margins of this fire are the survivors of the servants of Moloch who tried to thrust their grandfathers and great-grandfathers into the flames. They will grow running around the flames from those who wish to thrust them into the fire, to burn away all that they are. Some will die, killed by Muslim terrorists or by other modern day servants of Moloch, but others will survive, and one day their children will race around the flames, defying the worshipers of fire, the worshipers of death, to do their worst to them.

The fire blazes up, tongues of flame darting toward us like the tongues of lions. This is the race we run around the flames that always burn, whether we see them or not. Year after year, generation after generation, and century after century, the fire burns, but we go on and no matter how many of us burn, we continue running the race with the flames, outpacing it, outlasting it and outliving it. No matter how many of us die, we still live.

A Talmudic recollection bemoans the Zoroastrian persecutions of the Jews. The notion today is as quaint as Assyrian chariots and Roman legions. The day will come when the Islamic persecutions are as obscure and laughable. When all the desert sands have covered over Mecca and the might and power of Islam are one with Assyria and Rome, with ancient pagan religions that have come and gone, blazing brightly like the flames, only to go out into the darkness, the dance will continue.

The men slow their steps, an ancient movement that the first wave of settlers to the Holy Land instinctively recreated. Dancing is a key that unlocks secret knowledge, that opens up buried memories, that turns the wheel of time back until it all becomes a circle that comes alive when it is closed. Despite the tremendous variations in customs and appearances, they have all unlocked the code of the circle, the hand to hand connection, the knowledge that whatever else we must go on. That the Jewish people must live.

The Bar Kochba revolt was not the last time that Jews fought to liberate their land. It was not the last time that the gates of Jerusalem were thrown open to a Jewish army. The liberation of Jerusalem in 1967 was the fulfillment of a struggle that had been going on for nearly two thousand years, as empires and caliphates had claimed the land, planted their spears and rifles over its barren hills, and enforced their laws upon it. And if Jerusalem falls again, if Masada falls again, if we fall into the fire, then we will rise out of it again, less in number, less in memory, but still a circle.

Fresh from battle, the soldiers danced around the flames. They had defeated the legions of Rome, without any special training and with poor equipment, they had beaten the greatest army in the world. They had survived the flames and in an explosion of joy, they raced around the celebratory fires, tasting the momentary immortality of battle. Their names are forgotten, lost to memory. Lag BaOmer is associated now with two of Rome's scholarly opponents, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, who passed on the teachings and traditions that kept the circle intact even in the fire.

Wars are won and lost all the time. No victory, however significant, endures forever. There is no immortality in the victories of the flesh, only in the triumphs of the spirit. For all our losses, this circle is a victory, an ancient celebration of a spiritual triumph kept secret in the face of the enemy. The circle of clasped hands reminds us that against the dead hand of history, we have a Living Hand that guides us even in our darkest hours, in the smoke and flame, in the ash and fire.

"Know that your descendants will be strangers in a land not their own," G-d tells Avraham, as the sun goes down, and amid a thick darkness, a smoking furnace and a flaming torches passes between the parted pieces of the covenant. There is smoke and fire, a thick darkness, but as each hand in the circle clasps another, the pieces are joined together into one. The unity will not last. But it is a reminder of who we can be and who we should be when we join together. A reminder of the covenant with G-d and with one another.

The dance is difficult, not because it is hard to learn or do, but because it is tiring. Some fall out of the circle, but others join in. It is a mistake to dwell too much on how many come and how many go. To count the losses, while overlooking the gains. We were never meant to be a numerous people, to swell to an empire, rotten with corruption, choking on its own grossness, until it dies. It is easier to win the race with the flames when you are small and light on your feet. Some tire of the race and leave, and fall into the flames or the darkness and are gone. But we go on. We always go on.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - All The World

2013-04-26T18:53:00.001-04:00

THE WAR THAT WON'T GO AWAY

After the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Obama asked, “Why did young men who grew up and studied here, as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence?”

In Obama’s speech, the willingness of the Tsarnaev brothers to kill the people of the country they had grown up in is a paradox. But it isn’t a paradox; it’s the point.

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev carried out the marathon massacre not because they were on the outside, but because they were on the inside. Islamic terrorism was their way of expressing their American identity. When they detonated bombs at the Boston Marathon, they weren’t doing it as Chechen Muslims, but as American Muslims.

There is a reason why second and third generation Muslims are more likely to turn terrorist than their immigrant parents. It is because they have become American, British, Canadian and Australian part of the way. They have gone deep enough to begin making a claim on the country. The Western Islamist seeks to align his internal Islamic identity and his external national identity by unifying them through Islamization.

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were not fighting for Chechnya at the Boston Marathon. They were fighting against the American infidels who were barring the way to an Islamic America.

from my article Islam’s World War Came to Boston

JUSTICE WILL BE UNDONE

The new soft power strategy was big picture. It had nothing to offer the Americans fighting and dying while waiting for help to arrive.

Al Qaeda understood soft power as a weakness. Unlike the decrepit Clinton policy wonks, it was not impressed by the old strategy of refusing to engage while hiding behind the drones that were standing in for Bill Clinton’s favorite terrorist-fighting cruise missiles. It understood that limited engagement was not some bright and new philosophy, but an unwillingness to take casualties and inflict collateral damage.

“We will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people,” Obama announced in the Rose Garden and the terrorists laughed. They laughed because they had support from within the Libyan government. They laughed because the Libyan government had obstructed the arrival of rescue teams and denied the use of armed drones over Libyan airspace.

What sounded like a reasonable statement to an American audience was actually an admission that Obama would not act unilaterally to go after the killers.

from my article When America Is Weak, Its Enemies Attack

SWEET MUSLIM CHARITY

Basri should have received the death penalty for the murder of 3 Christian schoolgirls. Basri said he and two others killed the girls and took their heads to the group’s headquarters as a “gift” to mark the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Basri claimed he was sorry “not just from my mouth but from deep in my heart.” But he nevertheless joked and laughed as he described how it took two swipes of his machete to lop the head off one of the girls.

Hasanuddin allegedly returned from a visit to members of Philippines Islamist group the Moro Islamic Liberation Front with tales of how that organisation regularly staged bombings to coincide with Lebaran, the festival that ends the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

However, after further discussion with friends, he decided that beheading Christians could qualify as an act of Muslim charity.

Indonesia Frees Muslim Terrorist Who Beheaded 3 Christian Girls as “Ramadan Present”

PEOPLE OF COLORLESSNESS

What do George Zimmerman and Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev have in common? They’re both inconvenient minorities. Liberals assumed that Zimmerman was a white man who shot a black man based on his last name. His actual appearance and background were racially inconvenient.

Joan Walsh insists that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are white because they are from the Caucasus. But then again Aryans are from India. That leaves us no choice but to conclude that India is white. If we get really vague about boundaries, we can also include much of Asia and Iran. That whitens most of the human race which now consists of White-Chinese, White-Iranians and White-Indians.

Now it’s on to Africa. If white people originated from Africa, then by Joan Walsh’s infallible Caucasian logic, retroactively, the region must be white.

