Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Based on the fact that Donald is now linking to soft core teen porn, I guess we should be grateful that he’s teaching at a juco and not at a middle school.
Recall this kinda stuff below at TBogg's is considered cool left-wingsocial commentary. And if you check the thread, Godless freak-nozzle and Xtremist hate-merchant Repsac3 piles on the allegations of juvenile sexual predation despite facts that put the lie to these sick malevloent dopes as totally FUBAR. THIS IS THE FACE OF NIHILISM, with deep-dreaded ice-cold blackness in the heart. This is why good conservatives like Michelle Malkin travel with a bodyguard --- these folks have already tried to destroy my economic livelihood; I expect physical threats to my safety as forthcoming ... so always remember --- leftists are pure evil.)
At the University of California, Irvine the Muslim Student Union (MSU), a virulently anti-Semitic and anti-American student group, holds several programs which unabashedly support terrorist groups and unjustly denounce Israel, America, and the Western world. MSU events have featured speakers like Norman Finkelstein, Ward Churchill, Muhammad al-Asi and Amir Abdel Malik Ali, and have had titles such as "Hamas: the People's Choice" and "Israel: The 4th Reich."
On May 12, 2008 the Muslim Student Union invited Muhammad al-Asi to speak on the main part of the campus in front of the flag poles. Al-Asi has spoken at UC Irvine before, and his speeches are usually riddled with stereotypical tirades on Jews and unrepentant affirmations of terrorist acts on American and Israel.
Out of all the MSU’s speakers, al-Asi has the most lurid personal history. A former Air Force Officer, al-Asi became radicalized by the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and is an avid admirer of the late Ayatollah Khomeini. In 1983, he was removed from his position at the Islamic Center in Washington D.C. for being too radical, and since then, he preaches his hateful message in front of the very same mosque to passers-by. Al-Asi also makes regular trips to Iran to meet hard-line officials, and as reported by the Washington Post, is under constant surveillance from the United State’s government.
Al-Asi’s hateful message was on full display during this year’s hate week. With a speech peppered with pro-terrorist and anti-Semitic overtones, he didn’t disappoint his keffiyah wearing devotees of the Muslim Student Union. In referring to the fate of the Israeli state, al-Asi boasted about the increasing endangerment of the concentrated Jewish population in the Middle East, and the pent up aggression of their Arab neighbors:
"As the years go by you are going to feel more cornered in the nation state ghetto you constructed."
The invocation of “ghetto” is a common theme in al-Asi’s speeches. To the defrocked Imam, the state of Israel isn’t a prosperous and civilized nation founded by legal land purchases and predicated on international law, but rather a bastion for alien savages that ran rough shod over an otherwise pristine Middle East. According to al-Asi, modern Jewish culture is deviant and depraved, born from thousands of years of exile and the violent “ghetto life” they failed to learn from in Europe:
"Just like you didn't learn from exile, you didn't learn from ghetto life.
You left the ghettos of Europe, there were no ghettos to speak about in Muslim Countries. You left those ghettos and came in the fashion that you did, with all the bloodshed that went with it and still continues.
You came to the holy land, which you desecrated and blasphemed with every decision that you made and still are making and then you realize that you are in a territory of hostilities around you. These hostilities didn't come from nowhere, these hostilities are a reaction to all the misery and all the hostility that you brought with you."
Amir Abdel Malik Ali echoed similar overtones in his speech on Thursday, May 15. Invoking repetitive and hazy distinctions between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, he did however characterize Jews that are politically active in Republican politics as traitors “masquerading as right wingers.” Ali was unequivocally adamant about the destruction of Israel, but was more reserved in his attacks on America, calling for what he narrowly defined as the fall of “empire.”
Video Credit: Reut Cohen, "Welcome to Irvinistan,"with more on Amir Abdel Malik-Ali:
In order for people to live like human beings America must fall as an empire and America is coming down. When you put the Israeli flag up next to the American flag, what it means for many of us, you will fall just like that empire is going to fall.
By this time, five years after the run-up to the Iraq war, it's abundantly clear that those on the left implacably opposed to the toppling of Saddam Hussein's murderous regime are stuck in a pre-surge mentality, and they'll continue to use any and all methods to prolong their deligitimization campaign of the American deployment in Iraq.
Cernig's got a post up this morning on Australia's Rudd government and its effort to pull the country's contribution to joint security contingents in Iraq:
When War Party shills or the Bush administration repeat the old lie that "everyone thought Iraq had WMDs", they conveniently forget that French intelligence didn't, that weapons inspector Scott Ritter didn't, that Russian intelligence didn't, that Al Gore didn't, that German intel had already worked out that Curveball was a conman and warned the CIA...and leave out the fact that most Western governments were relying on the US to tell them the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Australian PM Kevin Rudd has been laying out that latter inconvenient truth for his public, on the occasion of his ordering a withdrawal of Aussie soldiers from Iraq. It's a story that's got very little attention in the US, however.
Notice that language: The "war party shills." God, that's sounds positively evil. I'm sure the diabolical "neocons" had something to do with it!
I went to leave a quote from the Wall Street Journal at the post, but apparently I'm banned by Cernig for violating his abstruse "rules" for debate at the blog:
We're sorry, your comment has not been published because TypePad's antispam filter has flagged it as potential comment spam. It has been held for review by the blog's author.
That Saddam had WMD was the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community for years, going back well into the Clinton Administration. The CIA's Near East and counterterrorism bureaus disagreed on the links between al Qaeda and Saddam--which is one reason the Bush Administration failed to push that theme. But the CIA and its intelligence brethren were united in their belief that Saddam had WMD, as the agency made clear in numerous briefings to Congress.
And not just the CIA. Believers included the U.N., whose inspectors were tossed out of Iraq after they had recorded huge stockpiles after the Gulf War. No less than French President Jacques Chirac warned as late as last February about "the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq" and declared that the "international community is right . . . in having decided Iraq should be disarmed."
The point here is not so much the disagreement over Iraqi WMD (Prime Minister Rudd's going to spin his antiwar meme as best he can, in kowtowing to whatever left-wing surrenderist pressures he's facing), but to illustrate the total cowardice of the antiwar hordes in censoring opposition to their views based on reason.
Cernig's a hack who has a history of banning pro-victory commenters, according to some whacked system of ad hoc posting rules. As Dave in Boca pointed out in any earlier entry,
Petty autocrat [Cernig] banished/blocked me for consistently outwitting and outfacting his tendentious gibberish.
