Kathy Boudin, Weather Underground Terrorist of 1960s and 1970s, Dead at 78 (VIDEO)

She was the mother of Chesa Boudin, the radical San Francisco District Attorney who's up for recall on June 7. She pleaded guilty in 1984 to first-degree robbery and second-degree murder in the shooting death of Brink's security guard Peter Paige in the Weather Underground's 1981 armored truck robbery, in Rockland County, New York.

Chesa was raised by the notorious, violent Weather Underground militants Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Kathy Boudin, a "model prisoner," served 22 years behind bars at New York's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women. She was paroled in 2003.

As the New York Times reports, "Kathy Boudin, Radical Imprisoned in a Fatal Robbery, Dies at 78":

She had a role in the Brink’s heist by the Weather Underground that left two police officers dead. But she became a model prisoner and, after being freed, helped former inmates.

Kathy Boudin, who as a member of the radical Weather Underground of the 1960s and ’70s took part in the murderous 1981 holdup of a Brink’s armored truck and then, in prison and after being freed two decades later, helped inmates struggling to get their lives on track, died on Sunday in New York. She was 78.

The cause was cancer, said Zayd Dohrn, whose family adopted Ms. Boudin’s son, Chesa Boudin.

On a March day in 1970, Ms. Boudin was showering at a townhouse on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village when an explosion collapsed the walls around her. She and fellow extremists had been making bombs there, the intended target believed to have been the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey. Three of them were killed on the spot. A naked Ms. Boudin managed to scramble away with a colleague and found clothes and brief refuge at the home of a woman living down the block.

She then disappeared.

Within a few years, so did the Weather Underground. A breakaway faction of the leftist Students for a Democratic Society, it called itself Weatherman, borrowing from “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a 1965 Bob Dylan song with the lyric “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The name evolved into Weather Underground.

In that era of turbulence over civil rights and the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, the group set off bombs at the United States Capitol, New York City Police Headquarters and other buildings. If anything, it was more adept at issuing long manifestoes, laden and leaden with references to Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, and asserting the world’s “main struggle” as being that “between U.S. imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it.”

With the Weather Underground fading by the mid-1970s as the war ended, its leaders, one by one, emerged from hiding to face the legal consequences of having been on the F.B.I.’s most-wanted list.

Not Ms. Boudin (pronounced boo-DEEN). “The very status of being underground was an identity for me,” she recalled years later in interviews with The New Yorker at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, N.Y., where she came to be imprisoned. She continued: “I was making a difference in no way, so then I elevated to great importance the fact that I was underground.”

That ended in October 1981, when she teamed up with armed men from another radical group, the Black Liberation Army, to hold up a Brink’s truck in Rockland County, N.Y., making off with $1.6 million. During the stickup, the gunmen killed a security guard, Peter Paige. They transferred the cash to a U-Haul truck that was waiting roughly a mile away. Ms. Boudin was in the cab of the truck, a 38-year-old white woman serving as a decoy to confound police officers searching for Black men.

The U-Haul was stopped by the police at a roadblock. Ms. Boudin, who carried no weapon, immediately surrendered, hands in the air. But gunmen jumped from the back of the truck and opened fire, killing Sgt. Edward J. O’Grady and Officer Waverly L. Brown. Though some accused her of surrendering as a tactic to get the police to lower their weapons before being attacked, Ms. Boudin insisted that that was not the case.

Not Ms. Boudin (pronounced boo-DEEN). “The very status of being underground was an identity for me,” she recalled years later in interviews with The New Yorker at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, N.Y., where she came to be imprisoned. She continued: “I was making a difference in no way, so then I elevated to great importance the fact that I was underground.”

That ended in October 1981, when she teamed up with armed men from another radical group, the Black Liberation Army, to hold up a Brink’s truck in Rockland County, N.Y., making off with $1.6 million. During the stickup, the gunmen killed a security guard, Peter Paige. They transferred the cash to a U-Haul truck that was waiting roughly a mile away. Ms. Boudin was in the cab of the truck, a 38-year-old white woman serving as a decoy to confound police officers searching for Black men.

The U-Haul was stopped by the police at a roadblock. Ms. Boudin, who carried no weapon, immediately surrendered, hands in the air. But gunmen jumped from the back of the truck and opened fire, killing Sgt. Edward J. O’Grady and Officer Waverly L. Brown. Though some accused her of surrendering as a tactic to get the police to lower their weapons before being attacked, Ms. Boudin insisted that that was not the case.

At her sentencing, she turned to the victims’ relatives. “I know that anything I say now will sound hollow, but I extend to you my deepest sympathy,” she said. “I feel real pain.” As for her motives, “I was there out of my commitment to the Black liberation struggle and its underground movement. I am a white person who does not want the crimes committed against Black people to be carried in my name.”

She proved to be a model prisoner at Bedford Hills, mentoring other inmates, attending to those with AIDS, writing poetry and expressing remorse for her role in the Brink’s robbery deaths...

Shoot, she was *such* a model prisoner that even William F. Buckley, the august founder of National Review, wrote a letter to the parole board supporting her release. 

Still more here.

The video at top is a "Brave New Films" hagiography. 

Searching in vain, I found not a single television news report on her death by any of the so-called mainstream broadcast, cable, or streaming outlets. 

I did find, miraculously, an old "CBS Sunday Morning" segment (here) on the 1970 townhouse explosion in Greenwich Village, which killed three Weather Underground bomb-makers, Diana Oughton, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbin. As reported at the Times' story here, Kathy Boudin was on scene, escaped, and went to ground after her three comrades blew themselves up. 