And now we’ve solved the great racial problem of the world. There are no more races. Only White-Africans, White-Asians and White-Europeans. Everyone is white now and everyone is privileged and everyone is racist.

White Hispanic is Old, White Chechen is New

RED LINE, YELLOW BELLY

To quote Obama at various times, it would be a “grave mistake”, would not be tolerated and “That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.” All that sounds properly butch, but in true Obama fashion is also vague enough to mean nothing. The red line is the line at which Obama’s calculus equation changes into a grave intolerable mistake or something.

The only absolutely compelling reason for intervention would be the sense that the Syrian rebels are about to lose for good. Panic at the possibility that Gaddafi would win is what compelled Sarkozy, Cameron and Obama to jump into the Libyan War. For now the Syrian rebels are nowhere near defeat.

Syria May Have Used Chemical Weapons and It Doesn’t Matter

MUSLIM PRIVILEGE

Before the day is out, you’ll be hearing about the Muslim woman who was supposedly punched on the shoulder by a man in dark glasses who yelled something at her. And you’ll hear more about the Bangladeshi man who was beaten up by some Latino men angry about the massacre. These incidents and others, some real and some made up, will be rolled into the backlash narrative that has become the main concern after any act of Muslim terror

The Buddhist community in Burma, victimized by Muslim violence, has been holding up protest signs reading, “The world is not only for Muslims.”

That Buddhist message is something that Muslims ought to take to heart. The idea that Muslims are the center of the world is the privilege behind acts of terror like the Marathon Massacre.

When Muslims brandish signs reading, “Islam will dominate the world” or when they rush in to claim victimization right after a massacre, they are displaying the Muslim Privilege that is at the heart of their violence.

Muslims are not the only people in the world. They are not only people who matter. It’s not just their pain that counts. The pain of their victims counts too.

Muslim Privilege: Muslims Are the Real Victims of Marathon Massacre

LIVE FROM CANADA

IT'S OBAMA'S WORLD, WE JUST LIVE IN IT

Illegal Immigration is a Civil Right, says Holder

Attorney General Eric Holder does not believe that parents educating their own children counts as a civil right. He does however believe that illegal immigration is a civil right. The only question is when murder and rape will also be declared civil rights. After all they are outcomes of the hallowed civil right of illegal immigration, which means that they must be civil rights too.

A Voice for Facebook Values

What is even weirder is that Mark Zuckerberg, as part of an amnesty push coalition with Obama, is funding ads attacking ObamaCare in praise of Senator Lindsey Graham.

Essentially Obama Inc. is helping set up anti-Obama ads to make Senator Graham look good. A billion dollar liberal dotcom operating out of Menlo Park, California, is creating ads touting Graham as a voice for South Carolina’s conservative values.

Ron Paul’s Board Includes Obama-Lover and Terrorist Supporter Who Compared Tea Party to Nazis

"People have a right to be angry, but throw in angry racists who don’t like Obama because he’s a man of color and people who just hate Democrats and Klu Klux Klan people and every kind of kook on the extreme right and you mishmash them all together and you get the Teabag movement," Margolis said. "

"The Republican Party may indeed split. I think that would be a very good thing. I would like to see all the right-wing crazies shipped off to North Dakota and to rant fulminate in the cold out there and leave Ron Paul’s sensible supporters."

Pressure Cookers are the New Assault Rifles

Joe Biden Delivers 1 Minute of Pure Stupidity at Boston Memorial

WAR IS PEACE

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, wounded and held in a Boston hospital, said his brother wanted to defend Islam from attack, according to the source.

Who at the Boston Marathon was attacking Islam? Was a 8-year-old boy at war with Islam?

To attack Islam is to prevent it from expanding. To be a non-Muslim is to be at war with Islam. To defend Islam is to kill non-Muslims.

In Islam, attack is indistinguishable from defense. To be a non-Muslim who insists on self-rule is to obstruct the peace of Islam. There can be no peace in the world as long as non-Muslims rule themselves in the Dar Al-Harb, rather than live as second class Dhimmis within the Dar-Al-Islam.

Islam is an identity. It treats any obstacles, including passive and unknowing obstacles, as active resistance. The active practice of any religion other than Islam is an attack on Islam.

The Boston Bomber’s Old “Defend Islam” Alibi

THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE BIG GOVBUSINESS

GE Capital got an inappropriate sweetheart deal from Obama Inc. for a $139 billion bailout. The misappropriated taxpayer money was leveraged to get GE to pursue programs that Obama Inc. favored. Apparently one of those programs is refusing to lend to gun stores.

What we are seeing is the political consolidation of big business into an arm of government with misappropriated taxpayer money being used to pick winners and losers in the marketplace, with the “winners” then doing the dirty work of the government and acting as its regulatory arm, destroying entire areas of business that the government has yet to be able to destroy on its own.

GE Got $139 Billion Obama Bailout, Now Refusing to Lend to Gun Stores

A TAX ON HOT AIR

If Thomas Friedman went stark raving mad, how would anyone tell? The man has written an entire book dedicated to the thesis that the earth is flat and responds to every major event by making up more words and trying to tie them into his globalized flat earth theory. No matter what happens, Friedman shoves into his feeder tube and out comes his randomly generated understanding of the universe.

The difference between Thomas Friedman and the cult leader waiting for the UFO is that the cult leader has some grasp of reality. Friedman does not. He blends the insipid treacle of a motivational speaker with a completely delusional worldview that he makes up as he goes along bolstered by politician style anecdotes of his world travels.

Thomas Friedman has never grown anything except a mustache and it shows. He tries to make up for this by using “incentivize” because he hears that’s what business people do. But all he’s doing is throwing out hollow cliches.

Thomas Friedman Recommends Fighting Islamism With Carbon Taxes

NIGHT OF THE LONG SPORKS

Obama sending out his political hit squad after Senators from his own party who dissented from him on one bill is creepy. The eternal campaign is not only being used to target Republicans, but it’s even being used to perpetrate “Night of the Long Knives” purges within his own party.

The Democratic Party is being radicalized by the far left. It’s hard to imagine that moderate Democrats like Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan or Senator Henry Jackson would have a place in a Democratic Party so radicalized that it is not only unable to tolerate moderate senators in New York or Washington, but that it can’t even tolerate them in red states where they are the only alternative to Republican senators.

Obama Campaign To Go After Pro-Gun Democratic Senators

FRATERNITIE

The simplistic narrative of Islamist apologists is that Europeans or Americans have issues with Islam because it’s foreign. This relies on the old lefty polar division between nativism and tolerance. Either you like foreigners or you hate them. Either you are open to new things or you’re a reactionary bigot. And any criticism of Islam is filed into the latter category.

But the survey suggests that the French don’t have an instinctive dislike of other religions. They have issues with Islam for reasons that are rather obvious to anyone paying attention to Muslim violence and hate.

If concern about Islam is just a reactionary instinct to anything foreign, Buddhism would rank as poorly as Islam. At least it would rank more poorly than Christianity or Judaism. But the French, to everyone’s surprise, are tolerant.