My neocon protege at GSGF was also banned after disputing a Newshoggers' post, so shining the light of reason on this guy triggered a good amount of reflexive "spam-filtering."
UPDATE: I frequently mention that many of my antiwar commenters, who I tolerate generously (including Repsac3), never denounce (but defend) the antiwar nihilism and left-wing anti-Semitism I regularly chronicle on this page.
Here's another example: In response to this post, and my reference above to Newshoggers' cheering of Downs syndrome suicide bombers in Iraq, Fauxmaxbaer responded in the comments, which is followed by my rebuttal and the comment of Gayle from Dragon Lady's Den:
** [1] I followed the links and could not find where anyone applauded or cheered the use of those with Down's Syndrome as suicide bombers. Could you provide that quote. [Fauxmaxbaer]
** [2] This is the only quote that I found and it does not fit the description of cheering or applauding:
For the record, assuming it's true, I think it's just horrible that whoever was behind this latest disaster used Down's women to perpetrate the bombings but I don't see it as a sign of desperation. I see it as a sign of adaptation and a brilliant one at that. Perhaps Mr. Owens can educate me on how our troops are supposed to counter this new evil tactic? That would be helpful. [Fauxmaxbaer]
** [3] "I see it as a sign of adaptation and a brilliant one at that."A brilliant adaptation, for killing the innocents? Is that okay with you, Fauxmaxbaer? That's cheering. If that's okay with you, you're as bad as they are. [Donald]
** [4]) Donald, I found that same quote, and I see it differently than Fauxmaxbaer does. "I see it as a sign of adaptation and a brilliant one at that." Sounds like approval and cheering to me! That quote came from here. I think Libby Spencer is morally challenged. [Gayle]
Gayle responded to me just seconds after I responded to Fauxmaxbaer, and I was already working on this update when I saw her comments. I was going to throw open the thread for some debate on defending as "brilliant" Downs suicide bombers, which for both Libby Spencer and Fauxmaxbaer, is a case in the worst form of moral relativism.
But to be clear: If war opponents see the strapping of explosive vests on mentally-challenged Iraqi women for the purpose of killing American soldiers and innocent civilians as a "brilliant adaptation," that can only be seen logically as applauding a shift in tactics by the terrorists to excalate the nihilist violence. Libby Spencer's original post, and Fauxmaxbaer's defense, demonstrates a moral equivalence (and depravity), that, frankly, I find sickening. Is there nothing that the terrorists will do that elicits an unequivocal denunciation by the far left-wing enemies of American success in Iraq?
Thanks to Gayle for the moral backup. Sometimes I go crazy with these lefties!
I deeply disagree with Michelle Malkin on immigration reform, and I've obviously not been pleased with her attacks on Senator John McCain.
But no one in the media or the right blogosphere is doing more to publicize the nihilist left's unending campaign of destruction against U.S. military recruitment programs, attacks which demonstrate the pure hatred of America and its martial institutions among many (if not most) in the antiwar cadres.
Malkin has published a new report on the dangerously escalating war on America's armed services at home. The report should be a read widely as a wake-up call in the aftermath of last week's Times Square bombing, :
Ideas have consequences. Inaction has consequences. For the past several years, I've chronicled the left's escalating war on military recruiters -- and the apathetic, weak-kneed response to it. The anti-recruiter thugs on college campuses and in liberal enclaves have thrived thanks to a combination of public indifference, law enforcement fecklessness and left-wing ideological apologism.
It has now been a week since the Times Square military recruitment center bombing. The investigation continues -- and so does the left's denial of the ongoing campaign against military recruiters. At a national conference of anarchists in Washington, D.C., last weekend, a "solidarity sticker" glorifying the biker bomber made the rounds. On the Internet, "peace" activists threatened the Gathering of Eagles, a national military support group that organized a rally at Times Square last weekend. From Pittsburgh to Berkeley, anti-war extremists have smeared recruiters as "death pimps" and "child predators." The militant Code Pink group continues to organize in-your-face protests to drive recruiters from major metropolitan areas.
The Times Square bombing was not an isolated incident, but an all-too-predictable symptom of reckless tolerance for dangerous "peace" peddlers skating on the edge of sedition. Lone nuts? Here is a brief history of the anti-military recruitment movement's mounting acts of vandalism and violence.
Malkin lists over two dozen incidents of intimidation and violence against recruiter in the last few years, for example:
January 20, 2005: At Seattle Central Community College, Army recruiter Sgt. Jeff Due and his colleague Sgt. 1st Class Douglas Washington were hounded by an angry mob of 500 anti-war students. The recruiters' table was destroyed; their handouts, torn apart. Protesters threw water bottles and newspapers at the soldiers. The far-left Students Against War had been agitating to kick the recruiters off campus. The college administration refused to punish the radicals.
The most recent incidents include Code Pink's violent campaign against recruiters in Berkeley, and the Times Square recruiting center bombing.
I wrote on the Times Square case, here, here, and here.
Malkin sees no end in sight to the antiwar mayhem:
When will this escalating war end? There will be no end in sight until lawmakers, law enforcement, the media and the public open their eyes to the hate, connect the dots, and stop coddling the increasingly crazed and emboldened anti-military militants before more bombs go off -- and innocents get harmed -- in the name of "peace."
Her concern is not unwarranted.
As Gayle at Dragon Lady's Den reports, in the wake of the New York bombing, there are new threats against the pro-victory support organization, Gathering of Eagles, which is planning a series of demonstrations this weekend.
Clearly deranged, the activist making the threats has now called on all "imams" to issue a fatwah ordering the assassination of Michelle Malkin.
Just a crazy extemist, right? An isolated case, which is nothing compared to Republican fear-mongering, some might argue.
At a Politburo meeting in April, Xi announced an effort to reeducate party cadres, using language that harked back to Mao's "rectification" campaigns of the 1940s when he was consolidating power at his revolutionary base in Yanan.
Trying to boost morale in the military, Xi decreed all generals and officers above the rank of lieutenant colonel must do stints of at least 15 days as rank-and-file soldiers. Mao used almost exactly the same tactic in 1958.
In public speeches, Xi tends to elevate the Communist Party above the nation and even above the Chinese people. He's tried to clamp down on criticism of Mao.
"To completely negate Mao Tse-tung would lead to the demise of the Chinese Communist Party and to great chaos in China," Xi told a high-level forum in January, according to an article last month in Study Times, an official publication of the Central Party School in Beijing.