This television news blackout is no surprise: President Barack Obama was a known associate of Bill Ayers during the latter's post-Weathermen university professor's life; and indeed, Obama launched his 1995 Illinois state senate campaign at a meet-and-greet at Ayers' house in Chicago.

Not a word of this will be brought up by our irretrievably corrupted legacy news outlets, lest the Democrats' chances in 2022 and 2024 be further deep-sixed by the "resurfacing" of "old news" reports on the party's most esteemed Democrat Party president in modern history, who was"palling around with terrorists."

Shoot, the current Democrat-Media-Disinformation-Complex beats Winston Smith's "memory hole" operations seen in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four --- and that's no joke.

ADDED: From Gail Heriot, at Instapundit, "THE BRINK’S ROBBERY/TRIPLE MURDER WAS ON THIS DAY IN [OCTOBER 20] 1981":

Please keep in your thoughts Brink’s guard Peter Paige and Nyack police officers Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown (who was Nyack’s first African-American officer). All three were murdered in the course of the 1981 Brink’s heist. Also remember Brink’s guard Joseph Trombino, who was seriously wounded, but survived, only to be killed twenty years later on 9/11.

The perpetrators were six members of the Black Liberation Army and four former members of Weather Underground who had since formed the May 19th Communist Organization.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the trial of the first three defendants (one from the BLA and two from the M19CO)...

Still more at Instapundit. 

Syria Withdrawal and Push for Border Wall Demonstrate Trump's 'America First' Worldview

Leftist media outlets have been slobbering all over themselves the last 24 hours, with a concatenation of news events they hope will damage the White House.

Actually, a lot of this is good news. The Mattis resignation isn't out of the ordinary at all. The economy's actually strong and markets are betting on the future, especially Federal Reserve moves that could dampen growth. Fact is, final 3rd quarter numbers show the economy humming along at 3.5 percent growth. Travel numbers for the season are at record numbers and it should be a booming Christmas shopping season.

For the leftist establishment take on Mattis see NYT, via Memeorandum, "Defense Secretary Jim Mattis Resigns, Rebuking Trump's Worldview."

And for the America First viewpoint, make sure you're following Diana West on Twitter:

There is nothing to win in the Islamic world and everything to lose at home. https://t.co/398cEasuM7

— Diana West (@diana_west_) December 21, 2018

And at the Los Angeles Times, "Trump's decision to withdraw from Syria and build a border wall instead marks a key moment for his 'America first' view":

Trump's decision to withdraw from #Syria and build a border wall instead marks a key moment for his '#AmericaFirst' view: #ThankYouTrump #SyriaWithdrawal https://t.co/15SlZSdHwM @diana_west_

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) December 21, 2018

President Trump, in a pair of tweets Wednesday summarizing his worldview, justified his decision to order American troops withdrawn from Syria while promising that the military would instead put resources into building the wall he’s long espoused along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” Trump tweeted, shortly before his press secretary announced that “we have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign.”

That declaration from Trump came shortly after another Twitter missive in which he declared that “because of the tremendous dangers at the Border, including large scale criminal and drug inflow, the United States Military will build the Wall!”

The joint tweets offered perhaps the clearest distillation to date of Trump’s “America first” policy: a simple and abrupt vow to disengage from one of the world’s most nettlesome conflicts, with a potentially premature declaration of victory over the militants of Islamic State, also known as ISIS, coupled with an unlikely promise that the world’s most sophisticated fighting force would be deployed to build a literal fortification around the homeland.

The order to withdraw the roughly 2,000 troops currently in Syria provided the latest example of how Trump’s instinct to turn inward, whatever the risk and costs to the United States’ influence and reputation abroad, may clash with the views of the generals and foreign policy experts who serve inside and outside his administration.

Defense Secretary James N. Mattis, for example, a retired four-star general who once commanded American forces in the Middle East, was pushed aside by President Obama for advocating more forceful engagement in the region. Pentagon officials over the last two years have repeatedly clashed with Trump’s desires to limit the kind of muscular U.S. role in the Mideast that Mattis has advocated in the past.

Trump’s announcement raised fears among national security professionals that he might follow the Syria decision with a troop drawdown in Afghanistan, something he has long wanted to do.

Either exit involves a strategic gamble by Trump and could also cost the president politically if Islamic State violence resurges or the region destabilizes during the 2020 election campaign.

“It is a major blunder,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). “If it isn’t reversed, it will haunt this administration and America for years to come.”

As is often the case, many officials worked Wednesday to mitigate the immediate impacts of Trump’s declaration, by slowing the withdrawal timeline and following his instructions only approximately. Others who have grown accustomed to Trump’s splashy promises and the fluidity of his decision-making cautioned that Wednesday’s announcement may not come immediately to fruition or could be tempered by the time the military implements it.

Trump’s about-face came only weeks after some of his own advisors said U.S. troops would remain in Syria until Iran, a key backer of Syrian President Bashar Assad, agreed to remove its own troops from the country. That expanded mission appeared to reflect the wishes of anti-Iran hard-liners, including national security advisor John Bolton, rather than Trump’s views.

A senior administration official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity put the matter bluntly. Asked about the cascade of recent statements by Bolton and others vowing to stay in Syria as long as Iran remained engaged, the official said that Trump is doing what Trump wants to do.

“The issue here is that the president has made a decision,” the official said. “He gets to do that. It’s his prerogative.”

The official conceded that the Islamic State threat has not been eliminated from the region beyond Syria’s borders, even if the militants have been significantly hobbled inside.

Some of Trump’s closest allies in the Republican Party oppose his plan...

Still more.

Is it Going to Be New Year's Eve with Andersoon Cooper and Kathy Griffin?