French Have Positive Opinion of Buddhism, Christianity and Judaism, Negative Opinion of Islam

PARADISE IN A COEXIST STICKER

And at the risk of being accused of intra-cultural political xenophobia — that is, a hatred of the Other within the mainstream of purely American politics, a risk I’m more than happy to take — I am here today to announce that I am through considering these people part of a greater national we. They, like the extremists they reward with teaching positions or defend against the yokels, the wingnuts, the small-government second amendment supporters and bourgeois small business owners they so vehemently and viscerally despise and seek to control and reshape, are the very Other they like to pretend they champion.

And having met their gaze — and having found it cold, cynical, manipulative, and tyrannical — I reject their claim to a separate and equal American authenticity. In fact, I reject them entirely.

They are my enemies and the enemies to my children, to children like Martin Richards and his sister. They are the enablers and the justifiers, the propagandists and the self-loathers, the liars and the fabulists.

What they want is power and control. And if it takes humanizing Marathon bombers while laying blame on American culture to shame Americans into malleability as a precondition for their re-education into collectivist economic units, they are willing to make that trade off. For the Greater Good. For their vision of Utopia.

...from Jeff at Protein Wisdom: It's Time for a Cultural Divorce

FRAUD AND A HALF

Massachusetts’ minimum wage is $8 per hour. So, even if Ms. Tsarnaeva was only earning minimum wage, she would be making at least $560 per week (for 70 hours work) and as much as $640 per week (for 80 hours work), or $29,120 to $33,280 per year, well above the maximum, even for a family of three to qualify for public assistance of any sort. Since Russell was legally married to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, her earnings for working “70 to 80 hours a week” would have or should have been included in any application for public benefits by her husband and would have disqualified him.

Reports say that the public assistance ended when the Tsarnaev couple no longer met income requirements in 2012. But did they declare that to the State of Massachusetts, or did they get caught? You can bet it’s likely the latter. That’s how it usually goes. Public assistance recipients do not take themselves off the rolls. The state catches them and takes them off.

Debbie Schlussel on welfare fraud in the Boston bomber clan

DIVERSITEA

Teeth-grindingly irksome is the increasing tendency of this culture to treat me like an idiot, lecture me, or both. My cell phone doesn't just tell me it's fully charged, it tells me to unplug from the charger "to save energy." Save it for what? A rainy day? What happens to all that "saved" energy? Where does it go? To the unfortunate poor in Haiti?

Even my teabags lecture me! Somehow, by drinking Lipton, I am helping the environment. What are they TALKING about? And no, I don't want to go to Lipton.com to "find out more." I just wanted a frigging cup of tea.

The problem with having a nanny state is that the private sector duly follows suit. Not only the universities but even private corporations now advertise how much they they value "diversity."

Nanny, Nanny, Go Away! at Boker Tov Boulder

THE LAST PRICE OF PEACE

Many who want us to think of them as “peacemakers” are saying we should be defending “moderate Islam” in order to save the world from the tyranny of “radical Islamists.” As a Christian, I am warned by Jesus against lukewarmness. The lukewarm will be spat out. I cannot defend lukewarmness in Christianity, and you want me to defend lukewarmness in Islam?

from Catholic Bandita

THE LAST NOT SO GREAT WAR

Peace is the goal of war. To accept a perpetual "war on terror" is to accept a plan for mere "management" rather than victory. The failure to plan for victory is the construction of a plan for defeat...

2. Not Process But Victory Restores Freedom

An open-ended "war on terror," like a ‘war on drugs" invites a continuing erosion of small liberties. As this persists, once rare infringements on liberty become the norm. If it is to be the case that the shoes of all air travelers are to be inspected from now until the last ding-dong of doom, we will all be wearing sandals on airlines for the rest of our days. In this, many are correct to be wary of the long term effects of The Patriot Act.

Short of military conquest, a free society does not lose its freedom. Rather, freedom is lost through small infringements on liberty and dignity in the name of security. A perfectly safe state is a state without freedom. As our policies look to sustain rather than defeat our enemies, we are to that degree held hostage to both our policies and our enemies. When war is reduced to a process, that process becomes a self-renewing system in the same way that the "war on drugs" has become institutionalized in our lives; a normal part of the background noise that defines our days. A strategy based on "management," on diplomacy rather than victory, leads only to the establishment of internal organizations dedicated to their own perpetuation.

During the Civil War and the World Wars of the last century certain freedoms were, at times, curtailed, infringed or suspended. Following victory in 1945 these freedoms not only returned but even greater states of equality and liberty emerged. Had the Second World War ended in a negotiated stand-off at the Rhine and Okinawa, a state of war would have continued for an unknowable time and, in such a state, a less-free United States would have been a certainty. Only the destruction of the Axis powers yielded a peace out of which freedom surged, not only in America but in the lands of her former enemies as well. Victory yields freedom in peace. An armed process yields only stasis

...this is part of a much larger essay on the First Terrorist War well worth reading at American Digest

Terrorism Without a Motive

2013-04-24T23:41:00.000-04:00

Means, opportunity and motive are the three crucial elements of investigating a crime and establishing the guilt of its perpetrator. Means and opportunity tell us how the crime could have been committed while motive tells us why it was committed. Many crimes cannot be narrowed down by motive until a suspect is on the scene; but acts of terrorism can be. Almost anyone might be responsible for a random killing; but political killings are carried out by those who subscribe to common beliefs.

Eliminate motive from terrorism and it becomes no different than investigating a random killing. If investigators are not allowed to profile potential terrorists based on shared beliefs rooted in violence, that makes it harder to catch terrorists after an act of terror and incredibly difficult before the act of terror takes place.

The roadblock isn't only technical; it's conceptual. Investigations consist of connecting the dots. If you can't conceive of a connection, then the investigation is stuck. If you can't make the leap from A to B or add two to two and get four, then you are dependent on lucky breaks. And lucky breaks go both ways. Sometimes investigators get lucky and other times the terrorists get lucky.

Federal law enforcement was repeatedly warned by the Russians that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was dangerous, but operating under the influence of a political culture that refused to see Islam as a motive for terrorism, it failed to connect the dots between Chechen violence in Russia and potential terrorism in the United States, and because it could not see Islam as a motive, as a causal factor rather than a casual factor, it could find no reason why Tamerlan was a threat not just to Russia, but also to the United States.

The missing motive factor has led to a rash of lone wolf terrorists whose acts are classified as individual crimes. Nidal Hasan's killing spree at Fort Hood was put down to workplace violence, but workplace violence isn't a motive, it's a bland description. The motive was obvious in Hasan's background and his behavior; but the military, an organization that by its nature has to be able to predict the actions of the enemy, had been crippled and left unable to see Islam as a motive.

The current working concept is that by refusing to allow our military and law enforcement to identify Islam as a motive, we are stifling terrorist recruitment by preventing Muslim from identifying terrorist attacks with Islam. This ostrich theory of terror assumes that if we blind ourselves to the motives of the terrorists, then potential terrorists will likewise be blinded to their own motives.