Just to show that he is not Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Xi blames the collapse of the Soviet Union on wavering from Communist convictions.
"It's a profound lesson for us. To dismiss the history of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party, to dismiss Lenin and Stalin, and to dismiss everything else is to engage in historic nihilism, and it confuses our thoughts and undermines the party's organizations on all levels," he said in another unpublished speech from December that was widely leaked.
Xi's predecessor for the last decade, Hu Jintao, was a bland figure. But political analysts believe he may have been more inclined toward political reform.
"Xi Jinping is very good at public relations, much better than Hu, who acted like a robot," said Willy Lam, a political analyst based in Hong Kong. "But ideologically he is really a Maoist, who wants to maintain tight control over the party and the military and to put a freeze on Western values."
Nobody expects Xi to reverse the opening of China's economy and, in fact, many are predicting reforms this year to loosen the grip of state-owned enterprises. But unlike Hu, he rarely speaks about rule of law.
Tighter controls were in evidence June 4, a sensitive day marking the anniversary of the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989. To much ridicule, censors deleted all references to the anniversary on the Chinese Internet — including a doctored photograph of yellow rubber ducks marching like tanks toward the square. Hong Kong journalists were detained briefly and prevented from filming the daily ceremony for the raising of the Chinese flag.
Authorities made sure no commemorations took place, rounding up activists and putting others under house arrest.
Boy, that sounds familiar. No doubt Xi's even getting a few pointers from President Dronekiller.
Like math and the Midwest, ISIS confuses progressives. It’s not hard to confuse a group of people who never figured out that if you borrow 18 trillion dollars, you’re going to have to pay it back. But ISIS is especially confusing to a demographic whose entire ideology is being on the right side of history.
Raised to believe that history inevitably trended toward diversity in catalog models, fusion restaurants and gay marriage, the Arab Spring led them on by promising that the Middle East would be just like Europe and then ISIS tore up their Lonely Planet guidebook to Syria and chopped off their heads.
But ISIS also believes that it’s on the right side of history. Its history is the Koran. The right side of its history is what Iraq and Syria look like today. It’s also how parts of Europe are starting to look.
Progressive politicians and pundits trying to cope with ISIS lapse into a shrill incoherence that has nothing to do with their outrage at its atrocities and a lot to do with their sheer incomprehension. Terms like “apocalyptic nihilism” get thrown around as if heavy metal were beginning to make a comeback.
Those few analysts who admit that the Islamic State might be a just a little Islamic emphasize that it’s a medieval throwback, as if there were some modern version of Islam to compare it to.
Journalists trying to make sense of ISIS demanding Jizya payments and taking slaves ought to remember that these aren’t medieval behaviors in the Middle East. Not unless medieval means the 19th century. And that’s spotting them a whole century. Saudi Arabia only abolished slavery in 1962 under pressure from the United States. Its labor market and that of fellow Petrojihadi kingdoms like Kuwait and Qatar are based on arrangements that look a lot like temporary slavery… for those foreigners who survive.
Non-Muslims paid Jizya to Muslim rulers until very recently. Here is what it looked like in nineteenth century Morocco from the account of James Riley, an American shipwrecked sea captain.
“The Mohammedan scrivener appointed to receive it took it from them, hitting each one a smart blow with his fist on his bare forehead, by way of receipt for his money, at which the Jews said, ‘Thank you, my lord.’”
Those Jews who could not pay were flogged and imprisoned until they converted to Islam. An account from 1894 is similar, except that the blows were delivered to the back of the neck. Only French colonialism finally put a stop to this practice as well as many other brutal Islamic Supremacist laws.
Morocco was one of the Arab countries where Jews were treated reasonably well by the standards of the Muslim world. It’s one of the few Arab countries to still retain a Jewish population. When ISIS demands Jizya from non-Muslims, it’s not reviving some controversial medieval behavior. It’s doing what even “moderate” Muslim countries were doing until European guns and warships made them stop.
If the French hadn’t intervened, the same ugly scene would have gone on playing out in Morocco. If the United States hadn’t intervened, the Saudis would still openly keep slaves.
Islam never became enlightened. It never stopped being ‘medieval’. Whatever enlightenment it received was imposed on it by European colonialism. It’s a second-hand enlightenment that never went under the skin.
ISIS isn’t just seventh century Islam. It’s also much more recent than that. It’s Islam before the French and the English came. It’s what the Muslim world was like before it was forced to have presidents and constitutions, before it was forced to at least pay lip service to the alien notion of equal rights for all.
The media reported the burning of the Jordanian pilot as if it were some horrifying and unprecedented aberration. But Muslim heretics, as well as Jews and Christians accused of blasphemy, were burned alive for their crimes against Islam. Numerous accounts of this remain, not from the seventh century, but from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Those who weren’t burned, might be beheaded.
These were not the practices of some apocalyptic death cult. They were the Islamic law in the “cosmopolitan” parts of North Africa. The only reason they aren’t the law now is that the French left behind some of their own laws.
Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia that were never truly colonized still behead men and women for “witchcraft and sorcery.” Not in the seventh century or even in the nineteenth century. Last year.
The problem isn’t that ISIS is ‘medieval’. The problem is that Islam is...
Historical vindication happens. The Obama White House assumes it will happen to them. Thus they can do pretty much what they want.
What they forget is that facts largely decide what history thinks—outcomes, what happened, what it means. What they also forget, or perhaps never knew, is that the great ones are always constructive. They don’t divide and tear down. They build, gather in, create, bend, meld, and in so doing move things forward.
That’s not this crowd.
This White House seems driven—does it understand this?—by a kind of political nihilism. They agitate, aggravate, fray and separate.
Look at three great domestic issues just the past few weeks.
These values [of honor and democratic merit, of civic participation and self-sacrifice for community] have not disappeared, but in our own time they have been severely challenged. With the shock of the 9/11 terror attacks, most Americans reacted by clearly and powerfully supporting their government's determination to use military force to stop such attacks and to prevent future ones. Most Americans also expressed a new unity, an explicit patriotism and love of their country not seen among us for a very long time.
That is not what we saw and heard from the faculties on most elite campuses in the country, and certainly not from the overwhelming majority of people designated as "intellectuals" who spoke up in public. They offered any and all explanations, so long as they indicated that the attackers were really victims, that the fault really rested with the United States.