It shouldn't be. Frankly, I'm surprised CNN hasn't fired her yet.

Here's Diana West with more, "Playing Beheadings for Laughs":

Even in this day of overexposure to the worst, the lowest, the ugliest, the most degrading, a severed head is still something else -- and it's still there. Even if Griffin were able to remove the bloody thing from the internet altogether (which she is not, given the explosion of copies all around), the image is still there, no matter how "sorry" Griffin is -- and I'm sure she is extremely sorry to be poised to lose, possibly, some very big, very mainstream gigs. It's there inside our own heads along with images of the real victims Griffin is also idiotically and toxically exploiting. Their real death's heads were also designed by other barbarians to shock and psychologically maim the living.

The question becomes, how alive are the rest of us -- starting at CNN?

UPDATE: She's fired.

Deal of the Day: TCP LED A19 60W Equivalent Daylight (5000K) Bulbs

Nice bulbs.

At Amazon, TCP LA1050KND6 LED A19 - 60 Watt Equivalent Daylight (5000K) Light Bulb - 6 Pack.

Plus, TP-LINK Wi-Fi Smart Plug, Works with Amazon Echo, Turn On/Off Your Electronics From Anywhere (HS100).

More, Etekcity 11lb/5kg Digital Kitchen Food Scale, Stainless Steel, Alarm Timer & Temperature Sensor.

Also, from Diana West, The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.

And from Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.

BONUS: Kim R. Holmes, The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left.

Deal of the Day: Save $30 on the Fire HD 6

It's a deal at $69.99.

At Amazon, Fire HD 6, 6" HD Display, Wi-Fi, 8 GB - Includes Special Offers, Black.

Also, Save on Select Barska Safes & Optics.

More, Save on J.K. Rowling Thrillers.

See also, M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies.

And, from Whittaker Chambers, Witness.

BONUS: Diana West, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character, and The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' from the Book-Burners.

Rose Parade Skywriters Also Smeared Trump as a 'Fascist Dictator'

Following-up from yesterday, "Trump's Not 'Disgusting' — What's Disgusting is for Leftists to Exploit New Year's to Smear GOP Frontrunner (VIDEO)."

There's more photos at SB Nation, including a picture of the "fascist dictator" smear. See, "Someone is skywriting anti-Donald Trump messages above the Rose Parade." (Via Memeorandum.)

.@iowahawkblog not sure where you're sitting, but new writing: "Trump Is Delusional. Trump Is A Fascist Dictator." pic.twitter.com/szkRrISBJD

— Jeff H (@j_hauser9) January 1, 2016

Also blogging, Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, "POLITICIZING THE ROSE BOWL GAME: “Meet the man behind the ‘Trump is disgusting’ skywriting,” according to CBS."

And Diana West, "Marco Rubio Campaign Donor Behind Anti-Trump Writing In the Sky at Rose Bowl."

And see, at Big Government, "Exclusive — Anti-Trump Air Campaign Donor Stan Pate Denies Connections to 2016 Republicans: ‘This Is All Me’."

Of course he'd deny it. These are leftist attacks. And the link to Marco Rubio's campaign is sickening.

It's Stan Pate, identified at the CBS News report, "Meet the man behind the "Trump is disgusting" skywriting."

Like I said previously, these folks can expect blowback, and it's coming.

10 Factors That Will Probably Determine the White House Winner Next Year

Enough with all the political speculation, here's some real political science prognostication!

From Larry Sabato et al., at Sabato's Crystal Ball, "10 Factors That Will Determine the Next President":

Here’s a thought experiment: What if Republicans nominated the 2012 version of Mitt Romney — same fundraising, same baggage, same everything — at their 2016 convention? What sort of odds would that candidate have in 2016?

We suspect the candidate would be a small favorite at the start of the campaign. He would be running against a Democrat who lacked the power of incumbency, and he would be competing in an environment where the public was ready for a change: The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed that about three-quarters of those surveyed wanted the next president to take a different approach to governing than President Obama, similar to how the public felt about how George W. Bush’s successor should act at a similar point in the 2008 campaign. It’s hard to precisely quantify, but there’s a generic desire for change that hampers a party the longer it stays in the White House. To satisfy that general feeling, a generic Republican might do the trick, which is why we cite Romney circa 2012 as an example of what could/should be enough to win the White House: A candidate who is largely average could flip a few percentage points of the national vote from the 2012 results, which is all it will take for the Republicans to win.

However, it’s quite unclear that the Republicans will produce a candidate of even the quality of Romney. After 2012, the party took a hard look at its inadequacies, producing a report that suggested the party needed to do more to reach out to nonwhite voters. Donald Trump, the GOP’s current polling leader, is not helping on that front. The Republican leadership is worried.

What follows is an exploration of 10 factors that will probably determine the White House winner next year. Some of these — many of them, in fact — suggest that the GOP should be seen as a narrow favorite. But a few factors, combined with the live possibility that the next Republican nominee will make Mitt Romney look like Ronald Reagan, indicate to us that, as we turn the page from 2015 to 2016, that the 2016 general election is still a coin flip...

Keep reading for the 10 factors.

I hope Trump's the nominee, mainly because he's so unlike Mitt Romney, particularly in that the latter might have won in 2012 if he'd have adopted some of the former's pugnacity. Conservatives need a fighter, and while Trump's not really conservative, he's definitely fighting on those issues really dear to the conservative base. I mean, Diana West is a movement conservative, as is Ann Coulter, and they see Trump as a savior. [And I forget to mention Phyllis Schlafly --- Phyllis freakin' Schlafly!] Even Michelle Malkin, who's gone a few rounds with Trump (rather nasty rounds, in fact), concedes that she'd vote for Trump if he became the nominee, primarily because he'd indeed fight to reverse the diabolical damage leftists have inflicted on this country.