Any law enforcement protocol that prevents investigators from understanding the motives of the killers in the hope that this will take away that motive from the killers is absurdly backward. The investigators of terror are not the instigators of terror. A police detective arresting a rapist does not create rape. An FBI agent arresting a terrorist does not create terror. Identifying a crime does not create the crime. It makes it easier for law enforcement and the public to fight that crime.

The insidious infiltration of blowback theory into terrorist investigations has dangerously subverted the ability of investigators to get to the truth and to catch the terrorists. Blowback theory assigns each act of Islamic terror an origin point in our actions. Everything that Muslim terrorists do is caused by something that we did. To those who believe in this linkage, the only way to fight Muslim terror is to stop inspiring it. The only way to defeat Islamic terrorism is to defeat ourselves.

Blowback theory has been dressed up in academic language and expert jargon, but all it amounts to is Stockholm Syndrome with a lecture hall. Its essential postulate is that if we become more passive in our responses, a strategy that is usually described with the complementary term, "smart", as in "smart war" and "smart investigation", then the enemy will become more passive in response to our passivity because we are no longer inspiring his violence.

Smart wars and smart investigations are those that don't offend Muslims. The cost of the smart war in Afghanistan has been a very expensive and bloody defeat. The cost of the smart investigation can be seen in the streets of Boston or in Fort Hood.

Any smart tactic based on inaction and ignorance, on throwing away advantages to seem less provocative, is not smart; it's stupid. When things go unsaid because they are politically incorrect, then they will eventually go undone. And when they are both unsaid and undone, then it becomes impossible to think them. The concepts fade out of reach, the connections in what, Hercule Poirot, called the little grey cells, are no longer made and what was once a familiar mental shortcut becomes an entirely alien concept.

Defeating ourselves in order to defeat Islamic terrorism is a dead end because we are not the source of that terrorism; we are its target. When we handicap ourselves out of a misguided notion that the best way to fight terrorism is with one hand tied behind our backs and an eyepatch on one eye, then Americans die.

Islamic terrorism, once the starting point of any rational investigation, has become an uncomfortable endpoint uttered by uncooperative suspects who refuse to go along with the stress-motivated killing spree defense their lawyers are eager to put forward for them. It is the dark thing at the end of every investigation that politicians don't want to talk about, reporters don't want to write about and prosecutors grow reluctant to discuss for fear of offending judges and stifling career prospects.

Without Islam as a motive, there is no way to fight the larger threat except as a discrete collection of seemingly random events. What connects a Tamerlan Tsarnaev to a Nidal Hasan to Ahmed in Jersey City or Mohamed in Minneapolis plotting the next attack? The official answer is nothing. One was a boxer and another was an army doctor and the third is just an Egyptian student or a Somali bank clerk. They have no motive in common except that of Islam.

Motives identify links. They make it easier to stack events together as a trend. They make it possible to predict the next attack by looking at the common denominators that matter as opposed to the ones that don't. And above all else, they combine together to give us a rational picture of the world so that we understand what we are experiencing and what we have to do about it.

A man dropped onto a battlefield without having the concept of an army or a war will be bewildered and horrified by the incomprehensible experience of large numbers of individuals shooting at him for no reason. "Why do they all want to kill me?" he thinks. "Was it something I did?"

Crime is personal. War is impersonal. The murderer has personal motives for his actions, but the motives of the soldier are irrelevant. In war, it is the organization that matters more than the individual. Wasting time predicting the movements of individual soldiers instead of armies is not productive. Attempting to understand terrorists as individuals, rather than members of a mass movement is equally a waste of time.

Media accounts have presented various exculpatory motives for Tamerlan Tsarnaev ranging from the possible head injuries he may have suffered as a boxer to the murder of a best friend that investigators suspect he may carried out. All these motives are irrelevant, not because they may not have some figment of truth to them, but because they stopped mattering once he became what he was. One soldier may join the army because his girlfriend broke up with him, another because he lost his job and a third because he wants to impress his friends. Those motives may all be true, but they don't matter. Once organized into a collective, their individual motives stop mattering and the collective motive takes over.

Islamic terrorism is a collective motive. There is limited variation in the tactics and the thinking of terrorists. Whatever they may have been before they fully committed themselves to the war against civilization is an incidental matter. And the only piece of individual identity that matters is still the collective one of their Islamic background. That is still the greatest predictive factor of terrorism.

The Islamic terrorist abandons his individuality and takes on an identity that asks him to love death more than life. His motives are no longer personal, but collective. He is a soldier in the Islamic war against civilization. His marching orders may come from Jihadi videos and magazines, but they provide him with training and an esprit de corps sufficient to the purposes of his campaign of terror. To strive to understand him as a father or a son, as a boxer or a doctor, is a waste of time. These biographical footnotes no longer represent him. They are the things he has discarded to become a messenger of death in obedience to a faith that values death more than life.

Without understanding that, the terrorist becomes a cipher, another nice young man who suddenly
turned violent, and the trend of terrorist attacks ceases to be a pattern and becomes a rash of horrifying incidents that can happen at any time.

Terrorism is a form of war. It cannot be won without understanding that there is a battlefield and an enemy fighting for control of that battlefield. Without that understanding, our superiority in strength and our possession of the battlefield can only result in a temporary stalemate leading to a permanent defeat.

Terrorism denial turns terrorist attacks into a cipher without a motive. If Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev had not carried out their attack at a public event in the age of the ubiquitous camera, then how long would law enforcement have chased down dead ends or searched for the Tea Party tax protesters that the political establishment expected them to find?

Without a motive, there is no place to begin searching. Without Islam, there is no motive. Terrorism denial isn't just an intellectual error; it is a grave danger to the lives of Americans. Terrorism denial created a space in which the Tsarnaev brothers were free to plot and kill. Terrorism denial cost the lives of three Americans and the bodily integrity of hundreds of others. Denying the Islamic motive for terror, makes it harder for law enforcement officer to do their job and easier for Muslim terrorists to do theirs.

Why Muslims Kill

2013-04-23T23:14:00.000-04:00

The murderer is the new celebrity. He emerges out of nowhere with a rags to mass murder story, and is swiftly accorded all the trappings of fame. Reporters track down anyone who knew him to learn about his childhood and his main influences. Relatives and friends both contribute fuzzy anecdotes, mostly indistinguishable from the ones they would present if he were competing on American Idol or running for president.

The disaffected form fan clubs around him. The experts discuss what his rise to fame means. Books are written about him and then perhaps a movie. And then it ends and begins all over again.

The Tsarnaev brothers, the living one and the dead one, are already receiving that treatment. Like most murderers they have already become more famous than their victims. More famous than the rescuers. The original Tamerlane is better known than any of his countless victims. The new one is already eclipsing his victims. Before long one of those Chechen bards whose videos he tagged into his playlist on YouTube will write a ballad about the Boston massacre and the circle will be complete.

That ballad, murderous and vile, will still be more honest than most of the media coverage about the two Chechen Muslims has been. The media's coverage is weighed down by its old fetish of murder as celebrity. The media covers murderers and celebrities in the same way. It writes exhaustively about them, but rarely meaningfully. The murderer, like the celebrity, is famous for being famous. And fame clips context and suppresses meaning. It becomes its own reference. A thing is famous for being known. It is known for being famous. It enters the common language as a reference. A metaphor.