As most of us have come to know too well, the terrorists of al Qaeda and other jihadists regard America as "the great Satan" and hate the U.S. not only because its power stands in the way of the achievement of their Islamist vision, but also because its free, open, democratic, tolerant, liberal and prosperous society is a powerful competitor for the allegiance of millions of Muslims around the world. No change of American policy, no retreat from the world, no repentance or increase of modesty can change these things.
Yet many members of the intelligentsia decried the outburst of patriotism that greeted the new assault on America. The critics were exemplified by author Katha Pollitt, who wrote in the Oct. 1, 2001, edition of the Nation about her daughter wanting to fly the American flag outside their window after 9/11. "Definitely not," Ms. Pollitt replied. "The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war."
Such ideas still have a wide currency, reflecting a serious flaw in American education that should especially concern those of us who take some part in it. The encouragement of patriotism is no longer a part of our public educational system, and the cost of that omission has made itself felt. This would have alarmed and dismayed the founders of our country.
Jefferson meant American education to produce a necessary patriotism. Democracy—of all political systems, because it depends on the participation of its citizens in their own government and because it depends on their own free will to risk their lives in its defense—stands in the greatest need of an education that produces patriotism.
I recognize that I have said something shocking. The past half-century has seen a sharp turn away from what had been traditional attitudes toward the purposes and functions of education. Our schools have retreated from the idea of moral education, except for some attempts at what is called "values clarification," which is generally a cloak for moral relativism verging on nihilism of the sort that asserts that whatever feels good is good.
Even more vigorously have the schools fled from the idea of encouraging patriotism. In the intellectual climate of our time, the very suggestion brings contemptuous sneers or outrage, depending on the listener's mood. There is no end of quoting Samuel Johnson's famous remark that "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," but no recollection of Boswell's explanation that Johnson "did not mean a real and generous love for our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest."
I did not know Steve Clemons was gay. In fact, the only thing I knew about Clemons, from reading his columns occassionally, was that he seemed like one more classic leftist nut spewing BDS across the blogosphere. The erudition of Clemons' essays did nothing to disguise his representation of the essential nihilism of today's postmodern left.
Clemons' Thanksgiving essay, where he discusses his sexual orientation, and his frustrations with Barack Obama, is one more example of how radically left is the progressive agenda of today's Democratic Party base:
Yes, like everyone - I'm pleased that Barack Obama won the White House. But it is only a small beginning in the right direction. But with Barack Obama, we also got Proposition 8. We have him talking about Iraq as the "bad war" and Afghanistan as the "good war". We have political appointments in both security and economic policy that either will be the height of brilliant personnel and policy maneuvering or alternatively could end up as a paralyzed cabinet and government disaster. There is only fog ahead, much yet we don't know.
We have wars going on in the Middle East that shouldn't be going on. I have friends there now being shot at - and helping to kill others - and this wasn't what the 21st century was supposed to be about.
I have been writing here for some time -- far before the National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2025 report came out chronicling America's global decline - that America's mystique as a great nation had been punctured by the invasion of Iraq. We showed key limits in our military and economic capacity, leading allies and foes respectively to count on us and fear us less. The economic crisis is the punctuation point in America's fall from its once significant global perch. I'm worried about all of this - making a traditional thanksgiving very uncomfortable.
Our new president preaches inclusion, which is a good thing -- and I think he has the potential to be one of the great stewards of the White House and the executive branch authority we have given him.
But how could people who helped deliver this man to the White House also spit on my decision to enter into marriage with someone I have been with for 17 years? Europe has embraced adjustments in marriage easily and in a socially healthy way, and yet we still stoke embers of nativism and fundamentalism in this country. Barack Obama's voice was used on anti-gay marriage robocalls to African-American and Hispanic voters in California. To my knowledge, he didn't ask for his voice not to be used.
I think intolerance is what undermines the glue of a nation, stirring up fear and violence at home and in wars abroad. We have a lot of intolerant Americans who helped elect George W. Bush twice to the White House, and now we have many other intolerant Americans who have come into their civic responsibilities as voters and have tainted the hope that people like my partner and I have for a better and more just nation that recognizes our relationship in the ways it should be recognized.
I'm going to see the movie Milk today starring Sean Penn reprising brilliantly the life of the assassinated first gay elected politician in the United States - and no matter what Proposition 8 thought it achieved, I'll be wearing my ring.
So, this is an uncomfortable Thanksgiving holiday, and I hope that those who read this today do embrace their family and friends - all of them, gay ones too - and remember that this nation needs to stop dragging when it comes to bigotry.
I've written much on gay rights and the unhinged left's backlash against the majority vote on Proposition 8 (which Clemons conveniently omits).
As for the rest of Clemons' rant, I'm a little surprised he's resorting to the same smears of intolerance and bigotry used by every other 9th tier leftist on the web.
Or, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised: The gay marriage movement has nothing more to argue for it than to demonize those who oppose them, which is essentially a temper-tantrum masquerading as argumentation. Leftists may indeed win the battle over marriage in the long run - with all the intimidation and claims of "rights" - as society proceeds along the path to hegemonic secularism. What's interesting here is how Clemons' gay marriage advocacy fits right in with all the other outrages against GOP governance over the last eight years.
For every action there's an equal and opposite reaction, or so they say. Conservatives are planning now for their comeback, and 2010's not too soon to make the case that the push for gay marriage is just one pillar of the larger radical program intent to destroy center-right traditionalism in this country.
My essays have been getting linked by a considerable number of blogs on the left-wing fringe, like At Largely, LGM, Stump Lane, and TBogg.
The traffic's nice, thank you, but the comments at the posts get old fast. My skin's thickened up a bit over the last couple of years, so I don't get too bothered by the attacks. Besides, it's like Mike's America once told me: "It's a badge of honor ... you know you're really getting to 'em."
My writing's been all over the place on the issues, but a common theme is often Palin Derangement Syndrome (or just left-wing nihilism generally).
But apparently my post on Matt Taibbi's way-over-the-top attack on the Alaska Governor generated some considerable resentment, at least if this e-mail from an outraged lefty is any indication:
I was going to say sophomoric...