See also, "Voters Seek Vengeance Against Obama's 'Fundamental Transformation of America' (VIDEO)."

It's Time to Rally Around Donald Trump

From Diana West, at Big Government (via Memeorandum):

Brent Bozell has called on conservatives to rally around Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)97%
 for the Republican presidential nomination. Ted Cruz is a good man and a fine candidate — my own second choice — but I believe GOP frontrunner Donald Trump is the candidate for American patriots to rally around.

Bozell states that Cruz is the one candidate who will return the United States to “her Constitutional foundations and Judeo-Christian values,” explaining:

On every issue of crucial importance to conservatives—defunding Planned Parenthood, ending the Obamacare nightmare, reducing the size of government, opposing amnesty—Cruz is not only with conservatives, he’s led the fight for conservatives.

To be honest, if these were the only issues under discussion in this GOP presidential primary season I would hardly be able to make myself pay attention. It’s not that they are unimportant issues. Personally, I support every one of them. But they are not existential issues. They are not the issues on which the very future of the Republic hangs. They are issues that a responsible Republican House and Senate, if they were loyal to their oath and to their constituents, could today begin to rectify all by themselves.

If they did — or if, say, a President Cruz were to ensure that Planned Parenthood was defunded, Obamacare ended, government trimmed, and amnesty once again staved off for another election cycle — we would all rejoice. However, the Constitution, the Republic, would be no more secure. On the contrary, they would still teeter on the edge of extinction, lost in a demographic, political, and cultural transformation that our fathers, founding and otherwise, would find inconceivable — and particularly if they ever found out that the crisis took hold when We the People lost our nerve even to talk about immigration and Islam.

It is in this danger zone of lost nerve and the vanishing nation-state where the extraordinary presidential candidacy of Donald Trump began. Like the nation-state itself, it started with the concept of a border, when Donald Trump told us he wanted to build a wall. Circa 21st-century-America, that took a lot of nerve.

After all, Americans don’t have walls. We don’t even have a border. We have “border surges,” and “unaccompanied alien minors.” We have “sanctuary cities,” and a continuous government raid on our own pocketbooks to pay for what amounts to our own invasion. That’s not even counting the attendant pathologies, burdens, and immeasurable cultural dislocation that comes about when “no one speaks English anymore.” A wall, the man says?

The enthusiasm real people (as opposed to media and #GOPSmartSet) have shown for Trump and his paradigm-shattering wall is something new and exciting on the political scene. So is the “yuge” sigh of relief. Someone sees the nation bleeding out and wants to stanch the flow. Yes, we can (build a wall). From that day forward, it has been Trump, dominating the GOP primary process and setting all of the potentially restorative points of the agenda, compelling the other candidates to address them, and the MSM, too. Blasting through hard, dense layers of “political correctness” with plain talk that shocks, Trump has set in motion very rusty wheels of reality-based thinking, beginning a long-overdue honest-to-goodness public debate about the future of America — or, better, whether there will be a future for America. That debate starts at the border, too.

A well-defended border is an obvious requisite for any nation-state. It bears noting, however, that before Donald Trump, not one commander in chief, and (aside from former Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-CO), not one figure of national fame and repute I can think of had ever put it to the people of this land that a wall was a way to stop our border crisis: the unceasing flow into the nation of illegal masses of mainly Spanish-speaking aliens, among them terrorists, criminals (yes, including rapists and murderers) and transnational gangs. On the contrary, crime and chaos at the U.S. non-border are what every branch and bureaucracy of our government expect We, the People to accept as normal — and pay for as good citizens.

But good citizens of what — the world?

For many decades, the unspoken answer  to this inconceivable question (inconceivable, that is, before Trump) has been yes. “We Are the World” has been the USA’s unofficial anthem, the political muzak of our times that we either hum along to, or accept in teeth-gritted silence for fear of censure (or cancelled party invitations). “Openness,” “multiculturalism,” “globalism” — all have been pounded into us for so long that I think Americans despaired of ever hearing anyone give voice again to a patriotic vision of American interests. Then Trump came along and changed the tune. Americans perked up their ears. Maybe a wall — which is just the beginning of Trump’s detailed immigration policy, which Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)80%
 calls “exactly the plan America needs” — would make America possible again. That would be great, indeed.

Does Trump see it all this way, or is he going on “feel”? I don’t claim to know, although by this time in the political season, I think I am beginning to get a sense of Trump. When it comes to what is important, beginning with immigration, Trump’s instincts are as formidable as his courage. Notwithstanding Cruz and his consistent conservatism (in which Bozell places great stock), immigration wouldn’t even be a campaign issue without Donald Trump. In my opinion, the Trump plan is absoutely essential to any possible return, as Bozell puts it, to America’s constitutional foundations and Judeo-Christian principles. I actually think of it as our last shot...

Still more.

Phyllis Schlafly also argue's that Trump's the last hope for America.

Boy, conservatives have a bleak view of our prospects. You can understand why.

BONUS: "The Political Establishment's Terrified by Donald Trump's 'Tangible American Nationalism'."

Halloween Used to Be for Kids

Heh, at Pajamas, "How Did Halloween Go From Being a Holiday for Kids to a Celebration of Adulthood?"

I tweeted, "Leftist narcissism and endless leftist adolescence?"

And Diana West tweeted me a link to her book, exclaiming, "of course!"

Heh, "#TheDeathoftheGrownUp, of course! http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312340494?..."