In the case of the Tsarnaevs, the surface coverage, the endless rounds of interviews with friends and relatives, with anyone who ever met them or retweed them, is mandatory because it avoids the more difficult question of why they killed.

The better news outlets answer with convenient terms like "radicalization" or "self-radicalization" and much of the public, primed to react to meaningless political jargon as if it had meaning, will think that they understand. A radical, they know, is a bad person, except for a brief period when surfers and ninja turtles could use it and still be good people. They don't quite know why that is, but they also don't know why high debt is good for the economy or why Islam is a religion of peace.

Radical and extremist are convenient terms for dismissing people and subjects without discussing them. Mental shortcuts like that can be convenient. No one really wants to spend every waking moment debating the people who think that the moon landing was faked or that we are ruled over by miniature T-Rex's who somehow look just like people. But when the body count gets high enough, dismissing it as extremism or radicalism doesn't hold up. The question must be discussed.

The experts point to foreign policy, but Muslim violence began a thousand years before the United States existed as an independent political entity. The younger Tsarnaev sibling scrawled something about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, prompted or unprompted, but Iraq is yesterday's news and America is in Afghanistan because of the Muslim attacks of September 11. We can keep retracing every event and connecting it to a prior event, but the constraints of history will swiftly take us back to before Independence Hall, Columbus and for that matter the English language.

If we are to flounder looking around for a first cause, we must either fetch up against the founding of Islam or try to make a case for Islamic violence predating Islam. Neither is very tenable. Dzhokhar can claim that he and his brother were defending Islam by murdering an 8-year-old, Hitler claimed that he was defending Germany by invading Poland and Japan is still waiting around for South Korea to thank it for protecting it from Western imperialism.

Prisons are full of 300 pound men who beat their 90 pound wives to death in self-defense and spree killers who felt bullied and misunderstood and defended themselves with killing sprees. The kind of evil we see in movies, the serial killer who gleefully whisper about demonic pacts and the joy of killing, are a rarity. Even human monsters are human. They explain things in terms of their egos. They are always defending themselves against some form of oppression and looking for someone to sympathize with their outrage.

Muslim terrorists are no different. The Taliban just poisoned a girls school as part of their campaign to defend Afghanistan from women who can read and write. Hamas fired an anti-tank missile at an Israeli school bus in defense of Palestine. Tamerlan Tsarnaev put down a bomb next to an 8-year-old boy in defense of Islam.

Islam, as one of the great world religions, has a long history of needing to be defended against small boys, blind female poets and elderly cartoonists. Sometimes Muslims have to defend Islam against each other, the way they are now doing in Syria. Other times defending Islam requires demolishing its archeological sites, the way that the Saudis are doing. Either way defending Islam is difficult work.

Everyone in a war usually claims to be defending against something. But the younger Tsarnaev was not really angry about Afghanistan or Iraq. He wasn't defending them. He was defending Islam. If you want to defend Afghanistan, then all you have to do is board a plane to Pakistan and then make the right contacts and find your way across the border to join a band of likeminded fellows fighting to defend your new country from women who can read. But to defend Islam, you can stay at home in Boston and kill little boys..

What is this thing called Islam? We can call it a religion, but that doesn't tell us much. Defining religion is a famously tricky affair. The bombmaking instructions in Al Qaeda's Inspire magazine begin by telling the would-be defender of Islam that the key ingredient in building a pressure cooker bomb, like the one used at the Boston Marathon, is trust in Allah. There is a kind of faith in that, but it's more like the kind of prayer you expect to hear Jeffrey Dahmer or Charles Manson utter to a god that they made in their own murderous image. Serial killers praying to a patron deity of serial killers to help them murder little boys in defense of a religion whose faith is in the murder of little boys.

But the whole thing need not be all that mysterious. Western man spent much of the last century threatening to fight to the death over the political and economic system that he would live under. Dispense with the label of religion and the sight of two angry young men setting off bombs in an American city is not all that alien. Neither is their motive.

There are two Islams that we can conceive of; the private and the public. It is it not difficult to see which of these the Tsarnaevs were defending. Despite the morbid fantasies of the real Islamophobia industry, practiced by CAIR and the left, no one was holding down either of the brothers and shoving pork in their mouths or forbidding them from reading the Koran. The government has carved out broad swaths of entitlements for Islamic religion in a country where Iftar is celebrated in the White House and the Department of Justice sues any store that thinks twice of frowning at a Hijab.

It's the public Islam that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar were defending. The private Islam forbids Muslims to eat pork or drink liquor The public Islam bars pork or liquor from being sold. The private Islam tells women to cover their hair. The public Islam establishes an entire system of police and judges to compel them to cover their hair.

Western liberals like to think of Islam as a private religion, in the tradition of most of its extant religions, but it isn't. Islam cannot function for very long as a private religion just as Communism could not function for very long as a private experiment on a few communal farms. It is an all or nothing system. Its fundamental expression is public. In private, it withers and dies.

The private Islam need not be defended with bombs. The public Islam must be. And as with so many totalitarian systems, when it speaks of freedom, it means slavery, when it talks of peace, it means war, and when it claims defense, it means attack.

Why did Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev detonate bombs at the Boston Marathon? They were engaged in an old disagreement over political systems. Terrorists of the left set off bombs to force a political revolution. Their Islamist fellow-travelers are doing the same thing. Dig away enough of the trappings of the celebrity murderer and you come to the ideas buried underneath all the rubble.

The Tsarnaevs are not the first terrorists to kill Americans in the name of a political idea. If they are radicals and extremists, than so are the likes of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. What difference is there between the radicals who detonated bombs to impose the rule of the left and those who detonate bombs to impose the rule of Islam?

When it comes to the Weather Underground, the media is eager to discuss their ends, but not their
means. And when it comes to the Tsarnaevs, the media will discuss their means, but not their ends. Dealing with the violence of the left would only make the left look bad. And dealing with the agenda of the terrorists would make the left's plan for a multicultural society seem unworkable. It would make it clear that terrorism is not random, but a violent means of imposing an idea. And it is the idea that is the issue.

If we are going to discuss Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, let us spend a little less time on their endless parade of relatives and former friends, and a little more time on the idea in whose defense they chose to kill and maim so many. Let us discuss Islam, not just as an abstract idea, but as a concrete political system. Let us discuss it the way that we discuss the plans and platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties. Let us look at Saudi Arabia, at Pakistan and at the new Egypt to see what this thing that the terrorists would like to impose on us is.

Despite thousands dead, a searching examination of that sort is exactly what the media would like to avoid. It does not want another "Better Red than Dead" or "Better Dead than Red" debate. It wants us to speak of foreign policy as an isolated American act and of random violence as arising from thin air. It does not want us to understand the nature of the struggle. It does not want us to know why we die. It is determined to keep from us the reason why Muslims kill.