But pathetic is better. You say you “despise the hard left agenda” yet you “abhor irrationalism.” Your diatribe on Taibbi’s Oct. 2 Rolling Stone article has no rationalism in it. It is as fully emotional and full of invective as the piece of writing you criticize, just nowhere near as imaginative and insightful. And you are just plain unoriginal and ordinary. I guess that explains why he’s a nationally syndicated writer and TV personality and you are a pathetic blogger. You are a hypocrite too, but that’s not surprising; I’ve found it to be a necessary prerequisite for neoconservatism. That you are an Associate Professor, even of some podunk JC in the OC, yet aren’t well schooled and self-critical enough about your blather to catch and edit obvious oxymorons is also not surprising considering the poor state of education in this country. Nor is it surprising, based on the above, that you would tout your academic credentials and spout your mindless, uncritical slavish patriotism (“I fully support current U.S. military operations throughout the world”) in one breath. (I doubt there is one American general that would make that blanket of a statement. Certainly many have voiced the contrary.) Do the world a favor. Stop masquerading as someone who’s got anything at all important to say about anything and make yourself at least of some use by getting a manual labor job. Leave the thinking to those who are endowed with intelligence and real learning.
I must be getting up there in the "wingnutiasphere," perhaps along with Michelle Malkin, who gets this stuff in her inbox routinely.
If we can turn away from the elections for a moment, and the future of the Republican Party, a more fundamental problem exists. It is nothing less than the nature of the American culture. By the term “culture,” I am not referring to the social issues that usually come up when one talks about culture wars; i.e., abortion, gay rights, religion, etc. Rather, I am talking about the perception and outlook that stand beneath the way our American public define the very nature of civic life in our democratic capitalist society.
That is why I regularly borrow from the Left, as some astute observers of my previous column noted in some comments, the works of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and particularly his theory of cultural hegemony. As I wrote in my concluding paragraph, we have to “wage a war of position on the cultural front and to do all possible to challenge the ascension of a failed intellectual liberal ideology, whether it is in the form of Progressivism, liberalism or socialism.” I’m referring to the kind of work Fred Siegel carries out in a new book he has just finished writing, and which I had the pleasure of reading in manuscript form, on the nature of American liberalism. When it is eventually published, I believe it can have the kind of impact that great works of history like Richard Hofstadter’s books had in the 1940s and ’50s.
Siegel shows that from its very inception, liberalism was a flawed ideology whose adherents substituted its would-be virtues as a way of distancing themselves from most Americans and their workaday lives; an ideology based on a view whose believers saw themselves as superior to most Americans, including those who were merchants, workers, or regular folk, who could not be counted on to comprehend the backwardness of their beliefs.
Continuing on through the post-war decades, Siegel deals with liberalism’s failure to accurately confront the issue of race; its love affair with the New Left and its moral collapse in the face of its anarchism and nihilism; the effects of McGovernism on the political collapse of the Democratic Party, and the resulting politics of “rights-based interest groups” and the new power of public sector unionism, a far different breed than that of the old labor movement of Walter Reuther and George Meany. If we want a different kind of social polity than the one we have now — based on catering to the power of competing interest groups that compose the core strength of the Democratic party — we have to address first the essential question of the kind of social order that liberalism has built.
I’m also referring to the work the intellectuals who edit National Affairs and those who edit The Claremont Review of Books — solid theoretical and analytical work on social policy, education, and law, all of which challenges the intellectual foundations of contemporary liberalism.
If you doubt that this intellectual work is necessary, you might ponder the question of why college-educated Americans are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats or among those even much further to the political Left. An answer appears in this article by Richard Vedder, which appears today in Minding the Campus. Vedder shows that the majority of professors who teach our young people in the humanities are primarily on the Left, as he writes, “62.7 percent of faculty said that they were either ‘far left’ or ‘liberal,’ while only 11.9 percent said they were ‘far right’or ‘conservative.’ The notion that universities are hot beds for left-wing politics has a solid basis in fact. Moreover, the left-right imbalance is growing — a lot. The proportion of those on the left is rising, on the right declining.” The latest research reveals that there are 5.7 professors on the left for each one on the right!
The irony is that this occurs only in the academy, since studies also show that more and more Americans define themselves as basically conservative rather than liberal. So it should come as no surprise that the suburban middle-class and university-educated Americans, having learned their liberalism and leftism at college, vote the way that they do. One study shows that 41 percent of Americans call themselves conservative while only 21 percent call themselves liberal. Thus, as Vedder says, the university faculties are truly “out of sync” with the country at large....
Another realm of mis-education is that of the popular media. This week, I have written about this in an article published in The Weekly Standard, which fortunately the editors have not put behind their firewall. It is titled “A Story Told Before: Oliver Stone’s recycled leftist history of the United States.” Stone’s TV weekly series premiers Nov.12th on the CBS-owned network Showtime, and will eventually be used by leftist professors in their own history courses on our campuses. It is, I show, nothing less than a rehash of old Communist propaganda from the 1950s offered up as both something new and as the true hidden history of our country’s past.
Imagine how many television viewers, many of whom know virtually nothing about how we got to where we are, will learn from this expertly edited documentary how and why the United States is basically an evil nation, on the wrong course, and supported the wrong side in all foreign policy crises throughout its modern history. We cannot disregard the effect this kind of miseducation has on the knowledge of our fellow citizens. Do you wonder why the polls show that most Americans think Barack Obama’s foreign policy the past four years was successful? It is because they are a generation educated from “historians” like the late Howard Zinn, political theorists like the linguist Noam Chomsky, and now from filmmaker Stone and his historian co-author, Peter Kuznick.
Analysis: In the space of 13 days, Isil destroyed a Russian airliner, bombed Beirut and brought carnage to Paris, inflicting a combination of attacks unmatched by any terrorist group.
Among the many terrible facts about the bloodshed in Paris, one stands out. No terrorist group has ever previously inflicted the combination of attacks claimed by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).
The carnage in Paris must be placed alongside other recent events for its real significance to become clear. True enough, Isil’s claims of responsibility should always be treated with caution, but if they are accurate, then consider what its operatives have inflicted in the space of just 13 days.
Since Oct 31, Isil has destroyed a Russian passenger plane over Egypt, wrecked a street in Beirut using two suicide bombers, and brought terror to Paris by carrying out near simultaneous assaults on at least six separate targets across the capital.
If its claims are true, Isil has carried out three complex acts of mass murder in three different countries – spread across two continents - in less than a fortnight. Along the way, its terrorists have killed 393 people from nations as disparate as Lebanon, Ukraine, France and Russia.
When David Cameron said that events in Paris showed Isil's appetite for “mass casualty attacks” and a “new degree of planning and coordination”, he was making the point in mild terms. There is simply no precedent in the modern history of terrorism for the rapid succession of havoc that Isil appears to have wrought.