Watching the World Fall Apart

From David Solway, at Pajamas Media:

In her valediction to a decade and a half of syndicated journalism, Diana West expresses her disappointment that there has been little or no progress over the years in advancing the debate about Islam and the specter of national decline. In some respects, the situation has deteriorated dramatically. “Indeed, now the U.S. faces the world without a defended border, with increasingly cheapened citizenship and no lawful immigration policy.” The same is true to varying degrees of other western nations as well. Her summation hits home for many of us: “It is hard to watch the world falling apart.”

The name of the game today is denial of the undeniable all across the spectrum of the major issues that afflict us. Denial that temperatures have been stable for the last eighteen years and that the diminution of sunspot activity heralds an age of global cooling rather than warming, as John Casey, president of the Space and Science Research Corporation, has decisively established in his recently published Dark Winter. Denial that Israel is the only democratic, morally legitimate state in the Middle East and that the Palestinian narrative of historical and cadastral residence is demonstrably false. Denial that Islam is a totalitarian entity and a religion of war that has set its sights on the ruination of western societies; and denial of the fact that Judeo-Hellenic-Christian civilization, for all its flaws, marks the high point of human political, social, cultural and scientific development.

Those who hold to such canting and spurious convictions and attitudes are the real “deniers” among us. And a people that lives in a collective state of denial of the obvious, or of what with a little study and dispassionate research would soon become obvious, is a people without a sustainable future. As SF writer Philip K. Dick said, in a speech aptly titled “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart in Two Days,” later published in his masterful I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Similarly, writes beleaguered Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who is currently being prosecuted once again for telling unpleasant truths about unrestricted Muslim immigration into the Netherlands and across many European countries, “Festering political problems do not go away simply because they are kept in a dark corner.” In a sane society, the messenger who brings irrefutable truths — judgments buttressed by solid evidence and logical reasoning — would not be shot or shot down, mocked or slandered. Such bearers of crucial tidings would be attended to and honoured. But we clearly do not live in a compos mentis society. Indeed, even those who have grasped the essential issues at stake increasingly believe that telling the truth is a tactical blunder and merely alienates the constituency they wish to persuade. And yet all they manage to accomplish is to weaken the strength of their argument, lose once-committed followers, and bring their own integrity and courage into question.

I used to think that only a monstrous catastrophe could save us, could provoke people to think again and to see the world as it really is, and could convince us to rise at last to our own defense — I mean something really enormous, that would make 9/11 look like a mere skirmish. Now I’m not so sure. We would probably find some way of temporizing, of refusing to examine or even recognize the causes of our misfortune, evincing, as Flemming Rose aphoristically put it in The Tyranny of Silence, “the infamous ability of humans to adapt.”

And how they — we — do adapt to the absurd, the false and the shameful in every walk of political and cultural life, of whatever magnitude! When the multi-billion dollar swindle that is “global warming” devastates the economy and temperatures begin to decline, leading to reduced crop growth and a crisis of hunger in various parts of the world, people will still insist that “the science is settled.” As it becomes increasingly evident that the media constitute a tribe of liars and fabricators operating as a fifth column, people will continue to read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Salon and the Huffington Post, and get their news from the BBC, CNN, and MSNBC, forming their opinions therefrom. Although it is by now indisputable that our elite universities have become latrines of left-wing dogma, anti-Zionist propaganda and a subversive pedagogy, we continue to subsidize their existence via donations and attendance rather than seek and support responsible academic alternatives. The more that questions arise regarding President Obama’s still-sealed academic records and mysterious documentary discrepancies, the more people will say “nothing to see here” and move on. As a Palestinian enclave without a legal government and no viable historical claim to the territory it covets resorts to anti-Semitic indoctrination of its denizens and unleashes episodes of outright terrorism, governments around the world will persist, in plain violation of international law, in recognizing it as a state. As Iran marches toward a nuclear bomb and perfects ballistic technology, western governments will declare that it is a rational actor supplementing its electrical grid. Should one of our cities be rendered uninhabitable for 60 years following a dirty bomb strike or half its population succumb to water poisoning, Islam would still emerge as the religion of peace and federal officers would be stationed around mosques to prevent a “backlash.” All such reactions are practically foreordained — until reality forecloses on its mortgage and a subprime debacle of existential proportions ensues, when it may be too late to reclaim what we have sacrificed to fear, lassitude and craven imbecility.

Keep reading.

Solway concludes with the the most hilarious joke, heh.

When Unaccompanied Alien Minors Are Really Baby #Democrats

From Diana West:

There is one thing we can predict about the tens of thousands of "minor aliens" crashing our southern border. If permitted to stay in this country and gain citizenship, at least 8 in 10 of them will grow up to be Big Government Democrats. They will likely believe that the U.S. government isn't big enough, and doesn't offer enough tax-payer-funded services.

Keep reading.

Diana West: "The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' from the Book-Burners"

Diana's publishing her response to the attacks from the David Horowtiz/Ronald Radosh cabal, and I'm happy to announce that she's been gracious enough to include one of my essays in her compilation.

At Diana's blog, "FLASH: Now Available! The Rebuttal: Defending American Betrayal from the Book-Burners."

Click to RTWT at the link, although here's the list of patriots she's included:

I have published both my rebuttal, which originally appeared in three parts at Breitbart News, and a selection of these essays written in my behalf in a new book, The Rebuttal: Defending American Betrayal from the Book-Burners. Authors include Andrew Bostom, Vladimir Bukovsky, Donald Douglas, Edward Cline, M. Stanton Evans, Ruth King, Clare M. Lopez, Ned May, R.S. McCain, Takuan Seiyo, Cindy Simpson, David Solway, John L. Work and more.

And check Amazon, "The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' from the Book-Burners."