A Tribal War in Boston

2013-04-22T23:33:00.000-04:00

Terrorism, like urban crime, is one of those things that you're not supposed to think about too much. It's fine to talk about your emotions after a bombing or a mugging. You can even share stories and eventually learn to laugh about it. What you cannot do is talk about where it comes from except in the vaguest terms of social conditions. Like pollution from industry or corruption from government, it's one of those toxic spinoffs of our modern society. It's just there and we don't much talk about it.

Islamic terrorism is considered a social problem in Europe. Ask an expert and they'll talk your ear off about unemployment, racism, overcrowded housing and the same long list of reasons used to explain urban crime. The United States is slowly coming around to that same point of view.

Forget the great debate between whether people kill people or guns kill people. The conclusion reached by most governments before your grandfather was born is that social conditions kill people.

The Tsarneav brothers are being talked about in the same way that most serial killers are. "They were so nice. What made them do it?" It's the empty repetition of a question to which no one really wants to hear the answer. "What could have made them do it?" isn't a genuine question, it's a ceremonial washing of the hands. A ritualistic statement that we couldn't have known anything was wrong. How could we? They were so nice.

Tamerlan Tsarneav slapped around one girlfriend, dragged another into a barefoot, pregnant and veiled arrangement, and went around telling everyone they were infidels. Sure he might have settled down at some point, picked up his membership card in the requisite front groups for the Muslim Brotherhood and limited his terrorist activities to donating to Islamic charities that just happen to do business in the middle of war zones. He could have stuck to beating his wife in the privacy of his home and told his neighbors that America would one day be destroyed knowing they would only nod and walk away humming, "But he's so nice".

The United States is full of moderate Muslims just like that. They are the people politicians point to as proof that not all Muslims are terrorists, just the ones who actually blow up things.

Tamerlan Tsarneav was indeed a social problem, but not the one most liberals think he is. He wasn't unemployment, racism or lack of parking spaces. He was the social problem we don't talk about because it's off limits. The empty space in the narrative. The one that terrorism comes from.

The Europeans would talk about integration. But what was there for Tamerlan to integrate to? A coterie of white academics looking to get jobs on climate change commissions? A rainbow coalition of minorities taking pride in victimization while demanding their piece of the pie? And who was he? American? What does being American mean? Chechen? Who are they? They're Muslims. They're killers. When being American got too hard, Tamerlan rolled the dice and they came up Chechen. They came up Muslim. And we all know the rest of the story.

Eurocrats worry endlessly about how many Tamerlans in London, Paris and Oslo roll those dice only to see them come up Pakistani, Algerian and Somali. But they can't talk about what's wrong with that.

Back in the Tsarneav homeland, clans fight each other to the death, wiping out entire families to the last child. Here is a brief description of one man's vendetta. "He wanted to kill off all the men in the other family, and he devoted his life to that goal. He would hide someplace where he thought one of his enemies might pass by, staying there for weeks at a time if necessary. In the end, he killed about 20 people."

That should sound familiar to anyone who sat in front of the television watching the aftermath of the Boston bombings. And here's another. "The oral tradition abounds in tales of feuds sparked by the theft of a chicken culminating in the death of an entire Teip." What is a Teip you might ask. A Teip is a Chechen clan. Everyone has one in Chechnya including foreigners. To have a place in the society, you must have a Teip of your own. Otherwise. "This man has neither a Teip nor a Tukkhum."

Where was Tamerlan's Teip in America? Americans don't talk about their Teips. Instead Tamerlan found the same Teip that so many other Pakistanis, Egyptians, Somalis and other Muslim immigrants find when they live in a non-Muslim country. Tamerlan's Teip, like Nidal Hasan's Teip, was Islam.

Tamerlan took possession of his Teip. And then he began to kill on behalf of his Teip. You can call it the Clash of Civilizations or a clash of clans. At the Boston Marathon, the Tsarneav brothers began killing the members of the Boston Teip or the American Teip in defense of the honor of the Islamic Teip. We can call this sort of thing terrorism, and it is, but it's also something much more primitive and much less calculated.

The Afghan soldiers murdering American soldiers often do it unprompted and sometimes even without any prior planning. They do it because in tribal cultures honor is complicated and murder is casual. Life is cheap, especially the lives of men without teips.

Americans were under the impression that Tamerlan was a member of Teip America. He wasn't. Teip America is fine for some some natives, but it was much too big for him. It had no shape or purpose. Nothing for him to claim possession of and defend. Teip America gave him everything for free and wouldn't even let him fight to take it. Teip America gave him the good life, but took away his honor.

But what does all this Teip talk have to do with the modern world? It is an article of faith that any number of people can come to this country and bring their diverse Teips with them, and aside from some picturesque native foods and unique post-colonial grievances, they all become part of the tapestry of Teip America.

Chechnya is a modern place now. Sure it has warlords, kidnappings and Sharia punishments, but who are we to judge them? And Tamerlan Tsarneav grew up in the United States. What could the crazy backward mores of his society, which we mustn't judge, have anything to with his killing spree? There are more relevant things that we could talk about, like race, class and the availability of parking spaces in Boston.

Even now the politicians begin trooping down to the local mosque to press the flesh with the "moderates" who are the last best hope for preventing another marathon massacre. But what is an American mosque really? Some are still mono-cultural, dominated by Lebanese, Turkish or Bangladeshi immigrants. Many however are more expansive. They are artificial Teips based on religion, rather than nationality or race. Their existence is innately Islamist.

The American mosque is an outpost of tribal Islamism. It's an artificial community that primes members of tribal cultures to identify with and defend a religious Teip. That is the system that the Saudis have invested a good deal of money into building because it provides them with an endless flow of cannon fodder.

We are not a melting pot or a beautiful tapestry of diversity. What we are is often something more prosaic. Clans. The clans may be broadly defined, but they are still there and if you doubt it, then go try an urban neighborhood that you are not meant to walk. The clan structure is weak and the leaders are often absent. Some clans are full of single mothers and itinerant male warriors. Others are traditionally patriarchal. Some clans form alliances based on language, geography or religion.

That is multiculturalism. It is a clumsy alliance of Teips pretending to represent all the Teips.
Multiculturalism, like most forms of liberal consensus, shut out any contradictory realities. But there are Teips here other than the coalition of community groups united to demand more money for social services centers. There are older Teips in America that come from the desert and the mountains. Teips that care nothing for building more LGBT youth centers and a great deal about honor and territory.

Tamerlan found his Teip in Islam. So have many Islamic terrorists and political Islamists. Their Teip is not one that we talk about. It is the Teip that is at war with all the other Teips. It is at war with the basic idea of Multiteipism that the entire broken system it is trying to topple over is based on. And the story is the same in Europe. It is the same in Canada. It is the same in Australia.

It is the same everywhere.

We can't talk about this of course because we are modern people and we know that's not how things work. We know that we are lucky to be living in a society with such rich diversity. Our diversity is our strength. The more divided we become, the stronger we will be. And if occasionally bombs go off or heads fly or planes crash into skyscrapers, we will walk away muttering, "But he was so nice."