The group’s recent attacks are unique in several respects. The fact that they happened quickly and in far flung countries is important, but not, in itself, decisive. Al-Qaeda never actually struck three targets in three countries in 13 days, but Osama bin Laden’s followers might have been capable of doing as much their heyday before 2001 – provided, that is, we are talking about the kind of bomb attacks that the network had made its speciality.
What makes Isil’s onslaught unique is how different the three operations were – and how each demanded a particular range of skills.
Most terrorist groups come to specialise in one method of bloodshed. Under bin Laden’s leadership, al-Qaeda developed a near obsession with destroying civil airliners - a compulsion that reached its apogee on September 11 – or planting large bombs in unsuspecting capitals. For the first two decades of its existence, Hamas concentrated almost exclusively upon carrying out suicide bombings in Israel.
The events of the last fortnight appear to demonstrate that Isil has mastered all of these black arts and more. The destruction of the Russian airliner showed that its operatives can subvert airport security and infiltrate explosives on board a passenger plane.
The deaths of 41 people in Beirut last Thursday once again displayed Isil’s ability to inflict a tragically familiar brand of terrorist attack, namely a double suicide bombing in a Middle Eastern capital.
And then came Paris. On Friday night, Isil’s terrorists used automatic weapons and bombs to carry out an assault which appeared to owe as much to the “urban guerrillas” of 1970s Europe as to the Islamist brand of nihilism.
Four decades ago, young Germans and Italians joined the Red Brigades or the Baader-Meinhof gang and fought gun battles in city streets. They took hostages and murdered passers-by, causing Italians to use the term "Years of Lead" for that era of their history, so named because of the empty bullet casings that lay scattered in the streets after every incident.
Isil’s terrorists followed a similar modus operandi in Paris, except that they focused solely upon killing innocent bystanders - not police officers or government officials - and their murderous exertions were ended only by their own deaths.
But the conclusion is unmistakable: when it comes to destroying a plane, taking hostages, dispatching suicide bombers to Beirut, or running amok in a European capital, Isil’s operatives can do all of the above in quick succession. They have shown their mastery of the full spectrum of terrorism in a way that no group – not even al-Qaeda - has ever done before...
I've picked up a quite a few nasty left-wing trolls since the flame war with the Sadly No! commies. One particularly despicable dickhead is the prick at "Thinking Meat", one of the more unbelievably messed up websites I've ever seen. Anyway, I've deleted his previous comments in the moderation queue, but like most nihilist trolls, he's persistent. He's attacking me as "racist" at his blog, but we naturally hear not one peep about Barack "Gangsta" Obama's endorsement of the most bigoted stereotypes of hip hop rappers. And for some whacked reason this Neanderthal thinks he's pwned me on my earlier remarks about Imam Rauf, where I noted: "No one's really digging down deep, which is that Imam Rauf has praised sharia and alleged that America deserved it on September 11." In a follow up comment, in the style of JBW, he writes:
I was right, of course. You don't have the guts to post Rauf's actual words.
No, much much easier to 'paraphrase' them, so that you can portray him as 'saying' anything you need him to 'say'.
"We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al Qaida has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims. You may remember that the US-led sanctions against Iraq led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children."
And Imam Rauf said the U.S. had it coming in September 2001, on "60 Minutes":
As for sharia, the Imam published [a defense of sharia] at Huffington Post last year: "What Shariah Law Is All About."
That's all the attention you get, Unthinking Freak. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Like Reppy, exDLB, Bonejob Keefe, Truth 101 and the rest you commie refuse. Stay the hell away from this blog. You are the scum of the earth.
*****
UPDATE: exDLB has responded, but he ignores the orginal criticism from Pinhead Thinking Meat. Here's my quote from the original post, with the key phrasing in bold: "No one's really digging down deep, which is that Imam Rauf has praised sharia and alleged that America deserved it on September 11." Note: exDLB is correct on my wording, and I have edited my statement above, because I was half asleep when I wrote it and that's not what I meant to write. So to recap: (1) Imam Rauf indeed "praised" sharia, the point Asswipe Thinking Meat claimed was a fabrication, and (2) exDLB ignores the YouTube clip I posted and the link to Discover the Networks --- and that's because exDLB is a liar and his post just spews more progressive anti-Americanism:
The crime perpetrated on the United States on 9/11 was heinous. Over 3000 US citizens and others lost their lives. The sanctions put in place and kept in place during the Bush I and Clinton administrations did lead to the deaths of over a half million Iraqi children. That was one of the reasons given by bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks. Rauf does not say the 9/11 attacks were justified. What he’s saying is no different than what Chalmers Johnson, Andrew Bacevich and many other conservatives have said. The attacks were blowback.
When someone issues a denial of their main point as a preface (both Imam Rauf and exDLB) that's a de facto acknowledgment that they're engaging in the exact allegations in which they've initially denied. So, listen carefully at the video. Imam Rauf indicates that Americans "have been accessory to a lot of innocent lives dying in the world," and that "in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA."
"Made in the USA."
In other words, you made your bed now sleep in it.
Anti-Americans all of them, which is why I will resist their nihilism and destruction.
The despicable low-life Charles Johnson published a deliberately vague hit piece on Patterico and his brain dead commentariat went straight to work on plans to threaten Patrick Frey's job at the L.A. County District Attorney's Office.
Charles Johnson, you are a hypocritical, dishonest lowlife punk. This post of yours guarantees that I’ll be doing a new post about you every single time I find out about another lie of yours.
Every. Single. Time.
In doing so, Charles Johnson, I will metaphorically crush you. I will metaphorically disembowel you and eat your innards. But I will not do a single physical thing to you. Nor will I encourage others to.
I will simply laugh and laugh as your reputation continues to shrink into nothing.
I have, of course, had people do this exact sort of thing to me many, many times before — and it’s not purely a tactic of the left, either. (In fact, there is one certain “classical liberal” site that did almost precisely the same thing a little more than a year ago.) Tbogg, Sadly No, Brad Friedman, his partner the convicted bomber, the aforementioned “classical liberal” site, and several disgraced reporters and columnists for the Los Angeles Times have all learned that the best way to get me to stop pointing out their dishonesty is to stop engaging in dishonesty.
You stop lying, I stop pointing it out. Simple as that.
UPDATE: It just gets better and better. Here is a Twitter message Johnson just republished:
This is classic. I've had E.D. Kain contact my college, not once, but twice, and during the recent Elizabeth Edwards nihilism episode my department chair received two outraged e-mails claiming that I didn't deserve to be teaching at a public college. And that's to say nothing of Libel BloggerDavid Hillman, who mounted a campaign of workplace harrassment last year, specifically launched to get me fired.