(In Kindle here.)

And ICYMI, see the astonishing essay right now, "BUKOVSKY & STROILOV ON AMERICAN BETRAYAL."

Why Academics Hate Diana West

I'm getting a kick out of this.

Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov have a long essay on Diana West's American Betrayal at Big Government, "WHY ACADEMICS HATE DIANA WEST."

Recall that when I met Diana at the book signing in Los Angeles, I mentioned to her that I'd be especially interested to see the response to her research from professional historians. I suggested that her thesis was "bold" and that academic historians would react strongly. Little did I know how strongly, especially in the case of nutjob Ron Radosh. Diana got a kick out of recalling our exchange this morning on Twitter.

If you haven't read it, visit Amazon to pick up your copy, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character.

Recognizing the Wrong People — Implications for U.S. Intervention in Syria

An essay on Diana West's book, American Betrayal, from Clare M. Lopez, which was apparently yanked from the Gatestone Institute's homepage after first being published.

At Diana's blog, "Clare Lopez: Recognizing the Wrong People."

It's not clear what happened, but I like how Ms. Lopez extrapolates from FDR's recognition of the murderous Soviet regime in 1993 to the foreign policy fiascos of the current, Muslim-infiltrated Barack Hussein administration:

As the world confronts the next horror of innocent Syrian men, women, and little children, hundreds of them apparently, killed in late August 2013 by a rocket barrage of the deadly chemical weapon, sarin, the U.S. and the world once again have the opportunity to react rationally, soberly, and with core U.S. national security interests uppermost in consideration. It seems most likely that the Iranian-and-Hizballah-backed regime of Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad is responsible for this latest war crime, and the outcry to empower his al-Qa'eda- and Muslim Brotherhood-dominated rebel opposition has become overwhelming. U.S. naval forces are positioned near Syria in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, pending a White House decision on U.S. action. Yet, even as one side of this intra-Islamic sectarian civil war is getting the worst of it, with more than 100,000 casualties racked up so far, and no end in sight, with chemical weapons against civilians introduced into the conflict, there has never been a more critical need for rational, sober-minded thinking about where U.S. interests and responsibility lie. While a 2012 Presidential Intelligence Finding for Syria authorized the extensive clandestine CIA, financial, and Special Forces training support that has been channeled to Syrian rebels (jihadis and non-jihadis alike), in the months since then, any decision to expand that support, now that chemical weapons have been used against civilians in a large-scale attack, demands a significantly better informed assessment of the probable beneficiaries of such assistance than has been the case to date.

Any decision to deploy U.S. military force beyond a punishing strike against the specific Syrian base and military unit that carried out this chemical weapons atrocity must take into consideration the consequences of an al-Qa'eda and Muslim Brotherhood victory in the Syrian civil war. It is hard to see how enabling the replacement of Iranian proxies and Shi'ite jihadis in Syria with Sunni jihadis aligned with al-Qa'eda and the Muslim Brotherhood will advance either U.S. national security interests in the region or those of our closest allies, Israel and Jordan. Providing generous humanitarian assistance to civilian victims is urgent and right; but, before America recognizes any more totalitarian-minded enemies of genuine liberal democracy, it would do well to enlist common sense, good judgment, and a judicious measure of national self-interest. It is high time we stopped empowering those who wish us ill.

Previously on Diana West here.

The Attacks on American Betrayal: An Update

I linked earlier to Diana West's WND article in which she argues the attacks on her book threaten her very livelihood. Things are heated, so it's logical that she's been both busy and aggressive in smacking down the various salvos against her book.

To call this an "academic debate" at this point is pointless. The behavior of Ron Radosh, in particular, reminds me more of a mafia kingpin eliminating gangland rivals than of a dispassionate analyst clarifying the historical record. It's out of hand.

It turns out Conrad Black has a new criticism up at National Review, "Defaming FDR," and Radosh was quick to send Diana a "collegial email" to give her the heads up:




Diana responds here, "Another Day, Another Attack on American Betrayal."

Plus, it turns out David Horowitz pulled out the big guns for another shot on Diana at Diana. See the big piece from John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, at FrontPage, "Was Harry Hopkins a Soviet Spy?"

It took me a little while to get through that one, it's so detailed. It's very scholarly though, and completely avoids ad hominem arguments, and is thus a vast improvement over the harsh screeds Radosh has been blasting.

And finally, Robert Stacy McCain jumped back into the debate, "Major Jordan, Carroll Reece, Birchers, Buckley and the Attack on Diana West":

I lamented this controversy when it first arose, and declared myself committed to defending Diana West, and remain resolute. Radosh and Horowitz say that they have serious reasons as conservatives for their crusade against American Betrayal, and despite my general admiration for their work, I think they are misguided in this effort.

Whatever West’s errors, she doesn’t deserve this treatment, and I think serious people need to ask what could be so dangerous about West’s book that it has engendered such extreme hostility.

RTWT.

David Horowitz Responds to Diana West

And to her supporters.

At Big Government, "What Difference Does It Make?' A Response to Diane West":

Let me be perfectly clear: There is no disagreement between West and us over whether the Roosevelt administration was infiltrated by Soviet agents, or whether pro-Soviet dupes and fellow-travelers were influential and affected administration policy. Radosh and other conservative historians whom West chooses to trash actually pioneered the work of tracking these Soviet agents and pro-Soviet influences, and analyzing their impact. There is also no disagreement about the infiltration of the Obama administration by Islamists or the Obama-Hillary support for the Muslim Brotherhood, America’s mortal enemy. The issue between us is not political in this sense, and it would be helpful if West and her followers would acknowledge that and stop treating our disagreement as political treason.