Kissing the Crocodile

2013-04-21T23:55:00.000-04:00

In Vienna, toward the end of the Age of Aquarius, a father bought his little girl a baby crocodile for her birthday. The child had become enchanted with the reptile after seeing a picture of it in a storybook and when all the other presents were opened, her new pet was presented to her.

The little girl was delighted with the present. She began to play with the baby croc and then tried to kiss it. The croc bit her on the nose. The little girl began to cry and had to be taken to the hospital. And the angry father went off to dispose of the nasty little beast.

On the next day, the police responded to reports of a strange creature in the Danube canal, that arm of the great river which flows timidly through the locks and into the city. Vienna being full of animal lovers, the crocodile was rescued from the canal while the father was reprimanded for nearly causing the creature, used to the warmer climes of the east, to perish of a cold in the chilly waters.
The matter was worried over in the newspaper columns dedicated to one of the rare events in a city where not very much was happening.

Scandalized animal lovers complained that the beast had been misunderstood. They urged readers to empathize with the crocodile. Imagine, they said, that a giant creature a hundred times your size brings you close to its parted mouth. Could they not see that the crocodile was convinced that it was about to be eaten and was only defending itself?

Wiser heads suggested that the father should never have introduced a dangerous creature into his home and once he had introduced it, he should have expected that it would bite. Like the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog; biting was in its nature. And throwing it into the canal after it had bitten one of us was in our nature.

The subject was fortunately confined to crocodiles, canals and little girls. There was no talk of the '75 hostage crisis in which the Austrian government allowed the Arm of the Arab Revolution led by Carlos the Jackal to escape to Algeria with his hostages after murdering a police officer.

Not long after the crocodile controversy, two Muslim terrorists armed with machine guns and grenades attacked a synagogue where a Bar Mitzvah celebration for children was taking place. Hesham Mohammed Rajeh, a mathematics student, had been living in Austria for two years. When he was later put on trial, he tried to kick the judge and shouted, "When I am out of here, I will spit on you."

Hesham Mohammed Rajeh and Marwan Hasan shouted "PLO, PLO" and began to shoot and throw their grenades.

Ulrike Kohut, 25, rolled in front of a grenade to protect another woman's child. She died of her injuries on the way to the hospital. Lotan "Nathan" Fried, 68, died of shrapnel wounds on the same route. Many more were wounded including a pregnant woman and a 12-year-old girl.

Two policemen and an Israeli bodyguard shot it out with the terrorists and won. Their arrest was followed by a phone call in broken German threatening bombings if they were not released, but this time, perhaps because no actual bomb was found, the authorities held firm and the crocodiles stayed in the canal.

A month earlier, two terrorists had been stopped at the airport after Kalashnikov rifles and hundreds of grenades were found in their luggage. The terrorists had been deported and the authorities had lodged a formal protest with Ghazi Hussein, the PLO representative in Vienna, who had been there to meet them at the airport, and eventually kicked him out of the country. Four years later, that airport was the scene of a hand grenade attack in which 39 people were wounded.

Austria's Socialist Chancellor, Bruno Kreisky, despite being of Jewish ancestry, was fond of Muslim terrorists and of Nazis, but not at all of Jews. Despite being on the left, Kreisky had a habit of filling his cabinet with former Nazis while comparing Zionism to Nazism. His political success rested on a welfare state built with Soviet money funneled through commercial orders and turning a blind eye to terrorist attacks carried out with Soviet and Polish machine guns was part of the price.

Even though the two terrorists had shouted, "PLO", Kreisky announced, "I am firmly convinced that the attackers had nothing to do with the PLO," Instead he suggested that they had been out to sabotage "Palestinian interests." During an interview, he offered that "the bad, unqualified treatment of Palestinians in Israel is one of the causes for these extreme actions."

Kreisky, the first Western leader to officially receive Arafat, refused calls from the Jewish community to end ties with the PLO and rejected criticism from the conservative opposition that his courting of the terrorist group had brought terrorism to Austria. Instead he counseled understanding the point of view of the crocodile. The crocodile felt mistreated. It bit.

Some decades later, Yusuf Ocak was sitting in a Vienna prison. Yusuf had made a Christmas video in which he announced, "Today is the 25th. Yesterday the kuffar unpacked their dirty presents on their dirty holiday. Now they will get something from us!" The video made for (DTM) Deutschen Taliban Mujahidin was one of the reasons why he was in custody.

Vienna had become a hub for the German Taliban, the way that it had once been a hub for the PLO. Jihadist terrorists targeting Germany, like the DTM or the Global Islamic Media Front which ran its German language operation out of Vienna, found its lax enforcement convenient. Two years later another German Taliban member was arrested in Vienna for plotting to fly an airliner into the Reichstag. Both men had been born in Europe. The crocodiles had learned to swim in the cold waters of the Danube and like it.

Yusuf and Thomas were not the first Islamist terrorists to be arrested in Vienna. Asim Cejanovic was caught trying to get to the American embassy with a backpack full of explosives and nails. But the judge decided that because he had been formerly treated for PTSD that he was innocent of plotting a terrorist attack and instead sentenced him only for illegal possession of explosives.

Empathizing with the crocodile required understanding that sometimes it only bit because it was suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. And then it was best to pretend that it didn’t do it.

Chancellor Kreisky had turned over Vienna to the PLO and terrorist attacks had boomed in the seventies. The targets of the PLO and its various splinter and rival groups had been fairly narrow. Naturally the Jews were first on the list. Then came their own leaders, like Egypt's Sadat or the OPEC ministers. But the Islamists were far less narrow-minded.

Mohamed Mahmoud, one of the leaders of the Global Islamic Media Forum, bluntly declared, "I was born as a Muslim, from two Muslim parents. I have nothing at all in common with the Austrian culture and mentality. To the contrary, there is enmity and hate between me and those in Austria, Germany, the EU and the USA."

Mahmoud, the son of a Muslim Brotherhood member, vowed, "My goal in life is victory or the martyr's death," As the scorpion said to the frog just before they both drowned, "It is my nature." If the crocodile in the Danube canal had been able to speak and explain his actions, he would have probably said the same thing.

There may be as many as 500,000 Muslims in Austria; a country with a population of only 8.4 million. Nearly 8 percent of Vienna is Muslim. The Muslim population of Austria doubled in two decades. It will take less time for it to double again. Half of the Muslims in Austria are under 25; twice the number for the general population.

By 2030, Austria is projected to have the 4th largest ratio of Muslim to native population in Europe; an increase of 68 percent. The native Austrian fertility rate is 1.3. The Muslim settler fertility rate is 2.4. The difference is one entire child. It's the 4th largest native to settler difference after Norway, Finland and the UK.

By 2050, the majority of children and teenagers in Austria could be Muslim. The Vienna of the
seventies was a place with more dogs and senior citizens than children, but if this goes on then the Vienna four decades hence will have few dogs and many children. Its primary languages will be Arabic and Turkish. And if global warming ever kicks in, perhaps crocodiles will even be able to swim in the Danube.

The doting father who brought his daughter a crocodile because she was taken by an exotic picture in a storybook did not mean for the blood and screams to follow; but it is the role of adults to keep children from kissing crocodiles even if the storybooks say they should.