Leftists can't win on the merits. They instead mount campaigns of retaliation. For the longest time Racist Repsac3 hosted this call to workplace harrassment at his blog: "If the Coward or any of his followers harass you online you, contact Vice President Donald Berz" at Long Beach City College. All the phone numbers and e-mail contacts were included. It was only after being repeatedly slammed for his sponsorship of such hatred and intimidation did RepRacist3 remove the contact information, but the post is still up. After reading that, folks should see this recent thread where RepRacist3 remorselessly attacks me as a bully --- a bully?
Right. Conservatives are bullies when they win arguments on the merits. It really has come to this. But they're progressive dumbfucts, so what can you do? They're pure evil. Threats to a blogger's livelihood are beyond reprehensible. E.D. Kain, the atheists, David Hillman, and RepRacist3 have all engaged in attacks on my personal livelihood, and they then have the audacity to allege bullying.
It's shameful, I know. But that's what folks of good morals have to deal with these days.
RELATED: Jeff Goldstein calls out Patrick Frey: "I never once tried to go after your job." I'm with Goldstein on that, actually. And I've called out Patterico myself, over his attacks on The Other McCain. It's hard out there. That said, I think I'll stay focused on the progressives. They provide enough death-chants and intimidation to last a lifetime. Freakin' asshats.
It's been almost two weeks since Elizabeth Edwards died. And the reaction to my comments are still reverberating around the web. Details on that below, but first it's worth sharing this quote from David Horowitz, at NewsReal Blog, "The Surreal World of the Progressive Left":
It is not for nothing that George Orwell had to invent terms like “double-think” and “double-speak” to describe the universe totalitarians created. Those who have watched the left as long as I have, understand the impossible task that progressives confront in conducting their crusades. Rhetorically, they are passionate proponents of “equality” but in practice they are committed enthusiasts of a hierarchy of privilege in which the highest ranks are reserved for themselves as the guardians of righteousness, and then for those they designate “victims” and “oppressed,” who are thus worthy of their redemption. Rhetorically they are secularists and avatars of tolerance, but in fact they are religious fanatics who regard their opponents as sinners and miscreants and agents of civil darkness. Therefore, when they engage an opponent it is rarely to examine and refute his argument but rather to destroy the bearer of the argument and remove him from the plain of battle.
I've written much on the totalizing secular religion of the progressive left, most recently, for example, at "Totalitarian Faith." But I've learned much more since Elizabeth Edwards died. I think by now it's fair say that my essay, "Elizabeth Edwards' Parting Statement Omits Mention of Faith in God," has received more attention on the radical left than anything else I've written. And I know why: My concluding paragraph at the post was like hitting a grand slam. Not only did I find it odd that Mrs. Edwards had abandoned God but I made an explicit connection between her views and those of the progressives, and I pulled those together by noting my surprise at how high "God is dead" nihilism had reached into the "precincts" of neo-communism. The reaction has been unreal, perhaps animalistic, even demonic. It was like waving a crucifix in the face of the progressive left. Retaliation for deviating from the accepted narrative came swiftly. The evil monkeys swarmed my comments. I got hate mail. And then angry atheists contacted the department chair at my college. The resident demons at that atheist blog were enraged when my colleague handled the incident professionally. One suggested that they get the complaint "Pharyngulated." That would be a campaign of viral hatred and intimidation akin to a DDoS attack, although the term didn't ring a bell initially. But yesterday PZ Myers linked, and the bell went off. Myers publishes Pharyngula, which was proclaimed by the journal Nature as "the top-ranked blog written by a scientist." The blog is obviously revered across the God-hating world. And Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, and one of the most famous atheist avatars on the scene, linked to Myers' post — and the commenters there appended my entry to the thread.
That's pretty astounding — no doubt an epic badge of honor for a Christian warrior! My only regret is that Tintin, the demonic prick at Sadly No!, didn't link the post. Now THAT really would have made my day, because, you know, there's no such thing REAL atheistic communism.
P.S. I just noticed that Huffington Post still features the Thanksgiving essay from 2006 praying for Dick Cheney to have another heart attack, "to rid the planet of its Number One Human Tumor."
Right.
Praying for the death of the Vice President of the United States. Hmm ... intolerance of competing opinion, campaigns of retaliation and workplace harassment, with the prototypical example of leftist death-wish hypocrisy? Behold the secular religion of radical progressivism.
Some have noted, and I agree that it’s a misnomer to call this “ClimateGate.” In addition to the fact that simply adding “Gate” to a scandal is so late twentieth century, calling it a “Gate” would imply that it’s something that the media will go into a frenzy over, because it’s a scandal about something politically incorrect (e.g., Nixon). No, a better name for it (again, not original with me — I think it showed up in comments at one of the PJM pieces) is “Climaquiddick.” In other words, expect the media to try to whitewash and minimize it.
Check the post for numerous updates, with citations for the term's growing usage.
It's the whitewashing and minimizing that's really kind of sickening. So far I haven't seen much on the denialist-left that's been worth quibbling with (mostly just stupid stuff, really); but I can't say that about this whopper of a post at Open Left, "The Puke Funnel is Trying to Disrupt Copenhagen; the CRU Hack Story Continues."
Take a couple of minutes and read through that entry. Then you'll see why there's unlikely ever to be any real "bipartisan compromise" in our lifetimes. Melanie Phillips said it best, in "Green Totalitarianism," where she suggests:
Which is the more terrifying and devastating: if people are bent and deliberately try to deceive others, or if they are so much in thrall to an ideology that they genuinely have lost the power to think objectively and rationally?
That's the first thing that came to me when reading Open Left's unbelievable psychological projection. It's truly derangement - and remember, the folks involved in the CRU scandal aren't first year graduate students. I cited today Kevin Trenberth - the lead scientist at the U.N.'s IPCC - but to hear the crazed commie ghouls at Open Left, someone with Trenberth's unimpeachable credibility is blown off as "meritless."
It's truly totalitarian, that kind of leftist ideological rigidity; and that's why I get almost sick to the stomach, since I know dealing with these people will be a lifelong battle, fought for preserving a good, viable future for our children. I have to admit: It's actually kind of scary. Not only do we have a press that's in the tank for the progressive radicalism eminating from the Obamunist (remember John Holdren, the extremist at the White House, is in on the e-mail scandal), but the media elites are practically biological predetermined to nihilism. As Dr. Sanity notes, some "people, groups, and nations" are so committed to denial that their "entire sense of identity is dependent on a certain view of the world and they would rather die than relinquish that view."