The real question for us is this: Does it matter if conservatives regard Lend-Lease and D-Day as Soviet plots, and describe allied wartime decisions--however mistaken--as being orchestrated not by Roosevelt and Churchill and their generals, but by Joseph Stalin?

Continue reading.

It's his utter condescension that bothers me, but the whole thing should be winding down by now.

I'll be reading more widely on these issues now (the left's treachery), so that's one upside of the debate.

Added: Diana's got a new piece up at WND, "In Defense of My Livelihood."

Sick: 'The Nation' Denies Harry Dexter White's Soviet Espionage

Well, this is fascinating, especially given the whole debate over Diana's West's American Betrayal.

It turns out Katrina vanden Heuvel's rag has published a review denying that Harry Dexter White ---- Franklin Roosevelt's man at the U.S. Treasury and Bretton Woods ---- was a Soviet mole.

Jonathan Tobin reports, at Commentary, "Portrait of Denial: ‘The Nation’ and Communist Spies":

You might think that having the most liberal president since Jimmy Carter would free The Nation from their commitment to keep fighting the old ideological battles. There are, after all, a host of contemporary arguments to engage in that, notwithstanding the weakness of the left-wing case, are not vulnerable to disproof by incontrovertible historical evidence as is the case with the delusional effort to defend White. Yet after so many years of pretending that Soviet infiltration of Washington in the 1930s and 1940s was a figment of the imagination of demagogic right-wing anti-Communists, keeping the flag of denial flying is their way of asserting that being left wing means never having to say you’re sorry.

Doing so can be dismissed as a mindless loyalty to their past as a publication, but one suspects there is also something else at work. Admitting the truth about Communist espionage doesn’t validate contemporary conservative critiques of other traditional left-wing positions on the economy like the minimum wage or the folly of socialized medicine and its forerunner, ObamaCare. But at The Nation, the notion that any cracks in what in another era would have been called party solidarity undermines all their beliefs still seems to prevail.

Why else would they bother beating the dead horse of espionage denial if not for the fact that doing so somehow bucks them up in the idea that the right is always wrong, even when it is obviously right.

Word.

Remember, with Democrats, it's always no enemies on the left, and that's to the dying end.

I wrote about this earlier, on Benn Steil definitive reporting on White as the ultimate Soviet mole, even more important than Alger Hiss. See, "Harry Dexter White, Franklin Roosevelt's Man at Bretton Woods, Was Communist Mole Who Passed State Secrets to Soviet Union."

Steil's book is here, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order.

The Latest on the Bitter American Betrayal Dust-Up

Diana West has a new roundup on her battle with FrontPage Magazine, "American Betrayal: New Links."

And she reports that her older brother, Jed West, tried to comment at the website but was banned. Here's the post at Facebook.

Diana posted a shout out for my essay on Twitter the other day:

@davereaboi Hey, it's a barrel of monkeys, @rsmccain ! Kudos to @AmPowerBlog for tackling and encompassing: http://t.co/1dIDCUBeT1

— Diana West (@diana_west_) August 10, 2013

And I do hope Robert Stacy McCain updates his comments on the debate. ICYMI, he's got a review of American Betrayal at Viral Read, "Top FDR Aide Hopkins Was Soviet Agent; Book Examines ‘Betrayal’."

Meanwhile, Wes Vernon offers an enthusiastic review, "The 80 year sell-out of America."

David Horowitz and Ron Radosh Attack Diana West and American Betrayal

Folks will remember I attended the Diana West book signing last month. It was a lively event and I was excited to meet Diana.

At the time I'd read a couple of chapters of the book. I'm frankly not well read in the historiography of Communist Party infiltration of the U.S. government, although from my own training I thought that some of Diana's conclusions were quite broad, especially on WWII strategic issues and the origins of the Cold War in Europe. Indeed, I mentioned to Diana that I thought her book was very "bold" and that I'd be interested to see the reactions among academic historians.

Unfortunately, this isn't what I had in mind.

It turns out that former Communists-turned conservatives David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh have launched a vicious, personal and ad hominem attack on Diana and American Betrayal. And right off the bat I have to say that any writer/scholar is going to face criticism and pushback against their work. But in an ideal world such criticism comes with an abundance of collegiality, reflecting normative expectations of elevating the community of scholars and scholarship. But with Horowitz and Radosh the attack is actually the exact opposite. It's an attempt to destroy any scholarship that isn't the acceptable form of anti-communism. This is conservative political correctness of the most extremely ugly kind.

Lots of interested parties are weighing in on this, and the heated exchange has seen a flurry of salvos issued at FrontPage Magazine, PJ Media, with Diana responding at her blog. But to be clear, at this point it's not wether Diana's book is right or wrong on facts and interpretations. It's that she's being treated as shabbily as can be, and sadly this is by people I've long held in very high esteem.

Let's start with Diana's initial, shocking email exchange with the folks at FrontPage. See, "If Frontpage Will Lie about This, What Won't They Lie About?" Diana was responding to Radosh's attack on her book at Horowitz's website, which included a nasty disclaimer falsely alleging that Diana refused to publish a response to Radosh at FrontPage. Check that link for the full post. (And note that Horowitz pulled his website's initial glowing review of the book, written by Mark Tapson, "MARK TAPSON ON DIANA WEST’S “AMERICAN BETRAYAL”.") But here's the exchange:

The email sequence starts at the bottom. I note that Horowitz cc'd his email (immediately below) to three other people -- presumably to display his cleverness.