If you bring a crocodile home, then blood will flow. Kissing the crocodile will not make it love you. It will bite you, because that is what crocodiles do.
Europe tried to kiss the Islamist crocodile only to be bitten for its trouble. The poisonous gift of multiculturalism that it brought to its children has ended in blood and tears. Those who want the nations of the continent to keep on kissing the crocodile urge them to empathize with the reasons why he mistakes love for hate and bites, but no matter how much they try to understand him, he refuses to stop biting them.

If the fathers of Europe would like to see a future for their children, then they must stop bringing crocodiles home to their birthday parties.

Refusing to be Terrorized

2013-04-20T23:42:00.000-04:00

Two out of three governments agree that dealing with terrorism is all about having the right attitude. That, "Yes, we've been bombed, but we're ready to pick ourselves up and get on with our lives without drawing any conclusions from what happened" attitude that politicians patriotically advocate as soon as the carnage is over.

"Americans refuse to be terrorized. Ultimately, that's what we'll remember from this week," Obama said in his radio address.

But of course Americans were terrorized. Obama's message is that in response to the terrorism, Bostonians won't spend the rest of their lives locked in their homes, at least not until the next time there's a terrorist on the loose. But then again neither are Rwandans or Sudanese. This isn't so much an inspirational message as a pat on the back from a government that once again failed in its duty to keep Americans from being terrorized.

If America had refused to be terrorized, the Tsarnaevs would not have been admitted to this country or would have been shown the door once they started adding terrorist videos to their playlist. Instead Tamerlan Tsarnaev was free to slap around his girlfriend while his brother Dzhokhar was adding classic hits to his YouTube playlist like "We Will Dedicate Our Lives to the Jihad."

That ditty, from the hit-master behind “Hey, Shahid”, “The Holy Jihad (Rise Muslim)” and “Insallah, We are Waiting for Paradise” contains lyrics like "Paradise’s rivers softly chime/The 72 virgins lovingly whisper" and "Infidels rule the earth/for the faithful life is torture".

But while infidels might still rule the United States, though there are serious questions to be raised about who is ruling Michigan or New Jersey, life was hardly torture for the Tsarnaevs who drove luxury cars, attended good schools and got good media coverage. The good media coverage continued even after their bout of mass murder as the New York Times feature story on them was headlined, "Far From War-Torn Homeland, Trying to Fit In." And who can blame them for trying to fit by practicing some of their native customs of mass murder.

At some point refusing to be terrorized looks a lot like refusing to pay attention to what terrorism is. After September 11 the government encouraged everyone to get back out there and shop. The message now is take in an interfaith service and then visit your local mosque for a sanitized tour that explains how peaceful Islam really is. There's a lot of talk about finishing the marathon and MoveOn.orging on our way past the unpleasantness.

But there are two standards on being terrorized. When a mentally ill man shoots up a school, then everyone is obligated to be terrorized all the time. Children can be seized for chewing a pop tart the wrong way and the leading leaders tow around selected parents of victims to demand that the pesky Bill of Rights take a back seat to a special moral superiority vote from a former Democratic member of congress whose great achievement in life was getting shot in the head by another mental patient.

The next Adam Lanza is just around the corner. But the next Tamerlan Tsarnaev isn't worth bothering with. Gun control is an urgent issue, but mass immigration from terrorist countries isn't.

Talk of refusing to be terrorized smacks of governments handing out coping mechanisms for preventable acts of terror. And once we start going down that road, it's worth remembering that the timeless coping mechanism for that sort of thing is Stockholm Syndrome. Indeed the old Stockholm cure is popular in the media which is already beginning to disgorge explanations of alienation that will show that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev didn't kill on their own, we made them killers by not showing them enough love.

It's not the role of governments to tell people how to get over a terrorist attack. Nor is it the role of government to violate the Bill of Rights using the act of a lone madman as a pretext. But it is the role of government to stop an international campaign of terror by a fanatical ideology from reaching these shores using the blunt tool of immigration.

Refusing to be terrorized is as simple as refusing to accept more immigrants from Muslim countries. It's not the least repressive measure ever, but it beats interfering with the civil rights of hundreds of millions of Americans who are not members of terrorist groups.

The difference between refusing to accept terrorism and refusing to feel bad about terrorism is the difference between refusing to be terrorized and refusing to pay attention to terrorism.

There is no need for Obama to play Therapist-in-Chief. It's not his job, even if he is better at it than he is at his real job. His job isn't to praise the attitudes of the people his administration put in danger by refusing to give Tamerlan the boot even after warnings had come in that he was involved with Islamic terrorism. It's to refuse to accept the presence of terrorists in this country.

Obama obviously won't do that job. But neither did Bush. Unlike empty paeans to courage by politicians with none of their own, that topic is not even on the table. The terrorists will keep on coming and after each new act of terror, the politicians who keep the door wide open for them will praise the indomitable spirit of whichever city got targeted this time around.

Americans don't need to be told that they have courage. It's a nice topic for a speech, but an even better topic for a speech is, "How I Spent My Summer Vacation Deporting Amateur Jihadists Who Claim Life Under Infidel Rule is Torture." One is an empty compliment. The other is a practical task.

A refusal to be terrorized should not be the task of the civilian population. It only becomes the task of the civilian population when the government is unwilling or unable to keep them safe. And then come the speeches that say, but don't say, "The bad news is you're going to be blown up, but the good news is you're going to be a good soldier about it."

Muslim terrorism doesn't just happen. It's not random. It's not inevitable. It's a known entity and it has a vector. When bird flu breaks out, flights from affected countries are suspended, but when Islamism breaks out in a country, then the planes keep flying and the refugees get resettled and the infection spreads.

America will refuse to be terrorized when it refuses to admit terrorists or potential terrorists into the country and when it begins aggressively deporting terrorist sympathizers from its cities. Americans will refuse to be terrorized when they demand a government that closes the door to terrorists, instead of praising everyone for their courage once the acts of terror happen.

Terrorism is a function of immigration. Terrorists do not come to this country on parachutes or sneak in by boat. For the most part they arrive here legally. They come through a door that our government opened and keeps open as widely as it can because its allied institutions profit from the traffic. It is more important for the government to keep colleges in the Middle East student business and to keep Democrats in the new minorities business than it is to refuse to allow this country to be terrorized.

We refused to be terrorized after September 11. We went shopping. We got back in the stock market. We fought two wars whose prime purposes was to get two Muslim countries to be able to vote for their leaders. And here we are again facing the same thing all over again. Except this time we get to trade Iraq for Syria and Boston for New York.

While we refuse to be terrorized, those who insist on terrorizing us continue swarming into this country. A hundred Muslim nations have sent their progeny to live their tortured lives here, until they grow tired of infidel rule and decide to do what they do back home. Kill. And then we once again can refuse to be terrorized at an interfaith service in which the clergy of the murderers stand side by side with the clergy of the murdered.

The day may come when we finally refuse to be terrorized. They will not do it by going back to do their part for the next shopping season, the next interfaith service and the next healing speech. They will refuse to be terrorized by closing the door on terrorism for good.