Anyway, be sure to check Air Vent for lots more devastating (and scientifically rigorous) developments in "Climaquiddick":
Plus, see James Delingpole (still calling it "ClimateGate"):
AGW is about raising taxes; increasing state control; about a few canny hucksters who’ve leapt on the bandwagon fleecing us rotten with their taxpayer subsidised windfarms and their carbon-trading; about the sour, anti-capitalist impulses of sandal-wearing vegans and lapsed Communists who loathe the idea of freedom and a functioning market economy.
We know it’s all a crock and we’re not going to take it.
I read the Lustick commentary at the New York Times, "Two-State Illusion."
But see the outstanding response from Jonathan Marks, at Commentary:
Let me set aside Lustick’s argument against the two-state solution and begin with what is most shocking in his op-ed, his own proposed solution. Lustick argues that the U.S. and others should abandon the two-state solution and let the parties fight it out. The key passage must be quoted at length:
With a status but no role, what remains of the Palestinian authority will disappear. Israel will face the stark challenge of controlling economic and political activity and all land and water resources from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The stage will be set for ruthless oppression, mass mobilization, riots, brutality, terror, Jewish and Arab emigration and rising tides of international condemnation of Israel (my emphasis).
Lustick makes explicit the nihilism of the anti-Israeli left. He has no strong reason to believe that the bloodbath he wishes on the Israelis and Palestinians will have results favorable to either. But why not break a few eggs if there’s some prospect of an omelette? Like many on the anti-Israeli left, but more explicitly, Lustick is prepared to entertain a morally satisfying position, which costs him nothing but means a blood sacrifice for those whose best interests he professes to have in mind....
Lustick does not really think a two-state solution impossible. Instead, he thinks that when confronted with a choice between two difficult ways forward, one should choose the one that results in the end of the State of Israel. Again, Lustick says out loud what his crowd thinks:
The disappearance of Israel as a Zionist project, through war, cultural exhaustion, or demographic momentum, is at least as plausible as a two state solution.
Lustick’s op-ed should be required reading for anyone who thinks that to stand with the anti-Israeli left is to support of the rights of Palestinians. To stand with the anti-Israeli left is instead to hope for an open conflict that will result in the end of Israel. It is not just friends of Israel who should be disgusted with academics who hope to foment such a conflict, knowing, unless they are complete fools, that in making a poorly thought out, long-odds bet on a one-state solution, they gamble with the lives of Palestinians and Israelis.
One other point: Lustick constantly compares Israel to South Africa, and in so doing reveals not just his anti-Semitism but his ignorance. He's attacking Israel as an "apartheid state" that deserves destruction, while of course saying nothing of the totalitarian pathologies of Islam that form the foundations of the so-called "Palestinian" identity. Behold the core of the left's anti-Israel depravity: The lies and double standard that are handmaidens to evil.
Equally disgusting to me is that Lustick's a political scientist. There are certainly a great many political scientists who are champions of Israel. But it's especially bothersome that there are so many nihilists like the depraved Lustick --- glorified as "experts," there're little more than propagandists for a new Holocaust. Sick.
The controversy over Tiller's late-term abortion activities drew heavy fire from conservatives. His Wikipedia entry notes that Bill O'Reilly alleged that "George Tiller performs late-term abortions to alleviate 'temporary depression' in the pregnant woman."
No one has been apprehended in the killing. KMBC 9 News - Kansas City reports "that police were looking for a blue Ford Taurus with a K-State vanity plate, license number 225 BAB. Police described him as a white male in his 50s or 60s, 6 feet 1 inch tall, 220 pounds, wearing a white shirt and dark pants."
But this information didn't stop Andrew Sullivan from convicting Bill O'Reilly and the "Christiantists" for the killing, "O'Reilly's Target Shot Dead In Church":
My thoughts and prayers go out to the Tiller family.
But let me state unequivocally here: The death of George Tiller is a tragedy. His killers should be brought to justice and the death penalty should be on the table. But Andrew Sullivan is sick man to use this murder for political purposes. The blood of the killing's not even dry, and Sullivan's already smeared the entire conservative movement as a coalition of murderers. There will be more on the left to join him. David Neiwert's probably writing a post at this moment. But have no doubts: The attacks here on O'Reilly as "Christianist" are tantamount to the attacks on Sarah Palin during the election last year. Andrew Sullivan slurred Palin as the "Christianist culture warrior in Wasilla, Alaska." But obviously Sullivan's allegations this morning are totally off the charts. Tiller's killing was a political assassination. The Christian Defense Coalition has already condemned the murder, and the group will hold a press conference tomorrow morning.
Sullivan's screed is a classic case study in how leftists operate. As demonstrated over and over since the election last year, the Democratic victory is fragile. Lefists will use any and all of the most unhinged tactics to defend a political program of postmodern nihilism. On a day when Americans should be pulling together, we instead have leftists driving the wedge in deeper. Contemptible.
**********
UPDATE: Right on cue, here's Joan Walsh: "George Tiller is the latest victim of right-wing American terrorism against abortion providers and supporters."
Ta-Nehisi Coates jumps on Sullivan's bandwagon: "We don't have the luxury of thinking about these bilious hate-mongers as loonies running off the lip. People are dying. And these shameless goons are cashing checks. Disgusting. I'm sick over this.
Digby also highlights how "vital" are therapeutic abortions: Tiller "was one of only a handful of doctors who will perform this vital service for women under the new law. If you think that women should have to endanger their lives in order to give birth to a fetus with no brain, then you probably think this man was a murderer. For the women who went to him, and for whom he put up with a horrifying amount of harrassment and violence before they finally managed to kill him, he was a Godsend."
Be sure to read Robert George's post at The Corner, "Gravely Wicked":
Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing. The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands. No private individual had the right to execute judgment against him.
I do not and did not blame O'Reilly for the murder. I think his rhetoric and demonization of an individual subject to violence and threats are excessive and dangerous. He has every First Amendment right to speak the words he has spoken and I am sure he never wanted this to happen. But you can debate these matters with a little less personal demonization and get your point across.
What a sanctimonious gasbag!
"A little less personal demonization"? That's precious coming from the Queen of Trig Trutherism himself!