On Aug 7, 2013, at 1:08 AM, david horowitz wrote:

Dear Diana,
Our decision to remove the review of American Betrayal was not because it offered an incorrect opinion that we wanted to suppress. The review was removed because the reviewer was as incompetent to provide an informed assessment of your book as you were to write it.
David [Horowitz]

From: jamie glazov
Subject: Fwd: review of your book
Date: August 6, 2013 7:41:00 PM PDT
To: David Horowitz

I guess we're not friends anymore.

From: Diana West ...
Date: Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 9:38 PM
Subject: Re: review of your book
To: jamie glazov

Dear Jamie,
What gall. You and your crew behave like little totalitarians, suppress an "incorrect" opinion of my book, and, now that you have your "correct" reveiw at the ready, ask me to dignify your nasty tactics by engaging in civil debate. If I deem it worth my while to respond to the Radosh review, I will find another outlet.
Diana

On Aug 6, 2013, at 9:41 PM, jamie glazov wrote:

Dear Diana, I just want to give you a heads up that our review of your book, written by Ron Radosh, will be going up on our site at 9:30pm Pacific time this evening (12:30am Eastern).

David would like me to pass on to you that you are most welcome to write a response to this review, and to feel free to write at length to defend your position (but not longer than the review itself).

Sincerely, Jamie.

I've placed Horowitz's email in bold as the condescension and contempt for Diana is really astonishing.

And the exact same contempt bleeds across the page at Radosh's angry review at FrontPage, "McCarthy on Steroids." He's so fired up that he posted another piece at PJ Media even before Diana was able to respond, "Why I Wrote a Take-Down of Diana West’s Awful Book."

And then on it goes. Here's David Horowitz, "Editorial: Our Controversy With Diana West."

There's also a review by historian Jeffrey Herf, "Diana West vs. History." And then Ron Radosh lashes out again, "Diana West’s Attempt to Respond."

And then back over at Diana's blog, "If Frontpage Lies about This, They'll Lie about Anything, Pt. 2," and "'Professor' Radosh Gets an 'F'."

Again, I'm still reading and evaluating Diana's book, and I expect to be reading more books in the genre of Soviet espionage against the U.S. My argument here is that the attacks on Diana are unscholarly and unprofessional. Nothing here works to elevate the community of scholars above the routine bilge we navigate on a daily basis in the blogosphere. There's a prodigious amount of research that went into American Betrayal, and I'd expect that the work would be seen as advancing an important debate and offering much needed provocation in our current era of official state-sponsored ignorance and the media's capitulation to daily Orwellian lies.

In any case, Robert Stacy McCain, who's very well versed in the works on Communist infiltration in the U.S., has weighed in at his blog, "Diana West Dissed by David Horowitz?" And Edward Cline has this, "FrontPage's Spitballs Strike Diana West":

Why would the editors remove Tapson's review? Because it contradicts Radosh's in substance and in style, in truth, and in honesty. The removal of Tapson's review speaks volumes about the motives of FrontPage's editors. Instead of issuing a statement to the effect that while they respect Tapson's views on West's book, there is another perspective and here is Mr. Radosh's, and even providing readers to a link to Tapson's review. But to remove a contradictory and controversial article is a confession of intellectual weakness and moral turpitude. The editors do not wish readers to compare the Tapson review with Radosh's. They wish to play Big Brotherish Ministry of Truth games with readers' minds.

In his rambling, Alinskyite article, Radosh expects West to have read or consulted every book ever published whose subject was FDR's conscious, insouciant, or unwitting complicity in the preservation of the Soviet Union. He claims she didn't read this or that authority or author. Her knowledge and command of the field of Soviet-American studies ought to have been encyclopedic, and if it wasn’t, then, as far as Radosh and his editors are concerned, she should be shot down, discredited, and her work consigned to a dustbin.

Reading his purported review, I was constantly reminded of that old legal saw, "When did you stop beating your wife?" "But I never beat my wife." "Prove it." "I can't prove a negative." "Too bad. Let the implied charge be entered into the minds of the jury." "Objection!" "Objection overruled."

Reading Radosh's "review," one is first knocked silly by the highly personal animus he nurtures for West. It colors his purported review and does him no favors, and certainly, as West herself points out, does nothing to lend his reputation as a neocon any credibility. I could not shake loose the impression that Radosh was attempting to defend Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, and even Stalin from West's charges. The invective present in his long screed is demonstrable and there for all to see who choose to see.

But rather than attempt to counter Radosh's allegations of West's incompetency and illiteracy – which in itself would require a book-length treatment, something I am not willing to undertake because the soundness and value West's book speak for themselves – I will simply stress that FrontPage's editors have shown their dishonest and manipulative hands by removing Mark Tapson's review. That is an unconscionable and unforgivable journalistic and moral crime.

There's more at the link.

And see the Lonely Conservative, "Front Page Mag vs. Diana West."

And also Kathy Shaidle, "Ron Radosh takes issue with Diana West’s ‘American Betrayal’." And note Kathy's update:

UPDATE: Andrew Bostom sent me two articles critical of Radosh’s reviews of new books about McCarthy, as a sort of “consider the source” thing. So I will check those out.

And yet more from Ruth King, "RON RADOSH: REVIEW OF DIANA WEST’S BOOK “AMERICAN BETRAYAL”….SEE NOTE PLEASE."

Back From Diana West's Book Signing

It was a pleasure to meet Diana West at the book signing last night. She gave a stimulating talk and the crowd reception of her book was phenomenal.

I took exactly one photo, and it's expressively representative

And see Mark Tapson's review of the book, here. And the Amazon book page is, here.

@RSMcCain At Diana West's talk and book signing in L.A. #AmericanBetrayal @Instapundit pic.twitter.com/IyN4PVvSAu
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) July 11, 2013